Delegating

Reading time: 6 min

Delegators are network participants who delegate (i.e., "stake") GRT to one or more Indexers.

• They help secure the network without running a Graph Node themselves.

• They earn a portion of an Indexer's query fees and rewards by delegating to them.

The number of queries an Indexer can process depends on their own stake, the delegated stake, and the price the Indexer charges for each query. Therefore, the more stake allocated to an Indexer, the more potential queries an Indexer can process.

Learn how to be an effective Delegator in The Graph Network.

Delegators share the earnings of the protocol alongside all Indexers based on their delegated stake. Therefore, they must use their best judgment to choose Indexers based on multiple factors.

There are three sections in this guide:

• The risks of delegating tokens in The Graph Network
• How to calculate expected returns as a Delegator
• A video guide showing the steps to delegate in the Graph Network UI

Listed below are the main risks of being a Delegator in the protocol.

Delegators cannot be slashed for bad behavior, but there is a tax on Delegators to disincentivize poor decision-making that could harm the integrity of the network.

As a Delegator, it's important to understand the following:

• You will be charged 0.5% every time you delegate. This means that if you delegate 1,000 GRT, you will automatically burn 5 GRT.

• In order to be safe, you should calculate your potential return when delegating to an Indexer. For example, you might calculate how many days it will take before you have earned back the 0.5% tax on your delegation.

Whenever a Delegator wants to undelegate, their tokens are subject to a 28-day unbonding period. This means they cannot transfer their tokens or earn any rewards for 28 days.

If you choose an Indexer that is not trustworthy or not doing a good job, you will want to undelegate. This means you will be losing a lot of opportunities to earn rewards, which can be just as bad as burning GRT. As a result, it’s recommended that you choose an Indexer wisely.

In order to understand how to choose a trustworthy Indexer, you need to understand the Delegation Parameters.

• Indexing Reward Cut - The portion of the rewards the Indexer will keep for themselves.
  • If an Indexer's reward cut is set to 100%, as a Delegator, you will get 0 indexing rewards.
  • If it is set to 80%, as a Delegator, you will receive 20%.

• Query Fee Cut - This is just like the Indexing Reward Cut, but it applies to returns on the query fees that the Indexer collects.

As you can see, in order to choose the right Indexer, you must consider multiple things.

• It is highly recommend that you explore The Graph Discord to determine which Indexers have the best social and technical reputations and which ones reward Delegators consistently.
• Many Indexers are very active in Discord and will be happy to answer your questions.
• Many of them have been Indexing for months, and they are doing their best to help Delegators earn a good return, as it improves the health and success of the network.

A Delegator must consider the following factors to determine a return:

• Consider an Indexer's ability to use the Delegated tokens available to them.
  • If an Indexer is not allocating all the tokens available, they are not earning the maximum profit they could be for themselves or their Delegators.
• Pay attention to the first few days of delegating.
  • An Indexer can choose to close an allocation and collect rewards anytime between 1 and 28 days. It is possible that an Indexer might have a lot of rewards they still need to collect, so their total rewards are low.

You should choose an Indexer that is transparent and honest about setting their Query Fee and Indexing Fee Cuts. You should also look at the Parameters Cooldown time to see how much of a time buffer you have. After that is done, it is simple to calculate the amount of rewards you are getting.

The formula is:

Delegators should consider the proportion of the Delegation Pool they own.

All delegation rewards are shared evenly, with a pool rebalancing based on the amount the Delegator deposited into the pool.

This gives the Delegator a share of the pool:

Finally, consider the delegation capacity. Currently, the Delegation Ratio is set to 16.

This means that if an Indexer has staked 1,000,000 GRT, their Delegation Capacity is 16,000,000 GRT of delegated tokens that they can use in the protocol. Any delegated tokens over this amount will dilute all the Delegator rewards.

Imagine an Indexer with 100,000,000 GRT delegated to them, but their capacity is only 16,000,000 GRT. This means effectively, 84,000,000 GRT tokens are not being used to earn tokens. So, both the Delegators and the Indexers are earning less rewards than they could be.

Therefore, a Delegator should always consider the Delegation Capacity of an Indexer, and factor it into their decision making.

1. When I try to delegate my transaction in MetaMask, it appears as "Pending" or "Queued" for longer than expected. What should I do?

At times, attempts to delegate to Indexers via MetaMask can fail and result in prolonged periods of "Pending" or "Queued" transaction attempts.

Let's say you attempt to delegate with an insufficient gas fee relative to the current prices.

• This action can cause the transaction attempt to display as "Pending" in your MetaMask wallet for 15+ minutes. When this happens, you can attempt subsequent transactions, but these will only be processed until the initial transaction is mined because transactions for an address must be processed in order.
• In such cases, these transactions can be cancelled in MetaMask, but the transactions attempts will accrue gas fees without any guarantee that subsequent attempts will be successful.

A simple resolution to this bug is to restart the browser (e.g., using "abort:restart" in the address bar), which will cancel all previous attempts without gas being subtracted from the wallet. Several users who have encountered this issue have reported successful transactions after restarting their browser and attempting to delegate.

This video guide reviews this page while interacting with the UI.