Field note
Warmup and cooldown on a stake account
The stake program uses four words the carrel worksheets print in large type: activating, active, deactivating, and inactive. They describe the same stake account at different moments. They are not four different accounts.
When you delegate, the account enters activating. It becomes active at an epoch boundary, subject to a cluster limit on how much stake may warm up in one epoch. Small delegations often finish on the next boundary. A surge of stake warming up across the cluster can stretch the wait. Until the stake is active it does not add voting weight and it does not earn the inflation reward tied to votes.
Cooldown is the same gate, facing the other way
Deactivate, and the account moves to deactivating. It becomes inactive at a boundary, again subject to the cooldown limit, often described as a fraction of effective stake that may cool in a single epoch. While it is deactivating it can still be the stake that was active for the epoch already underway. People who want the SOL liquid for a transfer the same day are reading a different clock from the one the cluster uses.
Inactive stake can be withdrawn by the withdraw authority, provided any lockup has expired. Withdrawing and deactivating are different instructions. The reading hour that covers “I cannot move my SOL” starts by asking which of those two the wallet is refusing.
What we ask you to copy onto paper
- The current epoch, and the approximate time of the next boundary if a public schedule is available that week.
- Whether the account is activating, active, deactivating, or inactive.
- Any lockup: a unix timestamp or an epoch, and whether a custodian is set.
- Which address is the withdraw authority, written separately from the stake authority.
Those four lines answer most of the anxious visits. They also prevent a common mix-up in which someone sends new SOL into a stake account that is already deactivating and then cannot tell which balance is which.
The library does not time the market for you. We do insist on the epoch boundary as a fact. If your plan needs the funds on a named calendar day, count backward through at least one full cooldown before you deactivate, and add another epoch if the amount is large relative to the cluster’s warmup limit.