Staking types

Compare native, pooled, and liquid staking: what you receive, validator involvement, and how each behaves on exit.

Every staking yield falls into one of three models. The model determines what your address holds after entering, whether a validator choice is involved, and how the position behaves on exit. yield.xyz’s public mechanics.type for these is staking (native and pooled) or liquid_staking; both are also present in GET /v1/yields’s type filter.

Comparison

Model	What you receive	Validator choice	Exit	Balance lifecycle
Native	Nothing transferable: a delegation record against the network	Often required: you pass a validatorAddress or validatorAddresses	Unbonds for the yield’s cooldownPeriod, then becomes withdrawable	active while bonded, exiting during cooldown, withdrawable once unbonded
Pooled	Nothing transferable: funds sit in a vault, a nomination pool, or the provider’s own validator set	You don’t pick validators; some pooled yields take the pool’s address in validatorAddress (Polkadot and Kusama nomination pools, and TON pool yields)	Same lifecycle as native, cooldown length set per pool	active while deposited, exiting during cooldown, withdrawable once unbonded
Liquid staking	A transferable receipt token, for example stETH, mSOL, or rETH	Abstracted behind the protocol	Redeeming through yield.xyz still runs the yield’s cooldownPeriod; the token itself can also be transferred or traded outside yield.xyz	active while held; exiting / withdrawable only if you redeem through yield.xyz

Rewards are either claimed manually (rewardClaiming: manual, a claimable balance appears) or compound automatically into the position or the receipt token’s share price (rewardClaiming: auto). Check mechanics.rewardClaiming on the yield rather than assuming one behavior per model.

Native staking

You delegate directly to a validator. Most native-staking yields set requiresValidatorSelection: true and expect a validatorAddress (single validator) or validatorAddresses (multi-validator) on enter. A minority, such as Ethereum’s dedicated-validator integrations (Figment, P2P, Luganodes, Validation Cloud), assign a validator internally on enter and don’t ask you to choose one.

Pooled staking

The yield still has mechanics.type: staking, but you don’t choose the validators: your deposit is routed through a vault, a nomination pool, or the provider’s own validator set. StakeWise’s ETH vaults (ethereum-eth-*-stakewise-staking), Everstake’s pooled ETH (ethereum-eth-everstake-staking), and Marinade’s SOL “Native Max Yield” product (solana-sol-marinade-native-max-yield-staking) take no validator argument. Polkadot and Kusama pool staking (polkadot-dot-pool-staking, kusama-ksm-pool-staking) and TON’s pool yields (ton-ton-nomination-staking, ton-ton-ton-whales-pools-staking, ton-ton-chorus-one-pools-staking, ton-ton-P2P-pools-staking) take the pool’s identifier in validatorAddress. In every case the position is a plain staked balance rather than a receipt token.

Liquid staking

A liquid-staking yield mints a receipt token (the yield’s outputToken) that represents your staked position and can move independently of yield.xyz, for example Lido’s stETH or Rocket Pool’s rETH. The public mechanics.type and the GET /v1/yields type filter use liquid_staking.

Receipt tokens accrue rewards in one of two ways:

• Rebasing (stETH): the token balance grows as rewards accrue; one token tracks one unit of staked value.
• Exchange rate (rETH, sAVAX, slisBNB, tsTON, mSOL): the token balance stays constant while its value against the underlying asset rises.

Neither model needs manual reward claiming. For exchange-rate tokens, display the underlying value rather than the raw token amount.

This page explains liquid staking as a model. Protocol integrations are documented under Earn › DeFi › Liquid staking. Restaking is a separate yield type; see Earn › DeFi › Restaking.

Chain-specific variants

A few ecosystems split staking into two distinct yields rather than one:

• Polkadot and Kusama each expose validator-staking (you pick specific validators) and pool-staking (you nominate through a shared nomination pool, no direct validator pick) as separate yield IDs.
• TON staking is pooled: nomination pools (ton-ton-nomination-staking) and per-provider pools (TON Whales, Chorus One, P2P.org), alongside Tonstakers’ liquid-staking token, tsTON. TON’s native token was rebranded from TON to GRAM; yield.xyz’s token metadata for these yields uses the symbol GRAM, while the yield ID keeps the ton segment for backward compatibility.
• Bittensor splits into root staking (bittensor-native-staking) and subnet staking (bittensor-subnet-staking). Both take a required subnetId: 0 for root staking, the subnet you delegate into for subnet staking. Both are native delegation, not pooled or liquid.

Next steps

Staking overview

The Stake It flow: discover, inspect, select a validator, enter.

Coverage

Where each model is live, by network.