Staking on Solana
This page gives an overview of how staking on Solana works, as background for the following sections on commissions and withdrawals.
Stake accounts
To stake SOL on Solana, one has to create a stake account, fund it with some amount of SOL, and then delegate the stake account to a validator vote account. The balance of a stake account can be split into four states: inactive, activating, active, and deactivating. Activating and deactivating stake are mutually exclusive, but a stake account can contain a mix of inactive, active, and activating/deactivating stake.
Stake on Solana is subject to a warmup and cooldown period. Immediately after delegating, stake transitions from inactive to activating. At the start of the next epoch, a portion of the activating stake transitions to active. In practice the full amount becomes active, but in theory, stake can take more than one epoch to warm up, when there is a lot of churn on the network. Stake deactivation works in the same way: immediately after deactivation, stake transitions from active to deactivating, and at the start of the next epoch, a portion of the deactivating stake becomes inactive.
A stake account has an authorized withdrawer, which is an address that can withdraw inactive stake from the stake account. Active stake cannot be withdrawn.
For the purpose of determining the stake held by a validator, activating stake is considered inactive, and deactivating stake is considered active. This means that activating stake incurs no rewards, and deactivating stake does.
Because Solana features a complicated rent mechanism, the minimum amount that can be staked, is the rent-exempt balance of a stake account. This amount is always inactive, only funds above this threshold can be activated. However, there used to be an issue in Solana where stake accounts that hold very little stake cannot be merged. Solido requires stake account merging to keep the number of stake accounts in check, so stake accounts need a minimum amount of stake. The exact minimum is not known, but 1 SOL is enough.
Vote accounts
To operate a validator, you need a vote account and an identity account. The
identity account contains metadata about the validator, such as its description,
and the vote account refers to the identity account. Multiple vote accounts can
refer to the same identity account, but a solana-validator instance can only
validate on behalf of one vote account at a time.
A vote account (the things that you delegate a stake account to), specifies a commission percentage. Validation rewards get split into a commission part, and a delegator part. Commission gets paid into the vote account, and the remainder gets paid into the delegating stake account, where it is immediately active. Because only funds in stake accounts can be staked, rewards paid as commission do not compound automatically, but rewards paid into stake accounts do.
Vote accounts have a withdraw authority: an address that can withdraw funds from the vote account. The withdraw authority can be different from the vote account itself, or the validator that controls it. For traditional non-pooled validators, it is set to an address controlled by the validator, usually the vote account address itself.