Staking/Delegation
The process of placing TAO or ALPHA with a validator to earn a share of their dividends.
Staking means placing your tokens with a validator on a specific subnet. By doing so, you increase that validator's effective stake, which gives them more influence when setting weights . In return, you receive a proportional share of the ALPHA dividends that validator earns.
On the root subnet, your TAO stays as TAO. On all other subnets, your TAO gets exchanged for the subnet's ALPHA token through the subnet's pool. Your position is then held in ALPHA, meaning its TAO value fluctuates with the ALPHA price. When you unstake, the ALPHA is exchanged back to TAO through the pool.
STAKING IS DELEGATION
In Bittensor, staking with a validator is delegation. There is no separate concept. Every validator is a potential delegatee, and every staker is effectively a nominator . The validator cannot access or move your staked tokens.
When a validator earns ALPHA dividends from a subnet, those dividends are split among all stakers (including the validator's own stake) proportionally. Before the split, the validator deducts their delegate take from the portion earned through delegated stake.
There is no lock-up period. You can stake and unstake freely. However, unstaking from a dynamic subnet involves exchanging ALPHA back to TAO through the pool, which incurs a swap fee. The amount of TAO you receive depends on the current ALPHA price and liquidity in the subnet pool at the time of unstaking.
CHOOSING WHERE TO STAKE
On the root subnet, you stake TAO directly and earn ALPHA dividends from every subnet your validator validates. On dynamic subnets, you stake in ALPHA and earn dividends from that specific subnet.
Each approach has different risk and rewards (root staking gives broad exposure while subnet staking gives concentrated exposure to a single subnet's ALPHA token).