✨Polkadot Staking Nomination Pools Are Live!✨

3 min readNov 4, 2022

Overview

Nomination pools are now live on Polkadot! 🤩

Previously it was very expensive to stake on Polkadot — users had to stake a minimum of ~175 DOT in order to receive staking rewards. 😔

With nomination pools, users can pool their funds together and nominate as a group, instead of as an individual! This reduces the amount of DOT required in order to earn staking rewards to just 1 DOT! 🥳

In this article we will explain some of the basic information that you should know! 👨‍🏫

Stake with Nomination Pools on Nova Wallet!

You can use the Nova Wallet DApp browser to easily interact with all the features of the Polkadot Staking Dashboard and begin staking with nomination pools! 🏄

What Are Nomination Pools?

Polkadot’s Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) algorithm means that there is a limited number of users who can stake with Validators (22,500). This is why the minimum amount of DOT required to stake was so high, because there were too many users wanting to stake, driving up the minimum requirement. 🐳

Nomination pools allow a group of people to permissionlessly pool their DOT tokens together and act as a single nominator. 🍯

What To Look For In A Nomination Pool!

The “Nominator” of the pool (basically the owner) is in control of which Validators the nomination pool decides to stake with. It is important for the decentralization of the Polkadot network that you favour nomination pools who are staking with independent Validators, and not large conglomerates running multiple Validator nodes. 🤝

You should also check that the pool is currently nonimating, and is not flagged as “inactive” or “waiting”. ⚠️

We would reccomend that you stake with Nova Wallet’s staking pool! 😻

Important Things To Keep In Mind!

An important thing to know is that, if one of the Validator nodes which the nomination pool is nominating with gets slashed, then all the members of the nomination pool are slashed evenly across the pool (this means you will lose some of your tokens!). 😿

Additionally, the DOT tokens which nominate to a nomination pool cannot be used in governance votes. This is different from if you are delegating to a Validator by yourself. 🗳️

You can learn more about nomination pools here. 👩‍🔬

About Nova Wallet

Nova Wallet is a next-gen iOS/Android application for the Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem, which provides the ultimate mobile wallet experience! Supporting over 60+ networks and assets, NFTs, extensive DApp support (for both Substrate & EVM), Crowdloans, and staking of assets including DOT, KSM, GLMR, MOVR, AZERO, PDEX, CAPS, TUR and KMA! Nova Wallet is a community-orientated app which is funded by the Kusama Treasury, and we aim to provide a convenient, fast, and secure wallet experience on mobile devices.