To receive staking rewards, you will need to do two things:

1. Lock your CELO tokens, and
2. vote for a validator group.

The validator group you vote for must be elected in order for you to begin receiving staking rewards.

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You should expect your maximum rate of rewards (ie. the baseline) if:

1. the validator group that you vote for is elected and
2. all of its members perform flawlessly.

The baseline reward estimate is about 6% annually. This baseline reward reward amount for stakers will decrease when more of the CELO supply is staking, and decrease when less of the supply is staking.

If the validator group you vote for has perfect performance, you can expect to earn 100% of your rewards. If members of your validator group experience downtime, you will earn fewer rewards. This amount will decrease rapidly the longer that validator members are offline.

Staking rewards will not be used to pay validators, so you will not pay a validator group a commission. Validators will automatically be compensated by the protocol.

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Stakers only risk opportunity cost (and no slashing), meaning that you may miss out on rewards that you otherwise would have received had the group you elected operated flawlessly. There are two ways this can happen:

1. A member validator in the group you vote for is offline too long or
2. Many validators commit a fault that puts the network safety at risk.

A validator safety violation cuts your rewards in half for one month.

If many validators in your elected group put the safety of the Celo network at risk by “double-signing,” you will only earn half of your baseline rewards for one month. Our understanding is that this is only likely to happen if validators attack the network maliciously.

Validator performance reduces your rewards relative to downtime.

Your validator group gets an “uptime” score for their performance, which begins to decline if any of the group’s validators are down for more than one minute (12 blocks). What does that mean?

Your rewards are proportional to average uptime score of your elected validator group. An “uptime” score of anything less than 1.00 will reduce the rewards you earn. The more that the group’s validators are offline, the more that your rewards earnings will be reduced.

If you’re staking CELO, you’ll be rewarded in CELO about once per day (epoch). The rewards automatically get compounded (restaked) unless the you decide to unlock a portion or all of your staked amount.

Validators get rewarded in Celo Dollar tokens (cUSD) once per epoch (roughly each day, initially). Validator group owners can take a commission of these rewards.

A user can unlock a portion or all of their locked Celo Gold at anytime after removing all active votes. There is a 3-day unlocking period before the user can transfer the amount back to their wallet.

Rewards are automatically added to staked CELO, so your rewards will automatically compound without having to do anything. However, that means that rewards must be unlocked in order to be liquid (ie. tradable).

Yes, but only for validators and validator group owners. Stakers will not be exposed to slashing.

You can vote today.

On May 1, 2020, the first Celo governance proposal was executed, enabling token holders to vote for validator groups and earn rewards. This came shortly after the Celo mainnet launch on April 22, 2020.

Celo token transfers are expected to be enabled on May 13th via governance proposal.