How does Nova Wallet get to 8.78% APY for Polkadot staking when both my calculations and @Leemo show the actual yield is below 3%?
Am I staking the wrong DOT, or is the advertised APY just a work of fiction?
I’d appreciate an explanation of how that 8.78% is calculated.
See here:
Looks like you have everything under control. 
Do you know how to create a referendum to chill/remove bad actors from the active validator set? It seems that W3F or Parity are not willing to take action on this.
I imagine it’s something like this, but I haven’t really checked.
Fill this with a list of validators, where the “signed” bit is the validator accounts.
Then do this:
Then, probably this with the preimage hash:
Probably requires Root, might work on staking admin, but not sure.
I’d imagine you can ask some AI coding tool or something 
Thanks. However, my understanding is that simply chilling a validator isn’t a permanent solution.
If a validator still has enough backing (self-stake + nominations), then chilling them only removes them temporarily, they can simply become active again once they choose to resume validating.
As far as I understand, the only way to prevent this permanently would be through a runtime change that allows governance to remove or restrict their backing. It also makes me wonder why W3F and Parity don’t seem interested in helping remove validators with a documented history of abusive behavior from the active set.
Is my understanding correct?
One of the reasons is because, as you mention, in a decentralized system like Polkadot, it would be trivial for them to start up a different validator on a different address. Thus chilling or even removing them would have no material impact other than inconveniencing them for a few days while they move DOT around.
In addition, the community may not be in favor of this, since under the “code is law” interpretation, they were simply following the rules of the chain, even if it is misleading. It can be seen as setting a bad precedent to initiate a governance measure like this, although of course any community member can do it through governance.
The actual mechanism for the community to remove validators it sees as bad actors, under the current system, is to stop nominating them.
With all the resources available to W3F and the engineering talent at Parity, if there were genuine willingness to remove these bad actors, it would have been done by now.
We’re not talking about honest mistakes. These validators deliberately acted against the interests of nominators through commission flipping, and in some cases by operating multiple identities to maximize their gains.
The runtime already includes staking.kick, which allows a validator to remove nominators from its own validator. So the concept of forcibly removing nominations already exists.
If staking.kick only works for a signed validator account and not for Root, then add a Root-only equivalent through a runtime upgrade -something like force_remove_nominations, force_chill_validator, or force_ban_validator- so governance can act when there is clear evidence of abuse.
The technical challenges are solvable. The real question is whether W3F and Parity actually want to protect nominators and clean up the active set. From the outside, it doesn’t look like you do.
The incentives for nominators to care were already weak, and DAP was the last nail in the coffin that permanently degraded Polkadot’s security.
The network already had to tolerate bad / malicious validators who took advantage of nominators who weren’t paying attentions. Post-DAP, they can now even collaborate with nominators to act against Polkadot as a whole, as nominators don’t need to worry about being slashed.
Governance can only do so much until blocks cannot even be finalized. So it unfortunately won’t help much here.
We’ll see in the coming months / years if our model holds. Bad / malicious validators aren’t being voted out by nominators is only one of the initial signs. We think there will actually be a particularly visible economical arrangement that will gradually become apparent in Polkadot’s validator community. Then we can know, with better certainty, whether the actual security level of Polkadot is really reduced to just 2M DOT. BonkDAO incident unfortunately means that a realistic attack will then be possible / likely.
