Get answers to common questions about Cosmos
What is Cosmos?
Cosmos aims to be the internet of blockchains. The Cosmos Hub’s native token, ATOM, is used to stake, pay for transactions, and to participate in on-chain governance. To learn more, please take a read through their whitepaper.
How does Cosmos staking work?
When deciding to stake your ATOM, you are delegating to a validator node. By delegating to StakeSeeker validator nodes, you help secure the native Cosmos network. The more ATOM that is delegated to these validators, the more transactions the validators will be able to approve and validate on the Cosmos blockchain network. When staking your ATOM, you will accumulate rewards generated by the validator nodes from the blockchain network protocols for successful transaction validation activity in the form of the native tokens. If you are planning to hold on to ATOM for a longer term investment, delegating will help you accumulate more ATOM while contributing to the health of the network.
What happens to the ownership of ATOM after they’re delegated?
StakeSeeker provides non-custodial staking, which means the custody and private key for your wallet remain with you (the delegator). As a validator, StakeSeeker will never have the ability to move your ATOM.
Can you unstake anytime?
Unstaking (also called unbonding or undelegating) can be initiated anytime. However, it takes approximately 21 days for your ATOM to unstake and become transferable. This time period exists in order to prevent long range attacks. During this time you will not earn rewards. When the process is complete, you can transfer/trade your ATOM tokens.
Is there a minimum staking amount?
You can stake as little as .001 ATOM, but remember to keep at least 1 ATOM token unstaked in your wallet to pay for any potential future transaction fees.
What are the risks of delegating on Cosmos?
Like many blockchain protocols, the consensus mechanism used by Cosmos includes a slashing mechanism whereby any validator that misses too many blocks or double signs a block are penalized by the network slashing the staked amount on that validator. StakeSeeker has our own capital on the line staked on the same validator nodes, so we are fully incentivized to do our best to prevent such events. However, delegators must be aware that this slashing risk will always exist.
What does StakeSeeker get out of this?
We charge a validator fee from the block rewards received by our delegators, mainly to cover operating costs of running the validator. For example if StakeSeeker validator fee is 2% and delegator receives 100 tokens as a reward, StakeSeeker will receive 2 tokens while the delegator will receive the remaining 98 tokens.
How is staking income disbursed? Is staking income liquid or automatically compounded?
StakeSeeker’s reward distribution mechanism calculates and distributes rewards to platform user wallets daily. StakeSeeker maintains control of the rewards accumulation and distribution in order to provide the highest level of security and safeguarding its staking services to verified users, preventing risk of bad-actors from utilizing our services.
Delegators will need to manually re-stake distributed rewards if you want to add them to your existing stake and compound returns. Reward income is not automatically staked.