How My Harmony One Validator Ended up with 664% APR For ONE Day
The way validators get elected is by having a certain amount of coins available as a Proof.
There are currently 640 slots available at each epoch.
Now a median stake is created which is based upon the number of coins staked and averaged by removing the outliers.
Currently this is ~5.8 million ONE.
Each validator will have x amount of keys and to get the bid, the sum
Number of Coins / Number of Keys = Total bid
so if I have 10 million ones and 2 keys
My bid will be 5 million ONE.
The highest 640 validators will be elected with ALL slots. It is an all or nothing.
IF you are above the median, you will get less rewards and if you are closer / below, you will get more rewards.
Most validators wait until just before election to assess what they need to be elected because people can delegate and undelegate at anytime!
It can be tough but it means that we work hard to make sure to maximise the rewards for delegators.
A few weeks ago, just before election, someone with a lot of keys did not update in time / forgot and thus left a lot of slots open.
THe algorithm just went down this list to find the next largest validator.
I was one of 6 validators with < 2 million coins that got elected and because we were well below the lower bound ( Median * 0.85 ) this meant that the stake was made up to the lower bound stake.
At that moment there were only a small amount of people delegated, the share was 664%.
This was ONLY for 1 day and ONLY for people that were already delegated.
The highest of us was 1227%
Harmony uses an average for validators so delegators can assess long term commitments but they do not remove outliers such as these.
So if you go to https://staking.harmony.one/validators/mainnet You will see the average (currently 92.7%) which is a correct for the average but incredibly misleading.
I always direct potential Delegators to my actual delegation page
Validator -> Maffaz.One
Here you can see my potential returns as a more normal 12.82%
My average will stabilise in the next week or so and I did poke Harmony to consider removing outliers from the average but atm it is not a high priority with so much development going on right now!
I hope this can clear up any confusion and if anyone requires more information, feel free to contact me here or via maffaz.one
TDLR:
It is possible on rare occasions for small validators to be elected with big rewards for ONE day and ONLY for those that delegated before the election.
I always encourage delegators to consider delegating a portion of coins to up and coming validators (ones with a good social media presence and contact details)
Something like 10–20% in the 641–650 range and those that have < 4 million coins. — Select ALL in the list of validators.
This is good for 2 reasons.
- You are helping the security and decentralization of the Harmony protocol
- You might get lucky and earn a lot of rewards in one day!
