Stake to an Existing Signer-Manager
How to stake STX-only under PoX-5 by choosing a signer-manager contract, what to check before you do, and how you get paid.
Staking STX-only under PoX-5 (Stacks 4.x) means locking your STX and naming a signer-manager contract to act for you. You choose how many cycles it runs, from 1 to 96. You can unstake at any time and your STX unlocks at the start of the next cycle, so you are never locked for more than one cycle.
You keep custody throughout: the STX locks in your own account and the manager never holds it.
Stake
For STX-only staking, use app.leather.io/staking, which lists signer-managers you can pick from. Several pool operators run their own staking apps as well.
Whichever you use, the transaction goes to pox-5.
Staking and staking updates are blocked during the prepare phase, the last 100 Bitcoin blocks of every reward cycle. A stake submitted then fails with ERR_STAKE_IN_PREPARE_PHASE (u47). This recurs every cycle rather than happening once.
A transaction ID confirms submission, not success. Confirm the position on-chain or in your wallet before treating yourself as staked.
One position per Stacks principal. STX-only staking and a protocol bond are mutually exclusive. Registering a bond while staked fails with ERR_ALREADY_STAKED (u19).
Choosing between signer-managers
If you took whichever manager your app offered, you can skip this. Everything below is readable on-chain before you stake.
Current fee. A percentage of your sBTC rewards, deducted by the manager before it pays you.
Fee ceiling. Fixed in the deployed code and unchangeable afterwards. Some managers permit anything up to 99.99%. Others cap at 5%.
Admin set. Who can change the fee and withdraw accrued fees. Some managers block an admin from removing themselves, so the contract can never be left with no admin. Others have no such guard.
An active signer-key grant. A manager without one cannot accept new stake, and your transaction fails with
ERR_SIGNER_KEY_GRANT_NOT_FOUND (u17).
A manager needs 50,000 STX (SIGNER_SET_MIN_USTX) in aggregate across everyone staking to it before it enters the signer set. That threshold is fixed and applies to the manager rather than to you, so your own stake can be any size as long as the signer-manager doesn't restrict it.
How you are paid
Rewards reach your signer-manager as sBTC and the manager distributes them. To be paid in native BTC on Bitcoin L1 instead, supply a signer-calldata buffer when you stake, if the manager contract supports it. pox-5 forwards that buffer to the manager and stores nothing itself, so what it means is defined by the manager you chose.
Both app.leather.io/staking and pool operators' own apps can supply those extra details. A general-purpose app offers the options it knows about, so a custom signer-manager may accept choices that only its operator's own app can work with.
Re-staking without resupplying your Bitcoin address reverts you to sBTC. In the reference manager, signer-calldata of none on a later call deletes the stored entry rather than preserving it, and you get no error.
Claiming is non-custodial and anyone can call it. Rewards move from pox-5 to the signer-manager, then the manager's claim-staker-rewards moves them on to you. Your manager will normally do both, and since PoX-5 (Stacks 4.x) you can also do them yourself.
Change or end your position
stake-update re-runs the manager's validation. A second call overwrites whatever the first stored, which is also how a stored payout address is rotated. You can change:
The signer-manager, which is how you switch pools. It takes effect from the start of the next cycle, with no cooldown.
The amount, to increase your stake.
The duration, to extend how many cycles it runs.
The Bitcoin payout address and max fee. When a manager starts paying to a new address depends on its own policy, typically from the next payout. Check the operator's site.
unstake ends the position. Like staking, it is blocked during the prepare phase, failing with ERR_UNSTAKE_IN_PREPARE_PHASE (u28). Unlocks happen at the start of the next cycle.
If you stacked under PoX-4
Every PoX-4 position unlocked when Epoch 4.0 activated, so you are not stacking until you re-enroll.
This used to be called joining a pool, and the word still works. PoX-5 has no separate pooling mechanism, so a manager with one staker and a manager with a thousand are the same kind of thing.
delegate-stx and revoke-delegate-stx are gone. PoX-5 has no delegation map, so there is no permission grant to inspect or revoke. You stake to a manager directly and you end it with unstake.
stack-aggregation-commit is gone. No operator commits per cycle on your behalf.
Solo and pooled stacking were separate mechanisms under PoX-4. They are not separate now.
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