Aleph Zero

Time factors

	Protocol time	Human readable time
Protocol time 1	Block	1 second
Protocol time 2	Era (= 86,400 blocks)	1 day
First reward delay	1 era	1 day
Reward frequency	At the end of every era	1 day
Unbonding period	14 days	14 days

Lifecycle

Must know before staking

Minimum stake amount	⚠️	2,000 AZERO to directly delegate 10 AZERO to join a nomination pool
Partial stake changes	✅
Partial reward withdrawal	✅
Compounding	⚠️	Stakers have the option to automatically add rewards to their staking balance or to withdraw immediately.
Penalty	⚠️	Offline
Slashing	❌

• Delegating is called nominating on Polkadot.

• Nominator caps. Only the top 1,024 nominators of each validator can receive rewards for an era.

• Nomination pools. Nomination pools let stakers pool their stake into one pool entity that can then nominate validators.

  • There can only be a maximum of 128 nomination pools.

• Changing validators. Stakers who have directly nominated a validator can switch their selected validator instantly. Stakers who have joined a nomination pool will need to wait 14 days to leave and select a new nomination pool.

Advanced topics

Rewards

• Rewards come from newly issued tokens.

  • Fixed number of tokens issued. 30 million new tokens are issued each year. 10% goes to the ecosystem fund while the rest is distributed to stakers.

• Factors that impact realized rewards.

  • Validator uptime. If a validator’s uptime is lower than 90%, the validator and its delegators will receive less rewards.

  • Commissions.

Risks

• Penalties. If a validator is offline for at least 45 minutes in a single day, the validator will be kicked out of the active set and will only be able to join after 10 days.

Validators

Total validator cap	❌
Validator requirements	✅	25,000 AZERO

• Validators cannot set a commission rate lower than 2%.

Resources

• Aleph Zero documentation: https://docs.alephzero.org/aleph-zero/

• Aleph Zero explorer: https://alephzero.subscan.io/