Your Delegation — Your Power (or how to choose a Validator wisely)

With your Wallet and your Delegation there comes also Power so it’s important to choose your validator wisely. We don’t want to just write down here a list of Validators and give our personal opinion, we would like to show you how you can check for yourself and delegate by your own personal values.

“There is enough on earth for everybody’s need, but not enough for anybody’s greed.” Mahatma Gandhi

1) Power

Delegating to a huge Validator will give them more Power. First of all, by adding or removing Keys a huge validator can quite easily rig the election. Second with his Voting Power on the DAO a huge validator can easy overturn the result. Harmony is known for building bridges and not walls.
https://staking.harmony.one/analytics/mainnet

To show you an example the Top 17 Validator out of 112 elected Validators have together 50.6% staking weight. Consider this:

2) Support the decentralisation

After the first topic it makes sense to delegate to a smaller one? But wait you have maybe several thousand ONE coins? Maybe they will grow fast and become a big one? Or maybe they don’t always watch their node and it is often offline? So, diversify your delegation to several Validator instead to just one

3) Check the bounds

There are some Validator on the top or in lower position with less than 10 million on the top or less than 5 million in the lower part. The upper one would like to split the stake across two keys in order to decrease the oversaturation. So, stick with them and give them a chance to grab a second Key. And those in low position need your support to get elected.
https://harmony.smartstake.io/election

4) Fees & Uptime

A minimum uptime of 95% should be achieved. 95% uptime does not hurt your rewards very much and is still a good value.
And as a maximum fee should be 15%, anything over is way too much. The average fee is in the moment 8.31%. Recently there has been a 5% minimum fee for existing validators after the 100th epoch. You can read the proposal here: https://gov.harmony.one/#/staking-mainnet/proposal/QmYbBQuDSZbMVa6RBi3kzFiNkXxv8PMp9rrT25drkxQnTb

5) Community, sustainable and charity

Some Validator are doing a great Job supporting the community with articles, instructions or helping out new validators. Others are doing something for sustainability or charity. We appreciate those things and value them as well, but this is up to you if this is a matter for your delegation or not.

6) Completely Inactive

After your delegation I would check from time to time if the Validator is still doing his service. 189'117'951 ONE are lying around on inactive Validators, 110'800'000 are from the huge Binance staking Wallet. These coins are not earning Rewards and could be redelegated to an active Validator. Of course, maybe there are sometime Maintenance issues so ask your Validator why he is offline. If it’s over several Epoch and he didn’t respond, they may have stopped their service.
https://harmony.smartstake.io/validators/NotEligible

7) DYOR

Smartstake is a great tool for checking everything that I explained here, you can see directly uptime, expected return, fee and stake weight.
https://harmony.smartstake.io/

More Information’s about Harmony’s Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS):
https://medium.com/harmony-one/the-definitive-guide-to-harmony-open-staking-6c78976a7d63