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How IKA Staking Works

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The staking lifecycle

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1. Deposit and allocate

When you stake, the allocation engine splits your IKA across multiple validators based on their composite score. You can:

• Auto-allocate — let the engine decide the split (recommended)
• Manual select — pick specific validators and amounts yourself

The engine enforces diversification: no single validator receives more than 40% of your total stake by default.

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2. Earn rewards

Staking rewards accrue every epoch (~24 hours). Your effective APY is the stake-weighted average across all your validators. The dashboard shows:

• Per-validator APY
• Weighted portfolio APY
• Historical APY trends

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3. Rebalance

Validator performance shifts over time. The rebalance planner compares your current positions against optimal allocation and generates a step-by-step plan:

1. Unstake from underperforming validators
2. Wait one epoch for the cooldown
3. Withdraw the IKA
4. Re-stake with better-performing validators

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4. Unstake and withdraw

Unstaking is a two-step process due to the Ika network’s cooldown mechanism: During the cooldown your tokens are locked — they don’t earn rewards but cannot be lost.

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Amounts and decimals

IKA uses 9 decimal places. The minimum stake is 1 IKA. The API and smart contracts always work in MIST. The frontend converts for display.