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Become a Delegator

In contrast to the rather difficult path to become a collator candidate, joining the delegator pool is rather simple. Anyone can delegate to a collator candidate by staking a minimum of 20 KILT and calling parachainStaking -> joinDelegators.

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You can either execute this transaction in Polkadot JS Apps or the KILT Stakeboard, which serves as an in-house developed Frontend for all KILT staking activity. Below, we outline the steps for Polkadot JS Apps.

In the Polkadot JS Apps (wss://spiritnet.kilt.io, or wss://peregrine.kilt.io) go to Developer -> Extrinsics -> Submission.

  1. Select the KILT address you want to delegate from as the extrinsic submitter (the using the selected account field)
  2. Select the appropriate extrinsic: parachainStaking -> joinDelegators
  3. Select the Id option (the MultiAddress (LookupSource) field)
  4. Select the collator account (the Id: AccountId field)
  5. Choose the desired stake amount.
  6. Sign and submit the extrinsic (the Submit Transaction button)
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A recent change in the blockchain metadata resulted in a change in the UI regarding how balances are shown. In the current version of PolkadotJS Apps, specifying 1 KILT requires adding 15 trailing 0s. So, for instance, 1 KILT needs to be written as 1,000,000,000,000,000, while 10,000 KILT would be written as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Happy Path​

If your chosen collator candidate has at least one empty slot in their delegation pool (out of 35 maximum slots at the time of writing), your delegation will be successful and you immediately start receiving rewards each time the collator you delegated produces a block.

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If your chosen collator fails to produce blocks, neither the collator itself nor their delegators receive rewards. This can happen if the collator has connectivity issues or are not building blocks fast enough.

Unhappy Path​

If the delegation pool of your chosen collator candidate is full, you may still delegate to them if you stake more than the current lowest delegator stake of that pool. When that happens,

  • The kicked delegator will be replaced by the delegator with a higher delegation (you) immediately
  • The kicked delegator's stake is prepared for unstaking as if they revoked the delegation
  • A delegator needs to wait 7 days (in block time) to be able to unlock the stake. Please note that it can take longer in real time as the block times assumes a constant block time of 12s, which is not guaranteed.
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For now, an account can only delegate to one collator at any time! Moreover, you can only (re-) delegate, e.g., call parachainStaking -> {joinDelegators, delegateAnotherCandidate}, once per staking round.