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How to vote for delegates?

Voting in Lisk

Voting on Lisk means to actively participate in the consensus by delegating your stake to a Delegate. When voting, you should make sure that you trust the delegate you want to vote for. You shouldn't base your decisions solely on percentages, but also how trustworthy the delegate is and what contributions it makes to advancing the Lisk ecosystem (which can indirectly increase token value).
Read more here 👈

📄 Glossary

Active delegate

An active delegate can mostly be considered as a forging delegate, who is able to forge new blocks for the Lisk blockchain.

Standby delegate

Delegate inactive for a given round. They may be selected to forge a block with a probability proportional to their voting weight.

Vote weight

The amount of votes cast for a delegate by voters

Self-vote

A vote cast for oneself by a delegate required by protocol.

📢 Key informations

  • The number of active delegates is 101, and 2 slots are randomly allocated to 2 standby delegate - total of 103 forging delegates per turn.
  • You can vote for up to 10 delegates. Your total vote weight will be divided among the selected delegates.
    (You can individually adjust the vote weight of each delegate).

Example: You own 1000 LSK, you can:

  • vote for 10 delegates with 100LSK each
  • vote for 5 delegates with 200LSK each
  • vote for 2 delegates for 400LSK + one for 200LSK

  • You can only vote in multiples of 10 LSK.
  • You cannot vote with your entire balance, you must have at least 0.05 LSK left in your account.
  • When you vote, your tokens are locked. You can unvote (or reduce the vote weight) a delegate at any time, but you must wait 2000 blocks, or about 5 hours and 40 minutes, then unlock, before you can access your tokens.
  • The delegate vote weight is capped by 10x of self-vote. The self-vote unblocking period is 30 days.

Delegate Penalties

When a delegate is penalized for misbehaving (PoM), then they will not be able to mine blocks for ~90 days, while the voter tokens are blocked for ~30 days.

📝 How to vote for delegate

Lisk Desktop Version

First, make sure you are using the latest version of Lisk Desktop (min. 2.0).

  1. Select the delegate you wish to vote for via the Search option.
  2. In the delegate's profile, click Add to votes.
  3. Then in Vote Amount enter how much of your tokens you want to allocate to vote for that delegate and confirm with Confirm.
  4. Your vote has been added to the queue, if you want to vote for another delegate repeat steps 1 to 3.

  5. Now you can go to the voting queue, the icon is in the upper left corner and should have a green circle on it.

    • The voting queue there is a list of delegates you wish to vote for (or change/delete votes).
    • In this section you can edit the New vote amount or completely remove the desire to vote for a particular delegate.
    • Once you have finished editing (if needed), click Continue.

  6. The vote queue summary window will appear, if everything is correct, click Confirm.

👏 A new Vote transaction should appear in your wallet's transaction list.

add vote

Voting Queue

In the voting queue, you can add/edit/delete votes in one transaction with different delegates.
You can even unvote 10 delegates and vote for 10 new delegates as long as you have free tokens per vote.

You can't swap votes from a delegate to another delegate - you have to unvote, wait 6 hours, unlock tokens and only then you can vote a given number of tokens

voting queue

📝 How to change a vote

  1. In the Wallet tab, in table Votes you will find a list of delegates and the number of tokens we have allocated to vote for that delegate (Vote amount). When you hover over a delegate, you will see an edit icon on the right side.

    Info

    We can also start changing the vote on the delegate's profile by clicking Edit Vote.

  2. Then in Vote Amount you enter how much of your tokens you want to allocate to vote for that delegate including the previous vote!

    Example: You vote 500 LSK for a specific delegate

    • If you want to add 300 LSK - type in Vote amount 800 LSK
    • If you want to take away 100 LSK - type in Vote amount 400 LSK

  3. Confirm change by Confirm button

  4. Then follow the same procedure as in the voting by going to the voting queue. Section 5 - "How to vote for a delegate"

bote change

📝 How to unvote a delegate

Same as when changing the vote 👆, but when editing the vote click Remove vote - automatically a given delegate will appear in the voting queue with New vote amount equal to 0 (in short all votes will be removed).

Info

Remember that tokens will not automatically return to your account, you have to unlock them with a transaction, about what below. 👇

usuniecie glosow

🔓 How to unlock tokens

Approximately 6 hours ⌛ after unvote transaction, it is possible to unlock your tokens.

  1. Go to the Wallet tab and then click on 🔒 in the Balance field.
  2. Confirm with Unlock LSK button and then Confirm.

The tokens will go to the wallet as soon as the Unlock transaction is confirmed in the block.

unlock

🛠 Tools to help you vote

  1. Lisk.vote - list of delegates and how much of a percentage of the rewards they pay out
  2. Lisk rewards - this tool tells you how many rewards you should be getting and how many you're currently getting
  3. Lisk voting - a calculator that shows which delegates you should vote for the best return on your vote

Remember to vote for reliable and verified delegates!

Tip

Despite your research, you still don't know who to vote for?
Join Lisk Discord and find out more on the #delegates-chat channel.

Video guides

📹 Lisk Voting Process