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Terminology

Account​

A staking account is an entry in the staking ledger.

It has two (sub)accounts:

  • General account

    It is used to keep the funds that are freely available to the account owner to transfer, delegate/stake, pay gas fees, etc.

  • Escrow account

    It is used to keep the funds needed for specific consensus-layer operations (e.g. registering and running nodes, staking and delegation of tokens, ...).

    To simplify accounting, each escrow results in the source account being issued shares which can be converted back into staking tokens during the reclaim escrow operation. Reclaiming escrow does not complete immediately, but may be subject to a debonding period during which the tokens still remain escrowed.

Address​

A staking account address is represented by a truncated hash of a corresponding entity's public key, prefixed by a 1 byte address version.

It uses Bech32 encoding for text serialization with oasis as its human readable part (HRP) prefix.

EVM-compatible ParaTimes running on the Oasis compute layer may use EVM-compatible 20-byte addresses in hex format (starting with 0x).

Delegation​

You can delegate your tokens by submitting an escrow transaction that deposits a specific number of tokens into someone else’s escrow account (as opposed to staking tokens, which usually refers to depositing tokens into your own escrow account).

In other words, delegating your tokens is equivalent to staking your tokens in someone else's validator node. Delegating your tokens can give you the opportunity to participate in the Oasis Network's proof-of-stake consensus system and earn rewards via someone else's validator node.

Staking​

You can stake your tokens by submitting an escrow transaction that deposits a specific number of tokens into your escrow account.

Rewards​

By delegating your tokens to someone else's node, you can earn a portion of the rewards earned by that node through its participation in the Oasis Network.

Commission​

Node operators collect commissions when their node earns a staking reward for delegators. A validator node earns a staking reward for participating in the consensus protocol each epoch. The commission rate is a fraction of the staking reward.

For example, if our validator node earns a reward of 0.007 tokens, 0.0035 tokens are added to the escrow pool (increasing the value of our escrow pool shares uniformly), and 0.0035 tokens are given to us (issuing us new shares as if we manually deposited them).

Slashing​

A portion of your delegated tokens can be slashed (seized) by the network, if the node that you delegated your tokens to gets slashed, e.g. as a penalty for equivocating in the protocol by signing diverging blocks for the same height.