How Divi Staking Works

1What staking is

Divi adds a new block to its chain about once a minute. Someone has to make each block, and in Divi that someone is a wallet holding coins, not a miner burning electricity. Making a block is called staking; the wallet that makes it is paid the block reward, brand-new DIVI created by the block.

Every running wallet that holds coins tries for every block. The more DIVI a wallet holds, the more often it wins. Your coins never leave your wallet and are never locked away: staking only uses them as a ticket.

2What you need

1. A wallet that can stake. IronDivi, Divi Desktop, BoxWallet or the Divi command-line node. The web wallet, the browser extension and the Telegram wallet can't stake yet (see which wallets can stake).
2. It must be running, synced and connected. A wallet that is closed, behind on the chain, or has no peers can't make blocks. If your computer sleeps, you stop staking until it wakes.
3. It must be unlocked for staking. An encrypted wallet keeps its keys locked; you unlock it once for staking only (Divi Desktop and the command line have a "staking only" unlock; IronDivi needs a full unlock). See Stake in a wallet.
4. Coins that have settled. A coin can stake once it has been in your wallet for at least 1 hour (the Divi node also wants 10 confirmations). Coins that came from a stake need 20 confirmations before they count again.

There is no minimum amount. A small balance stakes just as the rules say, only rarely: how often shows what to expect.

3How the winner is picked

For every second on the clock, each coin in your wallet gets one try: the wallet computes a hash for it. The hash mixes a number from the chain that nobody can choose (the stake modifier), the coin itself, and the current time. If the result is below a target, that coin has won and the wallet makes a block.

The target is scaled by the coin's weight:

weight = coin amount × coin age        # coin age counts from the last time the coin moved
                                      # and stops growing after about 7 days

So two things make a coin more likely to win: holding more DIVI in it, and leaving it alone. A coin that moved today (or that just staked) starts over with a small weight and grows back to full weight over a week. After a week, only the amount matters.

Nobody can speed this up. There is no extra hardware to buy and no pool to join: the hash is cheap, the target is set by the network to keep blocks a minute apart, and the chance is the same for one wallet holding 1,000 DIVI as for a thousand wallets holding 1 DIVI each.

4What a stake pays

Each block creates new DIVI, called the block subsidy. It started at 1,250 DIVI and drops by 100 every 525,600 blocks (about a year), down to a floor of 250. Of each block, 50 DIVI are set aside for the weekly lottery, and the rest is split between the staker, the treasury and charity.

The staker's 83% is two shares added together: 38% was always the staker's, and 45% used to go to a masternode. Since masternodes were retired on 23 August 2023, the masternode share goes to the staker too. The treasury and charity parts are not paid in your block; they add up and are paid out in special treasury blocks.

5How often you'll stake

Your chance of making any given block is your staking balance divided by all the DIVI that is staking. The network does not publish the second number, but it can be measured from who is winning blocks. Today's measurement:

These are averages at today's reward and today's measured supply, with the wallet running all the time. Real results swing around them. The return is the same percentage at every size; what changes is how long you wait between stakes.

Two tools do this sum for your own address: the stake estimate on the explorer, and the staking returns spreadsheet, which also tracks what you've earned so far.

6What happens to your coins

When a coin of yours wins, the wallet writes a coinstake transaction: it spends that coin and pays it back to you together with the reward. On the explorer it looks like your address sent coins to itself and came out ahead by the reward.

• The coin and its reward are unspendable for 20 blocks (about 20 minutes) while the block settles. If the block ends up on a losing side of a fork, the reward disappears and the coin is simply yours again.
• If the coin was larger than the wallet's split threshold, the coinstake pays it back as two halves. More, smaller coins give you more draws per second, so stakes come a little steadier. The default threshold is 20,000 DIVI in the Divi node and 100,000 in IronDivi.
• Wallets also combine small coins into bigger ones when they stake, so a wallet does not fill up with dust. How the two settings interact, and how to change them, is in Split and combine coins.

7Which wallets can stake

Staking needs the wallet to be awake all the time. A laptop that sleeps at night stakes at night's share of nothing. Many holders run a small always-on computer instead: see Stake on a VPS and Stake on a Raspberry Pi.

8The weekly lottery

The 50 DIVI held back from every block pile up for 10,080 blocks (one week) into a pot of 504,000 DIVI. At the end of the week the pot is paid to eleven stakers who made a block in that week with a stake of more than 10,000 DIVI (the coin plus its reward): the first-ranked gets half, 252,000 DIVI, and the other ten get 25,200 each. Rank is a hash nobody can steer. The lottery explains the rules and shows a real draw.

Next

• Stake in a wallet: turn staking on in IronDivi, Divi Desktop or BoxWallet.
• Stake from the command line: getstakingstatus and friends.
• Why isn't my wallet staking?: the checklist.
• Encrypt your wallet first if you haven't: a staking wallet is online all day.
• Glossary for stake, coinstake, coin age and the rest.

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