Field note
Stake accounts and vote accounts, side by side
The shelf above the oak desk holds two folders of different colors. Tan is the stake account. Slate is the vote account. We keep a third card, unfiled, for the identity key, because it belongs to the operator’s hot path and not to your delegation.
The tan folder: your stake account
A stake account stores the SOL you have committed to staking, along with two authorities. The stake authority may delegate, deactivate, or split and merge stake. The withdraw authority may withdraw once the stake is inactive and any lockup allows it. They can be the same address. When they differ, a person who holds only the stake authority cannot take the SOL out.
Delegation is a field on this account: the vote address it currently names. Rewards that you earn as a delegator increase the delegated stake. They are not a separate airdrop into your spending wallet. To use them as liquid SOL you deactivate, wait out cooldown, and withdraw.
The slate folder: the validator’s vote account
The vote account is the address you delegate to. It carries the commission, the votes the validator has cast, and the credits those votes have earned. It also names an authorized withdrawer, which is the operator’s business, not yours. You do not become a co-owner of the vote account by delegating.
The identity key is the validator’s hot key for gossip and block production. It can be rotated. It is not the address that should appear in your wallet’s delegate field. When a reader arrives with three strings copied from a status page, we sort them into tan, slate, and the unfiled card before we talk about performance.
A small checklist before you delegate
- Confirm the slate address is a vote account, not an identity and not a person’s spending wallet.
- Read the commission on that vote account the same day.
- See that vote credits are advancing across recent epochs.
- Know which key of yours is the withdraw authority.
- Note the epoch, so you already expect warmup.
The checklist is the last page of the Validator Desk worksheet. The Circle Workshop practices it with sample addresses. Either way, the folders stay on the shelf for the next reader.