[NPoS] Staking: Users can delegate their fund to a target which can nominate on their behalf.

[Ank4n]

This is first part of enabling funds of nomination pool delegators to be reusable for governance.

A delegator account should be able to delegate their funds to a delegatee account. The delegatee account can nominate validators using the funds of the delegator account. The funds of delegator should be locked in-place in delegator's account. Staking pallet will need to build a delegation ledger that will bookkeep the delegations. As first iteration, we should allow delegations only for direct nominations .

The slashes should be applied lazily. As long as more funds are staked than pending slashes, staking pallet should be happy. But it should not allow more funds to be withdrawn than pending slashes. Effectively, the balance of a delegated nominator is delegated_balance - pending_slashes. This value should always be zero or greater.

Nomination pool will use the above primitive to allow users to delegate their funds to the pool. The pool account would be the direct nominator. The pool is also responsible for managing rewards and slashes if applicable.

In future, the same primitives can be used to build different implementations/strategies around slashing and rewards for a pool.

Some more details on the approach
https://hackmd.io/JXvBdTcHTZmwpEZzNst8mA?edit

[bkchr]

A user should be able to delegate their funds to another account which can nominate validators on behalf of the user. The fund of user should be locked in-place in user's account.

This could be done by just having a proxy for nominate or not?

[Ank4n]

A user should be able to delegate their funds to another account which can nominate validators on behalf of the user. The fund of user should be locked in-place in user's account.

This could be done by just having a proxy for nominate or not?

Proxy is different from delegation (I will modify the description to clarify this). Proxy allows another account to do some action as if its done by the proxied account, where as in delegation, the account to which funds are delegated to, would act as the main nominator, and its active staking balance would be the aggregate of all the delegation funds it has received.

[bkchr]

where as in delegation, the account to which funds are delegated to, would act as the main nominator, and its active staking balance would be the aggregate of all the delegation funds it has received.

But isn't this nomination pools?

[Ank4n]

where as in delegation, the account to which funds are delegated to, would act as the main nominator, and its active staking balance would be the aggregate of all the delegation funds it has received.

But isn't this nomination pools?

The way nomination pool works today, it 1) moves the fund from delegator to pool account, and 2) stakes.
After this change, we will refactor nomination pool to instead: 1) delegate fund from delegator to pool account, and 2) stake.

The difference being, that the funds will be locked in-place in user's account enabling them to participate in governance voting.

Nomination pool would still do all the heavy lifting around pool administration, reward distribution, lazy slashing.

[bkchr]

Okay, thank you for the explanation @Ank4n :)

[Polkadot-Forum]

This issue has been mentioned on Polkadot Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.polkadot.network/t/opengov-improvements-on-the-technical-level/6578/3

[Ank4n]

complete with #3905