Ark — Voting in 2 Minutes

Every day I still come across some people who haven’t voted for an Ark delegate and as such are not receiving rewards. Ark is a delegated proof of stake system, which has 51 delegates who are voted in by the community. Now I don’t want to go into delegated proof of stake in this article, you can read more about that here. I want to give you a super quick description of how to vote!

1. You need Ark. Buy Ark on an exchange such as Binance or Bittrex with BTC or ETH (if you don’t have BTC or ETH, buy that for example via Coinbase)
2. Send Ark from the exchange to your Ark wallet. You can download the Ark wallet via ark.io
3. In your Ark wallet there is a tab called ‘votes’, go to this tab
4. Click on ‘add delegate’
5. Add a delegate you like. There are 51 delegates actively forging and as such able to reward voters. Their proposals can be found here. The top 51 can be seen here
6. Once you have added a delegate you like, click on vote. You will be asked to type in your passphrase (always keep your passphrase in a safe place, don’t share it) and then you need to pay 1 Ark for voting
7. You only pay this voting cost once, you only pay it again if you unvote or vote for another delegate
8. You have now voted and will receive reward from your delegate!

Now some thoughts based on what people ask me on Ark slack or Telegram:

• Your Ark remains fully in your control! It does not leave your wallet, nobody else can touch it. You can take out the Ark whenever you want
• You do not need to leave your wallet open. You have voted, this is now registered. You can turn off your computer and you will still continue to receive reward
• You don’t need to re-vote if the amount of Ark in your wallet changes. It can even be 0
• DO NOT REGISTER YOURSELF AS DELEGATE. This will cost you 25 Ark and is not necessary to vote!!!
• Each delegate has a different proposal. Some go for high pay out, others spend part of their Ark on development others on Marketing. Choose a proposal and delegate you like
• Delegates are happy to answer questions, ask them on the Ark Slack
• There are calculators to estimate your return, here is one example, but there are a variety of calculators out there

Lastly, this certainly isn’t the first article about voting within Ark. I just wanted to provide a very quick description in case you want to get started swiftly. If you want a lot of detail and screenshots, check this blog here.

Ark Delegate — thefoundry (our proposal, here)