Staking STX

Staking is locking STX, or STX paired with BTC or sBTC, to support the network's consensus and earn Bitcoin-denominated rewards. If you aren't familiar with how it works, read the Stacking and Stackers and Signing concept guides first.

Staking uses the pox-5 contract, deployed at SP000000000000000000002Q6VF78.pox-5. You can read its source on the Explorer. PoX-5 activated with the Epoch 4.0 hard fork and replaces pox-4.

Every PoX-4 position unlocked at activation. If you were stacking under PoX-4, your STX is already unlocked and you must re-enroll under PoX-5 to keep earning. See What's Changed in PoX-5.

Start here

1

What's Changed in PoX-5

If you were stacking under PoX-4: what unlocked, how to re-enroll, what changed about rewards, and the deadlines for the next cycle.

• What's Changed in PoX-5

2

Stake to an existing signer-manager

The common path, and what most people should do. You keep custody of your STX; the signer-manager you choose handles registration and reward distribution. Pick one whose fee and admin set you are comfortable with. Both are readable on-chain.

• Stake to an Existing Signer-Manager

3

Run your own signer-manager

For operators. This means deploying a contract and running infrastructure: a Bitcoin node, a Stacks node, and the signer software.

• Deploy a Signer Manager Contract
• Generate a Signer Signature
• Take a Signer Fee
• Run a Signer
• PoX-5 Upgrade Guide
• Run a Node and Run a Bitcoin Node

The minimum for a signer-manager to enter the signer set is a fixed 50,000 STX (SIGNER_SET_MIN_USTX) in aggregate across everyone staking to it. An individual stake may be smaller. This replaces PoX-4's cycle-varying min_threshold_ustx.

Definitions and roles

• Staker: anyone locking STX. Either STX-only staking, or a protocol bond pairing a BTC L1 timelock (or sBTC) with an STX lock. PoX-5 allows exactly one position per Stacks principal, and the two kinds are mutually exclusive.
• Signer-manager: the contract a staker stakes to. It is identified on-chain by its contract principal, not by a raw signer key, and it holds the reward-distribution logic.
• Signer: the holder of the signer key that a signer-manager has been granted via grant-signer-key. Running a signer means running the stacks-signer software alongside your own Stacks node and Bitcoin node.
• Pool: a signer-manager that other people stake to.

"Solo" and "pooled" are no longer separate mechanisms. Under PoX-4 they were. Under PoX-5 everyone stakes non-custodially to a signer-manager contract; the only question is who deployed it.

A solo staker in the old sense is someone running their own signer-manager, which is operationally the same thing as offering a pool service, because anyone can stake to that contract. There is no delegator or pool operator role at the protocol layer.

Reference guides

Updated for PoX-5:

• Stake to an Existing Signer-Manager
• Generate a Signer Signature
• Operate a Pool

The guides below were written for PoX-4. Where a page has been rewritten for PoX-5, its old name is shown first and the link goes to the page that replaced it. Anything still carrying its original name is being updated, so treat its contract calls and arguments as out of date. Per-transaction signer signatures and the delegate-stx / stack-aggregation-commit flow no longer exist.

• Stack with a Pool → Stake to an Existing Signer-Manager
• Solo Stacking → Stake to an Existing Signer-Manager, or Run a Signer to run your own
• Key and Address Rotation