Something clearly broke overnight. The active staking minimum reportedly jumped from ~280 DOT to ~10,100 DOT, causing many users with hundreds or even thousands of DOT to suddenly become inactive and stop earning rewards. At the same time, funds remain locked for 28 days due to unbonding rules. Some users also reported that both direct nominations and pools were inactive, which points to a network-level issue rather than user error.
The core problem is not “small vs big holders”. The problem is that rewards can stop overnight without warning, while capital stays locked, and this risk is not clearly disclosed in wallets that prominently advertise APY. Whether this is caused by election mechanics, a low number of elected nominators, or an edge case/bug, the user impact is the same: no warning, no grace period, no exit without penalty.
This may be “by design” and fully on-chain, but it breaks basic risk assumptions for staking and is extremely hostile to retail users. At minimum, wallets should clearly warn that direct DOT staking has no guarantee of continuous rewards and that users can become inactive without notice while still locked for 28 days. Posting this so others are aware before staking, not after learning the hard way.
Polkadot staking incident: active stake minimum jumped ~30× overnight while funds stayed locked
byu/0bran inCryptoCurrency
Posted by 0bran
6 Comments
At least that never happened to me with Atom. The price sinking is already enough. 😂
Havent heard about Polkadot in a while. Total ghost chain and dead coin
Rates displayed in the wallets are estimates and are subject to change without warning. No disclosure is necessary.
Still sucks though, unsure if it’s an issue or a decision to raise min stake to try and lock more liquid tokens up.
It’s clearly an overnight incident. Devs will have it fixed in no time. Posting this as a security alert is overly dramatic. Lol
Who cares it’s DOT
The absurdly convoluted DOT staking mechanism is what led me to bail. It’s just weird how complicated it is compared to others, like the 0 lockup self-custody hold=stake with Algorand.