Tracking your Stake

Staking to a good performing validator (or validators) is important if you want to maximize your staking rewards while also supporting Solana as a whole through better network performance. Factors that affect staking rewards are:

Voting performance. Validators process blocks of transactions and once they verify that they are correctly built, they "vote" on these block(s) by sending a vote transaction back to the rest of the validators in the network. Voting commits them to that particular chain of blocks (fork). When enough validators in the network vote on a particular block (over 67% of total validators by stake weight), the network reaches consensus on that block and it becomes "confirmed" and later "finalized". Apps will typically use "confirmed" status to notify you that your transaction has gone through. The network is faster when validators vote quickly and on as many blocks as possible.
Uptime. When a validator isn't actively validating (aka is "delinquent") it is not generating rewards for that period, and so a drop in rewards is directly proportional to the amount of time a validator is offline. Some downtime is typical, such as for when validators perform Solana validator software upgr)ades, but this should only take around 5 minutes or less and only occur about once a week or less. Overclock validator has a backup validator server that we use for seamless, no downtime upgrades. Occasionally validators will have longer downtime (i.e. an hour or so) if there are bugs in the Solana software that cause a server to stop voting and need to be troubleshooted or if the datacenter that the validator is in has an issue. The best practice however is that a validator operator has a backup server that they can quickly migrate to in emergency (not all server issues will allow for this though unfortunately, so occasional downtime even with the best validator operators happens). We have multiple backup servers located in separate datacenters with different server providers, improving redundancy.
Inflation Commission. A validator's inflation commission is the % of the total inflationary staking rewards that a validator takes as a fee. Some validators operate on 0% commission and support themselves purely through transaction fee and MEV related rewards. We currently have 0% commission on inflation rewards and depend on other sources of rewards. You can learn more about Solana's inflation schedule here.
Jito MEV Commission: Validators that run the JIto-Anza client earn extra rewards from processing Jito tip transactions. You can track our Jito commission on Stakewiz along with our inflation commission.

Validator Performance Dashboards typically report an estimate of yearly staking reward rate known as annual percentage yield (APY) along with the factors mentioned above, among others. They might also provide a subjective rating of validators based on performance, commission, stake amount, geographical decentralization, etc.

Typically, Solana wallets will report accrued staking rewards, but another way to check is by entering the wallet address you staked with into a Solana explorer and looking at the staking tab. It takes one epoch (see the primary Solana Explorer for epoch time remaining) for a stake account to activate and you will thereafter receive rewards after every new epoch.

Set Staking Alerts

On Stakewiz, which is a validator dashboard built by Laine validator, stakers can set alerts for Overclock Validator (or other validators) with regards to downtime and commission changes.
We will alert stakers at least 2 weeks in advance for planned commission changes, but we have no plans to change commission for now.
For downtime exceeding 20 minutes, we will report the occurrence in our discord.
Short periods of downtime (less than 10 minutes typically) occur when upgrading Solana validator software. Longer periods of downtime will be reported on in our Discord announcement channel.

Other resources

In the Solana Tech discord, stakers can see pending software upgrades in the mb-announcements channel and if there is ever a blockchain-wide network issue, validators are typically active in the mb-validators channel.

Staking to a good performing validator (or validators) is important if you want to maximize your staking rewards while also supporting Solana as a whole through better network performance. Factors that affect staking rewards are:

Voting performance. Validators process blocks of transactions and once they verify that they are correctly built, they "vote" on these block(s) by sending a vote transaction back to the rest of the validators in the network. Voting commits them to that particular chain of blocks (fork). When enough validators in the network vote on a particular block (over 67% of total validators by stake weight), the network reaches consensus on that block and it becomes "confirmed" and later "finalized". Apps will typically use "confirmed" status to notify you that your transaction has gone through. The network is faster when validators vote quickly and on as many blocks as possible.
Uptime. When a validator isn't actively validating (aka is "delinquent") it is not generating rewards for that period, and so a drop in rewards is directly proportional to the amount of time a validator is offline. Some downtime is typical, such as for when validators perform Solana validator software upgr)ades, but this should only take around 5 minutes or less and only occur about once a week or less. Overclock validator has a backup validator server that we use for seamless, no downtime upgrades. Occasionally validators will have longer downtime (i.e. an hour or so) if there are bugs in the Solana software that cause a server to stop voting and need to be troubleshooted or if the datacenter that the validator is in has an issue. The best practice however is that a validator operator has a backup server that they can quickly migrate to in emergency (not all server issues will allow for this though unfortunately, so occasional downtime even with the best validator operators happens). We have multiple backup servers located in separate datacenters with different server providers, improving redundancy.
Inflation Commission. A validator's inflation commission is the % of the total inflationary staking rewards that a validator takes as a fee. Some validators operate on 0% commission and support themselves purely through transaction fee and MEV related rewards. We currently have 0% commission on inflation rewards and depend on other sources of rewards. You can learn more about Solana's inflation schedule here.
Jito MEV Commission: Validators that run the JIto-Anza client earn extra rewards from processing Jito tip transactions. You can track our Jito commission on Stakewiz along with our inflation commission.

Validator Performance Dashboards typically report an estimate of yearly staking reward rate known as annual percentage yield (APY) along with the factors mentioned above, among others. They might also provide a subjective rating of validators based on performance, commission, stake amount, geographical decentralization, etc.

Typically, Solana wallets will report accrued staking rewards, but another way to check is by entering the wallet address you staked with into a Solana explorer and looking at the staking tab. It takes one epoch (see the primary Solana Explorer for epoch time remaining) for a stake account to activate and you will thereafter receive rewards after every new epoch.

Set Staking Alerts

On Stakewiz, which is a validator dashboard built by Laine validator, stakers can set alerts for Overclock Validator (or other validators) with regards to downtime and commission changes.
We will alert stakers at least 2 weeks in advance for planned commission changes, but we have no plans to change commission for now.
For downtime exceeding 20 minutes, we will report the occurrence in our discord.
Short periods of downtime (less than 10 minutes typically) occur when upgrading Solana validator software. Longer periods of downtime will be reported on in our Discord announcement channel.

Other resources

In the Solana Tech discord, stakers can see pending software upgrades in the mb-announcements channel and if there is ever a blockchain-wide network issue, validators are typically active in the mb-validators channel.

Staking to a good performing validator (or validators) is important if you want to maximize your staking rewards while also supporting Solana as a whole through better network performance. Factors that affect staking rewards are:

Voting performance. Validators process blocks of transactions and once they verify that they are correctly built, they "vote" on these block(s) by sending a vote transaction back to the rest of the validators in the network. Voting commits them to that particular chain of blocks (fork). When enough validators in the network vote on a particular block (over 67% of total validators by stake weight), the network reaches consensus on that block and it becomes "confirmed" and later "finalized". Apps will typically use "confirmed" status to notify you that your transaction has gone through. The network is faster when validators vote quickly and on as many blocks as possible.
Uptime. When a validator isn't actively validating (aka is "delinquent") it is not generating rewards for that period, and so a drop in rewards is directly proportional to the amount of time a validator is offline. Some downtime is typical, such as for when validators perform Solana validator software upgr)ades, but this should only take around 5 minutes or less and only occur about once a week or less. Overclock validator has a backup validator server that we use for seamless, no downtime upgrades. Occasionally validators will have longer downtime (i.e. an hour or so) if there are bugs in the Solana software that cause a server to stop voting and need to be troubleshooted or if the datacenter that the validator is in has an issue. The best practice however is that a validator operator has a backup server that they can quickly migrate to in emergency (not all server issues will allow for this though unfortunately, so occasional downtime even with the best validator operators happens). We have multiple backup servers located in separate datacenters with different server providers, improving redundancy.
Inflation Commission. A validator's inflation commission is the % of the total inflationary staking rewards that a validator takes as a fee. Some validators operate on 0% commission and support themselves purely through transaction fee and MEV related rewards. We currently have 0% commission on inflation rewards and depend on other sources of rewards. You can learn more about Solana's inflation schedule here.
Jito MEV Commission: Validators that run the JIto-Anza client earn extra rewards from processing Jito tip transactions. You can track our Jito commission on Stakewiz along with our inflation commission.

Validator Performance Dashboards typically report an estimate of yearly staking reward rate known as annual percentage yield (APY) along with the factors mentioned above, among others. They might also provide a subjective rating of validators based on performance, commission, stake amount, geographical decentralization, etc.

Typically, Solana wallets will report accrued staking rewards, but another way to check is by entering the wallet address you staked with into a Solana explorer and looking at the staking tab. It takes one epoch (see the primary Solana Explorer for epoch time remaining) for a stake account to activate and you will thereafter receive rewards after every new epoch.

Set Staking Alerts

On Stakewiz, which is a validator dashboard built by Laine validator, stakers can set alerts for Overclock Validator (or other validators) with regards to downtime and commission changes.
We will alert stakers at least 2 weeks in advance for planned commission changes, but we have no plans to change commission for now.
For downtime exceeding 20 minutes, we will report the occurrence in our discord.
Short periods of downtime (less than 10 minutes typically) occur when upgrading Solana validator software. Longer periods of downtime will be reported on in our Discord announcement channel.

Other resources

In the Solana Tech discord, stakers can see pending software upgrades in the mb-announcements channel and if there is ever a blockchain-wide network issue, validators are typically active in the mb-validators channel.

Staking to a good performing validator (or validators) is important if you want to maximize your staking rewards while also supporting Solana as a whole through better network performance. Factors that affect staking rewards are:

Voting performance. Validators process blocks of transactions and once they verify that they are correctly built, they "vote" on these block(s) by sending a vote transaction back to the rest of the validators in the network. Voting commits them to that particular chain of blocks (fork). When enough validators in the network vote on a particular block (over 67% of total validators by stake weight), the network reaches consensus on that block and it becomes "confirmed" and later "finalized". Apps will typically use "confirmed" status to notify you that your transaction has gone through. The network is faster when validators vote quickly and on as many blocks as possible.
Uptime. When a validator isn't actively validating (aka is "delinquent") it is not generating rewards for that period, and so a drop in rewards is directly proportional to the amount of time a validator is offline. Some downtime is typical, such as for when validators perform Solana validator software upgr)ades, but this should only take around 5 minutes or less and only occur about once a week or less. Overclock validator has a backup validator server that we use for seamless, no downtime upgrades. Occasionally validators will have longer downtime (i.e. an hour or so) if there are bugs in the Solana software that cause a server to stop voting and need to be troubleshooted or if the datacenter that the validator is in has an issue. The best practice however is that a validator operator has a backup server that they can quickly migrate to in emergency (not all server issues will allow for this though unfortunately, so occasional downtime even with the best validator operators happens). We have multiple backup servers located in separate datacenters with different server providers, improving redundancy.
Inflation Commission. A validator's inflation commission is the % of the total inflationary staking rewards that a validator takes as a fee. Some validators operate on 0% commission and support themselves purely through transaction fee and MEV related rewards. We currently have 0% commission on inflation rewards and depend on other sources of rewards. You can learn more about Solana's inflation schedule here.
Jito MEV Commission: Validators that run the JIto-Anza client earn extra rewards from processing Jito tip transactions. You can track our Jito commission on Stakewiz along with our inflation commission.

Validator Performance Dashboards typically report an estimate of yearly staking reward rate known as annual percentage yield (APY) along with the factors mentioned above, among others. They might also provide a subjective rating of validators based on performance, commission, stake amount, geographical decentralization, etc.

Typically, Solana wallets will report accrued staking rewards, but another way to check is by entering the wallet address you staked with into a Solana explorer and looking at the staking tab. It takes one epoch (see the primary Solana Explorer for epoch time remaining) for a stake account to activate and you will thereafter receive rewards after every new epoch.

Set Staking Alerts

On Stakewiz, which is a validator dashboard built by Laine validator, stakers can set alerts for Overclock Validator (or other validators) with regards to downtime and commission changes.
We will alert stakers at least 2 weeks in advance for planned commission changes, but we have no plans to change commission for now.
For downtime exceeding 20 minutes, we will report the occurrence in our discord.
Short periods of downtime (less than 10 minutes typically) occur when upgrading Solana validator software. Longer periods of downtime will be reported on in our Discord announcement channel.

Other resources

In the Solana Tech discord, stakers can see pending software upgrades in the mb-announcements channel and if there is ever a blockchain-wide network issue, validators are typically active in the mb-validators channel.