Proof of Stake: whose capital secures the network and what the staker puts at risk

Proof of Stake (PoS) is the rule by which a network decides whom to trust with recording the next block: the right to propose a block and to attest to the blocks of others goes to those who have locked up their own coins in the protocol. Staking is precisely this locking up. The reward for it is neither business income nor interest on a debt; it is what the protocol pays you for holding capital as collateral that the network is entitled to cut if you break its rules.

What exactly is locked up, and why

In proof-of-work networks, recording a block costs electricity: falsifying the history requires physical expenditure, and that is what makes it unprofitable. Proof of Stake replaces this external cost with an internal pledge. A validator puts up a deposit, the protocol sets its minimum size and places that deposit at risk: for signing conflicting blocks, for trying to rewrite history that has already been agreed, and sometimes for prolonged absence from the network, part of the stake is written off. This is what is called slashing.

This leads to the key distinction that gets lost in marketing language. You are not "placing funds at a rate" — you are posting collateral against an obligation to behave honestly. The economic security of the network equals the sum of what validators are prepared to lose; your reward is the price of your share of that risk.

Where the reward comes from

Payouts to a staker have several sources, and none of them has a debtor in the legal sense. The first is issuance: the protocol creates new coins and hands them to those who validate blocks. The second is the fees users pay for transactions. The third, less obvious, is income from the right to order transactions within a block, which a validator can capture itself or sell at auction.

The issuance component matters for understanding the picture: it does not create value but redistributes it from holders who do not stake to those who do. If the protocol issues new coins faster than demand for them grows, the nominal reward rate and the holder's real result diverge. That is why a promised "staking yield" cannot be read as a deposit rate — it has a different nature and a different denominator.

Why it is neither a dividend nor a coupon

A comparison with the stock market is useful precisely because of the differences, not the similarities. A dividend is a distribution of profit approved by a shareholders' meeting; the payout has a decision, a record date and an issuer that can be held to account. How this works on the Russian market can be seen in the dividends section, and upcoming payouts are collected in the calendar. A coupon is an obligation of the issuer written into the terms of the issue: on OFZ the state pays, and non-payment is a default with legal consequences.

A validator's reward resembles neither. It is accrued by code according to a formula described in advance, its size changes with the total volume of staked coins and the load on the network, and there is no one to present a claim to: there is no obligated party. The closest analogy in logic is not a payout from an issuer but your share in the output of a collective infrastructure, for participation in which you answer with your own collateral.

Ways to take part, and the risk of each

Your own validator. Full control over the keys and full responsibility: you pay for downtime caused by a crashed server, and you also pay for a configuration error that leads to a double signature.

Delegation. In networks that provide for it, you hand your voting right to an operator while keeping the coins yourself. The operator takes a commission from the reward, and its slashing mistake hits the delegators too.

Liquid staking. You give the coin to a protocol and receive a derivative token that can be sold and pledged while the underlying deposit remains locked. This adds smart-contract risk and the risk that the price of the derivative token diverges from the underlying coin at a moment when exiting the stake takes time.

Custodial "staking" on a platform. The most widespread and least obvious form: you hand your coins to an intermediary, and it promises accruals. Legally, this is not participation in consensus but a claim on the intermediary — that is, credit risk rather than protocol risk.

The time factor deserves separate attention. Exiting a stake is almost never instant: the protocol imposes an unbonding period so that it has time to punish a violator. While it runs, the price of the asset keeps moving, yet the collateral cannot be sold.

What the site's data does not cover on this topic

TradeAlmanac calculates indicators for the Russian market — stocks, bonds and funds. Reward rates, volumes of staked coins and multiples for crypto assets are not in the database, so you will not find specific values in this article — they should be looked up in the networks' own explorers, where they are published in real time. Terms relating to consensus, collateral and delegation are explained in the glossary.

The legal framework in Russia should also be stated honestly. Digital currency is defined by Law No. 259-FZ, adopted in 2020, and mining was regulated by amendments in 2024, but staking as a separate operation is not expressly addressed in legislation: questions of whether the reward is recognised as income, and when that income arises, are settled under general rules and interpretations that may change. This is an area where you should check against the current wording of the rules rather than against the text of an article.