Atomic Blockchain Staking was announced at NumerCon 2026. It is a new staking system that will replace the current system. Now I have details and want to answer many of the questions that have been asked recently.
Why change the system?
The current system is the second iteration on staking and it forced us to move off-chain. Both v1 and v2 made tradeoffs, so we wanted to design v3 to incorporate everything learned from the past. Here’s a basic overview of the pros and cons across each version:
Staking v1
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Pros: Users atomically stake per round and each round is an independent stake, so stake is returned to your wallet immediately when a round resolves.
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Cons: Manual staking was cumbersome and posed a high barrier to entry for new players.
Staking v2
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Pros: Users can “set and forget” their stake which can automatically compound without manual input each round, vastly simplifying the UX to start staking.
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Cons: Users must lock up a large amount of stake for a single round, this causes leverage due to overlapping rounds, forcing us to set a small clip and stake decrease is cumbersome.
Staking v3 (Atomic Blockchain Staking)
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Pros: Users can manually stake OR automate their stake. Stake is locked up atomically each round, can be claimed when a round resolves, and there is no more leverage or clipping.
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Cons: Blockchain is moderately more complex and expensive to use.
As you can see, we’ve designed Atomic Blockchain Staking to have maximal benefits with minimal drawbacks. Let’s dive into the new contracts.
The Staking Contract
Each tournament will be assigned a new stake contract instantiation. This contract:
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Maintains a ledger of rounds created by Numerai
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Tracks each model’s stake for each round and an associated submission hash
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Numerai generates a Merkle tree from payout results and posts the Merkle root
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You can claim resolved stakes net payouts or burns based
How do I stake on a submission?
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Each day, Numerai creates an on-chain round with the necessary metadata (such as open/close/resolve times and stake threshold).
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After you upload a submission, you can request a “stake authorization” from our API. A stake authorization is a signed hash of your submission information that can be verified by the staking contract. This ensures that you submitted to the round on which you want to stake.
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You send this stake authorization to the staking contract, locking up NMR in the round.
How do I claim my resolved stake?
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When a round resolves, Numerai generates “stake claims” based on the final payout values and posts these to our API.
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Numerai generates a Merkle tree using the stake claims and posts this to the staking contract so it can verify payouts and burns.
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You can query your stake claims from the API and use the claim hash to retrieve your stake (net payouts or burns) from the staking contract.
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Optionally, you can immediately restake claimed NMR into a currently open round using a specialized function to handle a claim + stake operation.
As you can see, this process is very involved and very manual. This is nice for power users that want hyper-granular control over each model’s stake round-to-round, but we also need an automation layer.
Allocation Strategies
We wrote an “Allocation Strategy” contract that automates the staking and claiming flows for you. This contract is designed to support the 2 current staking strategies: compound and constant (aka “take-profit”). When you set up your stake automation, you decide the mode (constant or compound) and the per-round stake for each model, then you grant “operator” privileges to Numerai’s hotwallet. This allows Numerai to trigger your staking automation each round.
How do I manage an allocation strategy?
You can instantiate your own stake strategies on-chain manually, but we will release a new web3-native stakes page that will allow you to edit your new allocation strategy. Instead of a separate popup for each model, you’ll be able to edit multiple models at once and batch-update your stake strategies.
How does this automate my staking?
Numerai “operates” the allocation strategy on your behalf by doing the following:
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Numerai queries submission hashes for the current round.
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Numerai queries resolved, but unclaimed stakes for your models.
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Numerai submits claim + stake transactions across your staked, submitted models.
As you can see from the above steps, you’re not required to actually interact with the blockchain. Numerai operates your staking for you by simply calling the allocation strategy you defined.
The Migration
Migrating from the current continuous staking protocol to the new Atomic Blockchain Staking protocol is complicated. So let’s break down what that will look like:
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The legacy off-chain staking system will be no longer accessible. We will be turning off the ability to interact with continuous staking. You will no longer be able to increase or decrease your stake through the normal website page / APIs. Instead, we will replace the staking UI with a new web3-native staking page that can create and control an allocation strategy through a non-custodial wallet solution backed by Privy.
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Your Numerai Wallet will still be accessible, but will no longer be used for staking. You can still access your Numerai wallet page, but links to it will be removed and your wallet address will be hidden to prevent new users from accidentally sending to the old wallet. You can still send from your wallet, but the available NMR in the wallet will no longer be used for staking.
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Your stake will begin migrating from your Numerai Wallet to the new stake contracts. The current system keeps your staked NMR in your wallet and simply uses off-chain accounting to earmark that NMR as staked and unavailable. The new system will need to actually lock up that NMR on the blockchain, so we will execute on-chain transactions to move that NMR from your Numerai wallet into the new staking contracts.
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New rounds will now lock up a smaller portion of stake. When an old “continuous staking” round resolves, we transfer 1/24th of your staked NMR into the new stake contract and lock that up. This is because there are 24 possible overlapping rounds and your current stake must cover all 24 new rounds, only the small fraction of your NMR that needs to be locked up will be transferred each round.
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You don’t need to do anything during the migration. We will handle provisioning your wallets and allocation strategies. We will also handle the migration of your staked NMR from your Numerai Wallet into your allocation strategy.
As a final step, we must transfer ownership for your allocation strategy to your non-custodial wallet. Next time you want to log in and edit your stakes, you’ll just need to confirm your ownership. Once this is done, you’ve taken control of your stake and NMR and Numerai will no longer have full control of your NMR.
FAQ
Does lower leverage mean lower payouts?
Yes and no. Staking leverage is generated from having a continuous stake with overlapping rounds. In Numerai and Crypto, there are 24 overlapping rounds, but the 5% clip reduces effective leverage to just 1.2x. In addition, Numerai and Crypto have low payout factors, which reduces maximal payouts / burns to something closer to 1-2% per round. This almost never hits the clip value and thus experienced leverage is actually lower than 1, so there is a lot of head room to actually increase payouts when we transition staking systems.
For Signals, the there are 64 overlapping rounds with a 3.5% clip. This nearly doubles the effective leverage to 2.24x. Signals also has a higher payout factor which brings maximal payouts / burns closer to 7% - this hits the clip value far more often, meaning Signals actually does experience this higher leverage. When we transition to the new staking system, there is no leverage. This means maximal payouts and burns will be reduced to 100% per round.
Can I bring my own wallet?
Yes. These contracts are deployed on the blockchain, so anyone will be allowed to interact with them in a de-centralized way. You can manage your own stake directly or instantiate your own allocation strategy. At this time, Numerai will roll out the new staking system using the non-custodial wallet solution to aid in the migration. Once we’ve completely transitioned, we will be able to build in support for other wallet solutions - such as Meta Mask - to be used directly on our website.