Question 1

Is it better to run my own validator or delegate to a staking pool?

Accepted Answer

It depends on your stake size, the pool's commission, and how much slashing and operating risk you are willing to carry. Running your own validator captures the full reward — the consensus issuance plus every bit of execution-layer income (MEV and priority tips) — with nobody taking a cut. But you pay for it in three ways: the ever-present chance of a slashing or downtime penalty, the hardware, bandwidth and monitoring cost of keeping a node online, and the minimum stake many networks require (32 ETH on Ethereum). Delegating to a pool or holding a liquid-staking token removes all of that — no minimum, no hardware, slashing risk socialised or insured — but the operator skims a commission, commonly 5% to 15% of your rewards. This calculator prices both net APRs side by side so you can see which one actually leaves more in your pocket at your stake size.

Question 2

How does slashing affect my staking yield?

Accepted Answer

Slashing is a penalty the protocol applies for validator faults — double-signing, being offline, or getting caught in a correlated mass-slashing event — and it burns a slice of your staked principal, not just your rewards. On its own a single slash is rare, but because it eats principal it has an outsized effect on expected return. The way to fold it into a yield number is as an expected annual drag: the probability of being slashed in a year multiplied by the fraction of stake you would lose. A 0.1% annual chance of a 1% penalty is only a 0.001% drag, which is negligible; a 0.5% chance of a 30% correlation penalty is a 0.15% drag, which starts to matter against a 3-4% reward. This calculator subtracts that expected slashing drag from the solo-validator APR so the comparison against a delegated pool — where slashing is usually socialised away from you — is apples to apples.

Question 3

What commission do staking pools and liquid-staking tokens charge?

Accepted Answer

Most take a percentage of the rewards you earn, not of your principal. Liquid-staking protocols and centralised exchanges typically charge somewhere between 5% and 25%: Lido and Rocket Pool sit around 10-14% on Ethereum, Coinbase and other exchanges are often higher, and some newer pools undercut with lower rates to win deposits. Because the fee is a share of rewards, a 10% commission on a 4% gross yield costs you 0.4 percentage points of APR — it does not sound like much until you compound it over years on a large stake. The number that matters is your net yield after the cut, which is what this calculator computes; it also solves for the break-even commission, the fee at which delegating and running your own validator leave you with exactly the same return.

Question 4

At what stake size does running my own validator become worth it?

Accepted Answer

The operating cost of a validator — a machine, power, bandwidth and your time — is a fixed dollar amount that does not grow with your stake, so it drags your yield down hard on a small stake and barely at all on a large one. Delegating, by contrast, costs a fixed percentage no matter how much you stake. That means there is a crossover stake size: below it the pool's commission is cheaper than your fixed operating drag, and above it your operating cost is diluted enough that keeping the full reward wins. This calculator solves for that crossover directly, so instead of guessing you can see the exact stake at which solo staking starts to beat delegating — and if the commission is small enough relative to your slashing risk, it will tell you that delegating always wins regardless of size.

Validator Staking Calculator

How commission eats the delegated path

The full reward, minus what it costs to keep it

The math