What is staking?

What staking actually is

Solana is run by around a thousand independent computers called validators. They vote on which blocks of transactions are real, and take turns producing new ones. Stake is how the network decides whose vote carries weight. Delegating points the weight of your SOL at one validator; in exchange, that validator earns the right to a commission on the rewards your stake generates. That is the whole of the relationship.

Mechanically, one transaction does three things: it creates a stake account in your name, it delegates that account to a validator, and it pays our entry fee. The stake account is where your SOL sits while it is staked, and your own wallet is written into it as the authority over it — twice, as explained below.

You type an amount in your own currency, euros or dollars. The conversion happens once, at the moment you sign, using a live SOL price; if that price cannot be read the button is disabled rather than guessing. SOL appears in the interface only where your existing positions are listed.

One consequence deserves to be stated flatly, because it is easy to miss: what actually gets staked is SOL taken from your own wallet. There is no swap anywhere in the path. This is not a way of earning on a euro or dollar balance that stays in euros or dollars. From the moment you stake, you are holding SOL, and you carry the SOL price with it.

Where the reward comes from

Solana creates new SOL on a schedule — inflation — and pays it to the people who stake. That is the source of the reward. It is the protocol paying, not CoFunders. No CoFunders money is involved, and CoFunders carries no obligation to you for it.

The arithmetic has one part worth explaining, because it surprises people. New SOL is issued against the whole supply but paid only to stakers, so the smaller the staked share of the supply, the more each staker receives. The rate we show is the network's staker share of newly created SOL divided by the fraction of supply that is staked, read live from the chain, then less your validator's commission.

We do not quote a fixed rate, and we never add an assumption for MEV — extra validator revenue that is sometimes shared with delegators — because whether a validator shares it cannot be read from the chain. Claiming it would inflate every number on this page.

If the rate cannot be computed, or the inputs fall outside a sanity band, the app shows no rate rather than a guess. There is history behind that. The app once displayed 7.3%, written by hand into the code. When someone measured what a delegator was actually receiving, the figure that day was 5.28%. A wrong rate is worse than no rate.

Rewards do not arrive as a payment. Each epoch they accrue inside the stake account itself and compound there. Your position simply grows; nothing lands in a balance you can spend.

Nobody takes custody of your SOL

The stake account is created with your wallet as both the stake authority and the withdraw authority. Those are the only two powers that exist over a stake account, and both are yours. Only your wallet can move, redelegate or withdraw it. CoFunders cannot, and neither can the validator.

No time lock is written into the account. The only wait is the protocol's own activation and deactivation cycle, described in the next section — not a term we impose.

There is no CoFunders smart contract or pool between you and Solana. We do not hold your money even for an instant to take our fee: the transfer to our treasury is wrapped in the same transaction that creates and delegates the stake, and you sign once.

One party does sit in the path, and it should be named rather than left out. Your wallet is an embedded wallet provided by Privy. Privy manages the key material and every signature goes through them, so signing depends on Privy being reachable. The key is exportable from the security screen, and that export is what makes the rest of this true: if CoFunders disappeared tomorrow the stake accounts would still be there, still yours, and reachable with any Solana wallet.

The record of what is yours lives on Solana, not in our database. When the app shows your positions it finds them by scanning the chain for stake accounts whose withdraw authority is your key.

Because everything runs on your signature, nothing happens on its own. We cannot stake an idle balance for you, and there is no set-and-forget mode.

The waiting, in both directions

Solana measures time in epochs. On mainnet an epoch is roughly two to two and a half days, and almost everything about staking happens at an epoch boundary. That is the source of every delay described here.

Going in: a new delegation does not start earning immediately. It activates at the next epoch boundary, and the first full reward is credited after a complete epoch of being active. In practice the first reward typically appears two to five days after you stake, depending on where in the epoch you signed. That is the protocol, not a CoFunders rule, and no product can shorten it.

Coming out: exit is two steps. The first, deactivate, starts the cooldown, and the stake stops being active at the next epoch boundary. Once the account reads inactive, the second step withdraws the SOL back to your wallet. A withdrawal attempted earlier simply fails.

Two to three days is the normal case. Solana also caps how much stake can enter or leave the network in a single epoch, so during a period of heavy network-wide unstaking the cooldown can run longer than one epoch. It is rare, and it is not something any platform can override.

That wait applies at exit, from the moment you ask to leave. Your position is not on a three-day term from the day you stake — that framing is both wrong and scarier than the truth.

What it costs

Two charges, both inside a transaction you sign. A flat $0.99 comes off the amount going in. On the way out, a flat $0.99 plus a share of profit only.

Both figures are set in US dollars and converted to the currency you type in, so the euro amount moves with the exchange rate. The minimum stake is $100 on the same basis. Below that, two flat charges take an unreasonable share of the amount, so the app refuses rather than letting someone lose money to rounding.

The profit share depends on your plan: 10% on the free plan, 7.5% on starter, 5% on pro, 2.5% on max. These are platform policy, not something enforced on the blockchain — staking here is plain Solana delegation, so no CoFunders program sits in the path to collect them.

The share applies to profit alone and can never reach into what you put in. A position that ends flat, or down, owes nothing but the flat exit charge. But note the shape of it honestly: those two flat charges apply whether the position made money or not, so a small or short-lived position can end up down on fees alone. This is not a product where we only earn when you earn.

Solana has a floor of its own underneath ours. A stake account must hold more than the network's rent-exempt minimum, which for an account of this size is roughly 0.0023 SOL. Our own minimum sits well above it.

What can go wrong

Price is the dominant risk, and it is not close. You are holding SOL. If SOL falls you can end up with less money than you started with, even holding the same number of coins, and even though the staking side worked exactly as described.

The projection on the stake screen applies an assumed price path of 15% a year. That is an assumption of a positive return, not a conservative one, and it is not a forecast — the same screen shows the symmetric fall beside it, so the loss case is the same size as the gain. For scale: SOL fell roughly 96% from peak to trough during 2022.

Slashing — a protocol confiscating part of a delegator's stake when a validator misbehaves — does not exist on Solana as of September 2026. A validator going offline or voting badly costs its delegators rewards, not principal. Slashing has been an active protocol proposal, so read that as a description of today rather than a permanent property.

Validator downtime is a real cost, and it is a cost in rewards. A validator that stops voting earns its delegators nothing for as long as it stays out, and one that misses votes earns them proportionally less. We read vote performance from the chain rather than assume it, but we cannot prevent it.

The rate floats. It is recomputed from network conditions, and nothing on this page is a promise about what you will receive.

There is no deposit-guarantee scheme behind any of this, no audit of this product, and no track record to point at. We are not going to manufacture any of those.

And to close off a question people reasonably ask: money pledged to projects on CoFunders is never staked. Staking is a separate thing you do with your own SOL.

Helius, and what we owe them

Before anything good about the choice, the thing to weigh it against. Helius is not a stranger to us, and not in one way but three. Our servers reach Solana through Helius's RPC. Your browser reaches Solana through a Cloudflare Worker we run that holds a Helius key and forwards to Helius. And the record of on-chain events reaches our database through a Helius webhook. Choosing them as the only validator concentrates a fourth dependency in the same company.

What that does not change: your SOL never leaves your wallet's control. Both authorities on the stake account are yours. Helius cannot touch it, and neither can we. If Helius has a bad week, the cost to you is rewards you did not earn, not coins you lost.

With that on the table, the case for the pick. The commission was 0% when we checked, the operator is large enough to still be running next year, and both commission and voting performance are re-read from the chain roughly every ten minutes rather than trusted from our own notes.

Be careful with what 0% means. It is 0% of the inflation staking reward — the network's reward passes through to you without the operator keeping a cut. MEV tips and block rewards are configured separately and are not readable from the chain, so 0% commission does not mean Helius earns nothing from your stake.

The figures we wrote down — about 16.3 million SOL delegated, 0% commission, voting normally — were true on the day they were recorded and change every epoch. Treat them as a dated snapshot; where it matters, the app reads them live.

Identity is pinned by vote account, not by name. Validator display names on Solana are self-declared strings written by the operator about itself, and nothing stops an impersonator publishing the name Helius. A vote account address cannot be forged, so that is what is fixed in our code, and the name you see in the app is our own label rather than anything read from the chain.

We should not overstate what choosing this operator involves. We do not audit them, we do not monitor them continuously, and we guarantee nothing about them. Size is a proxy for being an established going concern rather than a hobby node that might stop voting; it is not a proxy for virtue, and concentrating stake in large operators carries its own cost to the network.

There is no validator picker — the screen names the one validator it delegates to. If that validator goes delinquent or drops out of the active set, the app says staking is temporarily unavailable rather than quietly sending your stake somewhere else. Because you hold the stake authority yourself, you are free to delegate to any validator you like using a Solana wallet outside CoFunders.

What this is not

It is not a savings account, and no deposit-guarantee scheme stands behind it. Your money is at risk in a way money in a bank is not.

It is not a way to earn on a stablecoin balance. The amount you type is converted to SOL and staked as SOL, and you carry the SOL price from that moment.

It is not automatic. Every transaction needs your signature on your own device.

It is not one tap to get out. Deactivate, wait for an epoch boundary, then withdraw.

It is not a fixed rate. Anyone offering a fixed return on top of a floating protocol reward is keeping the difference, and that spread is the model behind several of the crypto lending platforms that failed in 2022. We are not going to run it.

And it does not fund anything on CoFunders. Staked SOL secures the Solana network. Backing a project is a different action, with different money.

Common questions