Delegation

Delegating is the simplest way to earn POKT from consensus without running infrastructure. You bond POKT to a validator, they sign blocks, and you receive a stake-proportional share of the validator pool’s relay settlement income — paid directly to your wallet.

You keep custody throughout. Delegation assigns voting power; it does not transfer your tokens to the validator. You can redelegate or begin unbonding at any time.

Info

Pocket uses standard Cosmos SDK delegation, unmodified. If you have delegated on any other Cosmos chain, the transaction flow is identical. How rewards reach you is not standard — read Validators first if you have not.

Choosing a Validator

The usual Cosmos advice overweights commission. On Pocket that advice is misleading.

Uptime is the signal that matters. A validator that drops out of the active set or gets jailed stops earning entirely, and so do you. Check signing history and status on explorer.pocket.network/validators.

Commission barely touches your income. Commission applies to rewards flowing through the Cosmos distribution module — inflation and transaction fees. It is not applied to relay settlement income, which is the overwhelming majority of what you earn and is distributed by stake weight before commission logic runs. The network minimum is 0%.

Active-set position. Only the top 21 validators by bonded stake earn. Delegating to one sitting just below the cut-off earns you nothing until it climbs back in. Delegating to one sitting just above it carries the risk it drops out.

Decentralization. Stake concentrated in a few validators weakens the chain. Spreading delegation across smaller active validators strengthens it, at no cost to your returns given commission’s limited role.

Tip

Before delegating, look up a validator’s real payout history in the explorer’s delegation view for one of its existing delegators. Settlement events are the ground truth — far more informative than an advertised rate.

Delegating with Keplr

Keplr is the most common route for token holders.

  1. Add Pocket Network. Go to chains.keplr.app, search “Pocket”, and choose Add to Keplr. Approve the popup. Your pokt1... address appears in Keplr.
  2. Open Staking. Select Pocket Network in Keplr, then the staking section.
  3. Pick a validator. Keplr lists the active set with commission and voting power. Cross-check against the explorer — Keplr does not show settlement earnings.
  4. Enter an amount and confirm. Leave some POKT unbonded for transaction fees.
  5. Verify. Your delegation appears in Keplr, and in the explorer at /account/<your-address>?as=delegation.
Warning

After delegating, ignore Keplr’s Claim / claimable rewards figure. It reflects only the minimum Cosmos inflation, not your settlement income — which arrives in your wallet balance automatically with no claim step. See What Keplr Gets Wrong.

Ledger users can delegate through Keplr with the Cosmos app — see Hardware Wallets.

Delegating with Soothe Vault

Soothe support coming soon. Soothe Vault is Pocket’s native wallet, but it does not yet expose staking or delegation. Use Keplr (or pocketd) to delegate for now. This page will be updated when Soothe ships delegation support.

Delegating with pocketd

Prerequisites

  • pocketd installed
  • POKT in your account, plus a small amount for fees
  • A validator operator address (poktvaloper1...)

Find a validator

bash
pocketd query staking validators --network=main

Delegate

bash
pocketd tx staking delegate <validator_address> <amount>upokt \
  --from=<your_key_name> \
  --network=main \
  --fees=200000upokt

To delegate 10,000 POKT:

bash
pocketd tx staking delegate poktvaloper1abc... 10000000000upokt \
  --from=my-wallet \
  --network=main \
  --fees=200000upokt
Warning

Amounts are denominated in upokt (micro-POKT). 1 POKT = 1,000,000 upokt. Double-check before submitting — there is no undo.

Verify

bash
pocketd query staking delegations <your_address> --network=main

Rewards

Settlement rewards need no action. They are transferred to your wallet at each session settlement, and appear in your balance.

The Cosmos distribution module separately accrues a small amount from the protocol’s minimum inflation. That balance does require a claim, and is what wallets display as claimable:

bash
# The small inflation-only balance — not your settlement income
pocketd query distribution rewards <your_address> --network=main

# Claim it
pocketd tx distribution withdraw-all-rewards \
  --from=<your_key_name> \
  --network=main \
  --fees=200000upokt

To see what you actually earned, use the explorer’s delegation view:

plaintext
https://explorer.pocket.network/account/<your-pokt1-address>?as=delegation

Redelegation

You can move a delegation between validators without unbonding:

bash
pocketd tx staking redelegate <source_validator> <dest_validator> <amount>upokt \
  --from=<your_key_name> \
  --network=main \
  --fees=200000upokt

Redelegation takes effect immediately with no unbonding period, and you keep earning throughout. Cosmos limits how many redelegations can be in flight from the same source validator — the cap is 8 concurrent entries. A completed redelegation also cannot be immediately redelegated onward until its entry clears.

Unbonding

bash
pocketd tx staking unbond <validator_address> <amount>upokt \
  --from=<your_key_name> \
  --network=main \
  --fees=200000upokt
Danger

Unbonding takes 21 days (unbonding_time = 1814400s). During that period your tokens are locked, earn nothing, and the unbonding cannot be cancelled. This is a protocol rule — no validator or pool can shorten it. If you only want to change validators, use redelegation instead, which is instant and keeps you earning.

Jailing and Slashing Risk

Validators that miss too many blocks are jailed — removed from the active set until they submit an unjail transaction. While a validator is jailed, it earns nothing, and neither do its delegators.

A validator is jailed if it signs fewer than 10% of the blocks in a rolling window of 200 blocks. The minimum jail period is 600s.

Slashing penalties are currently set to zero on Pocket Network. Both slash_fraction_downtime (0%) and slash_fraction_double_sign (0%) are zero, so neither downtime nor double-signing currently burns delegator stake.

Warning

These are governance-controlled parameters, not guarantees. The slashing machinery is fully present in the protocol and the DAO can raise either fraction by vote. Treat zero-slashing as the network’s current configuration, not a permanent property — and note the real cost of poor uptime is lost earnings, which applies today regardless.

Values on this page are read live from chain state at build time. Verify any of them yourself:

bash
pocketd query slashing params --network=main
pocketd query staking params --network=main