First, the denominator problem
Almost every published statistic about Nimiq staking is wrong in the same way. Not because the numbers are made up, but because there are three legitimate validator counts and they differ by more than a factor of two, so a page that quotes a count without saying which one it used has not really told you anything.
Here are all three, from one reading taken on 14 September 2026, in epoch 1344.
| The set | Validators | Total balance | Staker records |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered on chain | 52 | 9,271,046,367 NIM | 2,878 |
| Of those, with no inactivity flag | 40 | 9,101,434,092 NIM | 2,851 |
| In the official validators list | 25 (23 with a record on chain) | 5,598,696,692 NIM | 2,658 |
They are not nested tidily, which is the interesting part:
- 22 of the 40 non-inactive validators appear in the official list. 18 do not, and between them those 18 held 3.50 billion NIM, which is 38.5% of the non-inactive total. A third of the stake sits behind operators who have published nothing about themselves.
- One listed entry carried an inactivity flag on the day we read it. Being on the list is not a statement about current state.
- Two listed entries had no validator record on chain at all. The list is maintained by pull request and an operator who deletes a validator does not automatically disappear from it.
Which denominator you should use depends on the question. For "is this network alive", 52 and 40 are the honest numbers. For "who can I actually choose between", the official list is the practical one, because it is the set with published fees and payout policies, and it is what our validators page renders. For anything about concentration, the non-inactive set is the fair one, and that is the denominator used in the rest of this page unless a heading says otherwise.
Nought validators were retired and nought were jailed on this reading. Twelve of the 52 carried an inactivity flag, which is what happens to a node that stops turning up.
Concentration: where the stake actually sits
Denominator: 9,101,434,092 NIM across the 40 validators with no inactivity flag, 14 September 2026.
| Slice | Stake | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Largest validator | 753,635,135 NIM | 8.3% |
| Top 3 | 2,147,640,386 NIM | 23.6% |
| Top 5 | 3,339,360,597 NIM | 36.7% |
| Top 10 | 5,684,369,819 NIM | 62.5% |
| Top 20 | 8,423,955,737 NIM | 92.6% |
| Bottom 20 | 677,478,354 NIM | 7.4% |
Half the eligible validator set holds under 8% of the stake. The median validator balance was 126,281,323 NIM against a mean of 227,535,852 NIM, and a mean that far above the median is the arithmetic signature of a long tail. The smallest non-inactive validator held exactly 100,000 NIM, which is a bare deposit with nothing delegated to it at all.
Measured over the official list instead, the same picture reads sharper, not softer. Denominator: 5,598,696,692 NIM across the 23 listed validators with a record on chain. The largest held 12.2%, the top 5 held 50.2% and the top 10 held 84.5%. That is not a contradiction of the table above. It is what happens when you measure a smaller set: the published list is 60.4% of all registered stake, and the giants that sit outside it are the reason the wider measure looks flatter.
The shape of the largest validators
The single most surprising thing in this reading is not the concentration figure. It is what the concentrated validators look like from the inside.
The largest validator on the network held 753,635,135 NIM and had exactly one staker. Subtract the 100,000 NIM deposit and that is a single address delegating more than 753 million NIM. It is not in the official validators list, it publishes no fee and no payout policy, and there is nothing improper about any of that: registering a validator is permissionless and publishing your details is optional.
It is also not alone. Four non-inactive validators had one staker or none and held over 100 million NIM each. Together those four held 2,050,652,243 NIM, 22.5% of the non-inactive total, and not one of the four appears in the official list. Read plainly: roughly a fifth of eligible Nimiq stake is single party infrastructure that is not offering a service to anybody.
The contrast with the delegation pools is stark. 13 of the 40 non-inactive validators had 100 or more stakers. Those 13 held 4,757,741,613 NIM, 52.3% of the non-inactive total, and carried 2,570 of the 2,851 staker records. So the majority of the stake and the overwhelming majority of the stakers are two overlapping but quite different populations, and a concentration number that does not separate them is telling you about whales when you probably wanted to know about pools.
Staker records: 2,878, and what that counts
Be precise about the unit, because it is the figure most likely to be quoted back as a user count. A staker record is one address delegating to one validator. An address can back exactly one validator at a time, so anyone splitting a stake across operators holds several records, and the number of individual people behind 2,878 is lower than 2,878 by an amount nobody can measure from chain data.
| Where the records sit | Count |
|---|---|
| All registered validators | 2,878 |
| Validators with no inactivity flag | 2,851 |
| Validators in the official list | 2,658 |
| Validators outside the official list | 220 |
| The single busiest validator | 408 |
92% of all staker records sit on a validator that has published who it is. That is the number we would point at if somebody asked whether the published list matters: measured by stake it covers 60%, but measured by people it covers nearly everyone. Five of the 40 non-inactive validators had one staker or none.
You can see this distribution rather than read it. NimMap draws the delegation graph, every validator and every address staking with one, and the difference between a pool with 408 stakers and a single party validator with one is obvious at a glance.
Fees across the published list
Denominator: the 25 entries in the official validators list, 14 September 2026. Fees exist only here. A fee is a declared, off chain policy, not a protocol field, so a validator outside the list has no published fee to count.
| Declared fee | Entries |
|---|---|
| 0% | 4 |
| 1% | 5 |
| 2% | 1 |
| 2.5% | 1 |
| 3% | 3 |
| 3.33% | 1 |
| 3.9% | 1 |
| 4.9% | 1 |
| 5% | 7 |
| No fee value published | 1 |
So: a band from 0% to 5% with nothing above it, a median of 3% among the 24 that declared a value, and 5% as the single most common choice. One entry published no fee field at all, which is a gap in its declaration rather than a claim of zero.
What a fee does and does not buy you is the whole subject of choosing a Nimiq validator, and the short version bears repeating next to this table: a fee is a share of rewards that exist. A validator that is not elected produces no rewards, and a 0% cut of nothing is nothing. Fee is the easiest column to compare and the least decisive one.
Payout types
Same denominator: the 25 listed entries. Distribution to stakers happens off chain, so the payout type is a declaration about how an operator behaves rather than something the protocol enforces.
| Declared payout type | Entries | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| restake | 19 | Your share is added to your delegated balance, so it compounds in place. |
| direct | 4 | Your share is sent to your address as an ordinary transfer. |
| none | 2 | The operator declares no payout to stakers at all. |
Restaking is the default of the ecosystem by a wide margin. It is worth knowing which one you have chosen, because they look completely different when you go looking for evidence that a stake is working: a restaking validator makes your staker balance grow, while a direct one leaves that balance flat and sends transfers into your wallet. Where Nimiq staking rewards come from follows that chain from the batch reward to your address.
Where we sit in this, for the record
We run one of the 52. On the same reading, ImpactZero held 3,570,199.44 NIM and 5 staker records, which is our own 100,000 NIM deposit plus five delegations. That ranks 34th of the 40 validators with no inactivity flag, and it is 0.039% of all registered stake.
Set against the concentration table, that is a validator with a small fraction of what an average slot costs, and it is not being elected. We publish these figures on a page about concentration precisely because they are the unflattering end of it, and because a measurement page written by a participant is worth less if the participant leaves themselves out of the measurement.
What these numbers cannot tell you
- Not a user count. 2,878 is addresses, not people, and the gap between the two is real and unmeasurable from chain data.
- Not an elected set. Election hands out 512 slots in proportion to stake at every epoch boundary. Nothing here counts slots, so "40 eligible" is not "40 producing blocks".
- Not a fee you will pay. Declared fees come from a published list that operators maintain themselves. We have counted the declarations, not audited the behaviour.
- Not identity. A validator with one staker and 753 million NIM might be an exchange, a treasury, a foundation or one person. The chain does not say and neither will we.
- Not a rate, and not a price. There are no yield figures and no price figures anywhere on this site, deliberately.
- One reading, on one day. Everything above is 14 September 2026. Staker counts drift slowly, balances drift faster, and the validator set can change at any election block.
Take your own reading
Nothing on this page needed private access, and the whole thing is reproducible in about a minute. The validator records, balances, staker counts and state flags come from one public endpoint, and the fees and payout types come from the public repository behind the official validators list. Both are linked in the sources below.
If you would rather read it live than re-run it, our validators page renders the listed set from the same data with fees, payout types and trust scores, the block explorer shows the chain moving underneath all of it, and is Nimiq still active is the companion page that measures the network rather than the staking set. The rest of our guides are on the Learn hub.
Nothing on this page is financial advice.