Where to Stake Tezos and How To Choose Baker

Before reading this document please make sure you have checked out Tezos baker metrics overview and understand what each column in the table below means. It’s important to understand that choosing a Tezos baker just by one criterion (e.g. by highest ROI) is not the best decision. You should take into account all the metrics.

A complete list of Tezos public bakers is now available on the TzKT bakers page. “Public” means that you can freely delegate your assets to it. To find other bakers, such as custodies or cryptocurrency exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, etc.) you can switch to the “all bakers” tab.

Search particular Tezos baker

If you want to find information about a particular Tezos baker, enter his tz address into the search box, or simply begin typing his name and you will see all the Tezos bakers whose names contain the entered string.

If you cannot find a Tezos baker, then he is probably a private baker or a new baker and we haven’t listed him yet.

Filter Tezos bakers

As you can see, the number of public Tezos bakers and delegation services is quite large, so to reduce the selection you might have to filter it by some criteria, according to your preferences. You can find the filters button on the right side.

There are four criteria by which you can filter the Tezos bakers:

• Payout amounts means how accurate the payouts are in a quantitative sense. See details…
• Payout period means how the payments fit the declared schedule. See details…
• Service health - Active is what we need, Dead is a working baker who was a public baker but for some reason stopped paying his delegators, Closed is a permanently closed service (we store them for historical purposes only).
• Free Space allows you to specify how much tez you want to delegate so that the bakers whose Free space is less than required are filtered out.

Sort bakers

After filtering the bakers you might want to sort them by various criteria (ascending or descending) to determine who is “on top” in terms of specific criteria. You can find sorting buttons right above the list of bakers.

You can sort bakers by the following criteria:

• Staking balance sorts Tezos bakers by staking balance. See details…
• Free space sorts Tezos bakers by free space (how much XTZ you can delegate them). See details…
• Fee sorts Tezos bakers by fee value. See details…
• Min. delegation will be handy if you delegation a small amount of tezos.
• First payout displays baker’s payout schedule. Regular payout delay is 37days, but some bakers may pay rewards in advance.
• Payout amounts and Payout period shows how responsible the baker is about his duties. See details…

How to choose Tezos baker

Disclaimer: This is our personal opinion. We don’t aim to impose it. There are just some thoughts that might interest someone.

Make sure you meet baker’s requirements

First of all you should check and filter out all bakers whose requirements you do not meet, otherwise you won’t receive staking rewards.

Tezos bakers cannot technically control the number of accepting delegations or their amounts. Any account in Tezos with any balance can be delegated to any registered baker. Often this leads to overdelegation which is definitely not a good thing, so bakers apply strict conditions, trying to control delegations flow.

Minimum delegation requirements

Some bakers have minimum delegation amount requirement. In other words, those delegators who hold the balance less than the minimum required are excluded from rewards distribution and won’t receive anything.

You can sort the table by this criteria in one click on the column header.

Note: Bakers can change their conditions, so we highly recommend everyone always monitor staking rewards. If you do not want to visit the website every three days, try our Telegram bot. The bot will notify you if everything is good or if something is wrong with your Tezos staking rewards.

Compare bakers by criteria

We think there are three primary types of Tezos baker criteria:

1. Promises - this is what a baker promises to his delegators. It’s the fee (and therefore ROI), payment schedule, discounts, etc.
2. Efforts - this is what a baker actually does to make things better (in other words, what a baker has achieved). It’s a contribution, voting activity, payment accuracy and timing, insurance, etc.
3. Luck - this is how lucky a baker is in some criteria which are independent of anything but random factors. It’s staking balance, free space, efficiency (primary criteria on mytezosbaker and tezos-nodes), etc.

Promises

It’s pretty tempting to see a baker with zero fees or with the highest ROI, isn’t it? But does it make any sense if a baker pays inaccurately (less than expected) or even skips payouts? Or stops paying at all…

Of course, it’s quite logical to choose a baker with better conditions, but keep in mind, that it’s just a promise and no one can be sure that the baker will keep his promise (we saw several bakers who promised never to change their fee, but after a while they did it anyway).

Efforts

It’s much better when a baker not just promises something, but also does something. When you support bakers who make contributions to Tezos ecosystem or actively involved in the governance process you help make Tezos better and increase the value of the entire network.

Luck

Criteria such as Tezos node efficiency (or node performance) might be interesting, but most endorsement and block misses happen because of inefficiencies in the p2p layer (propagation delays, etc). No, seriously, what most Tezos bakers do is run a node, configure it just once, and forget about it. All subsequent processes such as steals, misses, accusations, etc, happen without any baker’s participation…

So is it fair to evaluate Tezos bakers by criteria, which they cannot even affect? Of course, there were cases of serious issues with bakers, where they were out of service for a long time, but these cases are so rare, that we can simply ignore them.

Conclusion

In our opinion the right priority is efforts > promises > luck.

Nevertheless, you should make your own decision. It’s always better to make a conscious choice - this is the only way to find your best Tezos baker ;)