How IKA Staking Works
The staking lifecycle
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
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
3. Rebalance
Validator performance shifts over time. The rebalance planner compares your current positions against optimal allocation and generates a step-by-step plan:- Unstake from underperforming validators
- Wait one epoch for the cooldown
- Withdraw the IKA
- Re-stake with better-performing validators
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.
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.