Crate pallet_staking

Staking Module

The Staking module is used to manage funds at stake by network maintainers.

• staking::Trait
• Call
• Module

Overview

The Staking module is the means by which a set of network maintainers (known as authorities in some contexts and validators in others) are chosen based upon those who voluntarily place funds under deposit. Under deposit, those funds are rewarded under normal operation but are held at pain of slash (expropriation) should the staked maintainer be found not to be discharging its duties properly.

Terminology

• Staking: The process of locking up funds for some time, placing them at risk of slashing (loss) in order to become a rewarded maintainer of the network.
• Validating: The process of running a node to actively maintain the network, either by producing blocks or guaranteeing finality of the chain.
• Nominating: The process of placing staked funds behind one or more validators in order to share in any reward, and punishment, they take.
• Stash account: The account holding an owner's funds used for staking.
• Controller account: The account that controls an owner's funds for staking.
• Era: A (whole) number of sessions, which is the period that the validator set (and each validator's active nominator set) is recalculated and where rewards are paid out.
• Slash: The punishment of a staker by reducing its funds.

Goals

The staking system in Substrate NPoS is designed to make the following possible:

• Stake funds that are controlled by a cold wallet.
• Withdraw some, or deposit more, funds without interrupting the role of an entity.
• Switch between roles (nominator, validator, idle) with minimal overhead.

Scenarios

Staking

Almost any interaction with the Staking module requires a process of bonding (also known as being a staker). To become bonded, a fund-holding account known as the stash account, which holds some or all of the funds that become frozen in place as part of the staking process, is paired with an active controller account, which issues instructions on how they shall be used.

An account pair can become bonded using the bond call.

Stash accounts can change their associated controller using the set_controller call.

There are three possible roles that any staked account pair can be in: Validator, Nominator and Idle (defined in StakerStatus). There are three corresponding instructions to change between roles, namely: validate, nominate, and chill.

Validating

A validator takes the role of either validating blocks or ensuring their finality, maintaining the veracity of the network. A validator should avoid both any sort of malicious misbehavior and going offline. Bonded accounts that state interest in being a validator do NOT get immediately chosen as a validator. Instead, they are declared as a candidate and they might get elected at the next era as a validator. The result of the election is determined by nominators and their votes.

An account can become a validator candidate via the validate call.

Nomination

A nominator does not take any direct role in maintaining the network, instead, it votes on a set of validators to be elected. Once interest in nomination is stated by an account, it takes effect at the next election round. The funds in the nominator's stash account indicate the weight of its vote. Both the rewards and any punishment that a validator earns are shared between the validator and its nominators. This rule incentivizes the nominators to NOT vote for the misbehaving/offline validators as much as possible, simply because the nominators will also lose funds if they vote poorly.

An account can become a nominator via the nominate call.

Rewards and Slash

The reward and slashing procedure is the core of the Staking module, attempting to embrace valid behavior while punishing any misbehavior or lack of availability.

Slashing can occur at any point in time, once misbehavior is reported. Once slashing is determined, a value is deducted from the balance of the validator and all the nominators who voted for this validator (values are deducted from the stash account of the slashed entity).

Slashing logic is further described in the documentation of the slashing module.

Similar to slashing, rewards are also shared among a validator and its associated nominators. Yet, the reward funds are not always transferred to the stash account and can be configured. See Reward Calculation for more details.

Chilling

Finally, any of the roles above can choose to step back temporarily and just chill for a while. This means that if they are a nominator, they will not be considered as voters anymore and if they are validators, they will no longer be a candidate for the next election.

An account can step back via the chill call.

Interface

Dispatchable Functions

The dispatchable functions of the Staking module enable the steps needed for entities to accept and change their role, alongside some helper functions to get/set the metadata of the module.

Public Functions

The Staking module contains many public storage items and (im)mutable functions.

Usage

Example: Rewarding a validator by id.

use frame_support::{decl_module, dispatch};
use frame_system::{self as system, ensure_signed};
use pallet_staking::{self as staking};

pub trait Trait: staking::Trait {}

decl_module! {
	pub struct Module<T: Trait> for enum Call where origin: T::Origin {
		/// Reward a validator.
		pub fn reward_myself(origin) -> dispatch::DispatchResult {
			let reported = ensure_signed(origin)?;
			<staking::Module<T>>::reward_by_ids(vec![(reported, 10)]);
			Ok(())
		}
	}
}

Implementation Details

Slot Stake

The term SlotStake will be used throughout this section. It refers to a value calculated at the end of each era, containing the minimum value at stake among all validators. Note that a validator's value at stake might be a combination of the validator's own stake and the votes it received. See Exposure for more details.

Reward Calculation

Validators and nominators are rewarded at the end of each era. The total reward of an era is calculated using the era duration and the staking rate (the total amount of tokens staked by nominators and validators, divided by the total token supply). It aims to incentivize toward a defined staking rate. The full specification can be found here.

Total reward is split among validators and their nominators depending on the number of points they received during the era. Points are added to a validator using reward_by_ids or reward_by_indices.

Module implements pallet_authorship::EventHandler to add reward points to block producer and block producer of referenced uncles.

The validator and its nominator split their reward as following:

The validator can declare an amount, named commission, that does not get shared with the nominators at each reward payout through its ValidatorPrefs. This value gets deducted from the total reward that is paid to the validator and its nominators. The remaining portion is split among the validator and all of the nominators that nominated the validator, proportional to the value staked behind this validator (i.e. dividing the own or others by total in Exposure).

All entities who receive a reward have the option to choose their reward destination through the Payee storage item (see set_payee), to be one of the following:

• Controller account, (obviously) not increasing the staked value.
• Stash account, not increasing the staked value.
• Stash account, also increasing the staked value.

Additional Fund Management Operations

Any funds already placed into stash can be the target of the following operations:

The controller account can free a portion (or all) of the funds using the unbond call. Note that the funds are not immediately accessible. Instead, a duration denoted by BondingDuration (in number of eras) must pass until the funds can actually be removed. Once the BondingDuration is over, the withdraw_unbonded call can be used to actually withdraw the funds.

Note that there is a limitation to the number of fund-chunks that can be scheduled to be unlocked in the future via unbond. In case this maximum (MAX_UNLOCKING_CHUNKS) is reached, the bonded account must first wait until a successful call to withdraw_unbonded to remove some of the chunks.

Election Algorithm

The current election algorithm is implemented based on Phragmén. The reference implementation can be found here.

The election algorithm, aside from electing the validators with the most stake value and votes, tries to divide the nominator votes among candidates in an equal manner. To further assure this, an optional post-processing can be applied that iteratively normalizes the nominator staked values until the total difference among votes of a particular nominator are less than a threshold.

GenesisConfig

The Staking module depends on the GenesisConfig.

Related Modules

• Balances: Used to manage values at stake.
• Session: Used to manage sessions. Also, a list of new validators is stored in the Session module's Validators at the end of each era.

Modules

inflation

This module expose one function P_NPoS (Payout NPoS) or compute_total_payout which returns the total payout for the era given the era duration and the staking rate in NPoS. The staking rate in NPoS is the total amount of tokens staked by nominators and validators, divided by the total token supply.

Structs

Bonded	Map from all locked "stash" accounts to the controller account.
CanceledSlashPayout	The amount of currency given to reporters of a slash event which was canceled by extraordinary circumstances (e.g. governance).
CurrentElected	The currently elected validator set keyed by stash account ID.
CurrentEra	The current era index.
CurrentEraStart	The start of the current era.
CurrentEraStartSessionIndex	The session index at which the current era started.
EraPoints	Reward points of an era. Used to split era total payout between validators.
Exposure	A snapshot of the stake backing a single validator in the system.
ExposureOf	A typed conversion from stash account ID to the current exposure of nominators on that account.
FilterHistoricalOffences	Filter historical offences out and only allow those from the bonding period.
ForceEra	True if the next session change will be a new era regardless of index.
GenesisConfig
IndividualExposure	The amount of exposure (to slashing) than an individual nominator has.
Invulnerables	Any validators that may never be slashed or forcibly kicked. It's a Vec since they're easy to initialize and the performance hit is minimal (we expect no more than four invulnerables) and restricted to testnets.
Ledger	Map from all (unlocked) "controller" accounts to the info regarding the staking.
MinimumValidatorCount	Minimum number of staking participants before emergency conditions are imposed.
Module
Nominations	A record of the nominations made by a specific account.
Payee	Where the reward payment should be made. Keyed by stash.
SlashRewardFraction	The percentage of the slash that is distributed to reporters.
SlotStake	The amount of balance actively at stake for each validator slot, currently.
Stakers	Nominators for a particular account that is in action right now. You can't iterate through validators here, but you can find them in the Session module.
StakingLedger	The ledger of a (bonded) stash.
StashOf	A Convert implementation that finds the stash of the given controller account, if any.
UnappliedSlash	A pending slash record. The value of the slash has been computed but not applied yet, rather deferred for several eras.
UnappliedSlashes	All unapplied slashes that are queued for later.
UnlockChunk	Just a Balance/BlockNumber tuple to encode when a chunk of funds will be unlocked.
ValidatorCount	The ideal number of staking participants.
ValidatorPrefs	Preference of what happens regarding validation.
Validators	The map from (wannabe) validator stash key to the preferences of that validator.

Enums

Call	Dispatchable calls.
Error	Error for the staking module.
Forcing	Mode of era-forcing.
RawEvent	Events for this module.
RewardDestination	A destination account for payment.
StakerStatus	Indicates the initial status of the staker.

Traits

SessionInterface	Means for interacting with a specialized version of the session trait.
Trait

Type Definitions

BalanceOf
EraIndex	Counter for the number of eras that have passed.
Event	RawEvent specialized for the configuration Trait
Points	Counter for the number of "reward" points earned by a given validator.