What are Stake Pools?
A stake pool is a server node that holds the combined stake of various stakeholders in a single entity. These pools get rewarded with additional coins — approximately every 2 days or Epoch for Solana stake pools.
There are private and public stake pools. Private stakepools only give rewards to the owner (100% fee) while public stake pools give rewards to all stakeholders within the pool. The manager of the stakepool decides the fee, and the validators in the pool. Users can then delegate their staked SOL to a pool and receive rewards.
Why are Stake Pools Important?
Each validator is responsible for creating new blocks on the network and therefore is vital to the blockchain. Pools help validators by promoting the redistribution of stake across many validators. This increases decentralization and decreases the risk of users losing all their stake in the case of slashing. Slashing occurs when a validator/node is punished for acting maliciously (signing illegal transactions, double signaling, voting for illegal forks), in which 100% of the stake delegated to that validator would be removed.
Our Stake Pools
To promote decentralization, our stakepool will attempt to distribute the Solana across a large selection of validators that we will choose based on our own grading schema. This schema will have the main goal to maximize rewards and increase decentralization. To do this, an effort will be made to delegate stake with good validators that have a smaller share of stake.
Steaking.io has also been working with universities to set up their own validators. In addition to our regular stake pool, we are also going to have a university stake pool where the staked assets will be delegated only to university validators to support their learning and fund their blockchain organizations.
