Introducing the Polkadot Staking Dashboard: The Easiest Way to Nominate and Stake Your DOT

Staking your DOT just got a whole lot easier with Polkadot’s new staking dashboard. This new interface offers an intuitive, user-friendly alternative to the Polkadot-JS Apps developer tool for DOT holders who want to stake natively on Polkadot.

The Polkadot ecosystem is getting a long overdue upgrade to its staking experience for less-technical DOT holders. The new staking dashboard↗, demonstrated today for the first time at Polkadot Decoded↗, provides a simplified and streamlined interface to give users a more intuitive staking experience. Coupled with the expected launch of nomination pools↗ (currently live on Kusama only), the new dashboard eliminates the need for newer and less-technical DOT holders to stake via third-party staking service providers.

The dashboard is now available for the community to try out in beta, with several features to continue improving the staking experience planned for future updates.

Polkadot uses a variant of proof of stake called Nominated Proof-of-Stake, or NPoS, which enables DOT holders to help secure the network by selecting validators and staking their tokens to receive rewards. In addition to improving the user experience, the new staking dashboard is also designed to encourage more participation with native staking directly on the Relay Chain rather than using third-party applications and custodial services, helping ensure the network remains secure and decentralized.

Polkadot Staking Dashboard Beta

It’s now possible to manage all Polkadot staking functions through the staking dashboard. The interface works by connecting to your existing Polkadot wallet, with support for the Polkadot-JS Extension and Talisman for now, and support for Subwallet coming soon. Additionally, read-only accounts are supported, allowing you to connect any account on a read-only basis to track your staking activity. The dashboard currently has support for Polkadot, Kusama, and Westend networks.

The staking dashboard currently offers the following features and functionality:

• Research, favorite, and nominate your choice of validators
• See your payouts history thanks to an opt-in Subscan API integration
• Support for nomination pools (currently live on Kusama only)
• Handy definitions for staking terminology
• Support for read-only accounts on mobile devices
• Extrinsic-related data fetched directly from RPC node for better decentralization
• Network-wide staking metrics

App walkthrough

Overview

The Overview tab provides information about the state of the network, including the cumulative supply of DOT being staked globally and the number of nominators on the network earning rewards. There’s also information on your staking statistics, such as the amount you have staked vs your free unstaked balance and an overview of your recent staking payouts. The announcements section features recent news on the network’s staking parameters that may affect your staking positions.

Staking

You can view all the relevant information about your staking activities at a glance under the Staking section. The ‘Stake’ tab provides an overview of your current staking setup and lets you start or stop nominating, adjust the DOT amount bonded, choose and adjust your selected validators, and select your payout destination. The ‘Payouts’ tab shows insights on your recent history of staking payouts.

Validators

The ‘Validators’ tab allows you to see an overview of network validators and relevant statistics that could affect your nomination choices. You can sort validators by commission rate and exclude inactive validators, oversubscribed and blocked validators, validators charging 100% commission, and validators without an on-chain identity. Once you’ve identified your favorite validators, you can pin them to save them in the ‘Favorites’ tab for easier reference and selection.

Get started with the Staking Dashboard

Go to the Staking Dashboard↗ to get started. Then, select ‘Connect’ to link an account from the compatible wallet extensions including Talisman and Polkadot-JS. Select ‘Read Only Accounts’ to import any account address directly into the dashboard.

Make sure your controller account and reward destination are set, then you’re ready to set up or modify your staking preferences. If you’re not familiar with any terms along the way, click the (i) to access the Staking Assistant.

Coming soon to the Staking Dashboard

The staking dashboard is a work in progress. There are two milestones active on Github [here↗ and here↗] at the time of writing aimed at getting the codebase production-ready and feature complete — so users can expect changes and improvements across the board.

In addition to improving the existing code, a range of other validator discovery improvements including a search bar, a validator metrics card, fairer nomination generation, and integration of the validator selection algorithm are on the agenda before the initial release. High-priority items like proxy account support and SubWallet extension support are also on the near-term roadmap.

With this first-class staking portal, the community now has an easy, modern, and advanced interface to stake directly on the Polkadot Relay Chain. This should encourage more network participation as users are given an easier way to stake directly (versus through trusted third-party services), and ultimately a more secure network.

User experience will continue to improve beyond the beta, and the dashboard should help to inspire other components that will contribute to a larger library of reusable, generic UX components for the ecosystem and complement the other application-side initiatives that include style guides, validator discovery, metrics, and future Polkadot APIs.

Have any feedback on the beta or suggestions for future functionality? Check out the feedback page↗ and leave your thoughts!

Interested in building on Polkadot or Kusama? Get in touch↗!