# Stake Pool

The Parrot Stake Pool is a deployment of the official Solana Stake Pool (opens new window) implementation. You can use the Parrot stake pool UI (opens new window) to stake SOL, and mint stake pool tokens.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of staking and unstaking with a stake pool. In a nutshell:

You deposit SOL into the Parrot Stake Pool to receive prtSOL immediately
The stake pool manager will be responsible for delegating the deposited SOL to validators
You may withdraw from the stake pool at any time. Typically, you will end up with an activated stake account
Undelegate from the activated account, and wait for the next epoch to get your SOL back
You will receive the original amount of SOL plus the block rewards that have accrued

# Why Stake Pool?

The stake pool is an important new primitive for the Solana ecosystem because it solves a few important problems:

It is difficult for a user to decide which validator to stake with. Which validators are stable? Which validators can help increase the security factor of the network?
Once a staker has chosen a validator, the staked amount is too "sticky", as there is no incentive to balance the stake across more validators.
A user faces the dilemma of whether to stake SOL or to use SOL. Using SOL in DeFi means missing out on about 6~7% of annual yield from block rewards.

The stake pool solves the first two problem because it is able to aggregate the stakes of many users and delegate their SOL to multiple validators in ways that helps to improve the security of the Solana network. For a pool staker, it is "stake and forget", as the pool would also be responsible for rebalancing the stake amounts to validators as needed.

More importantly, the stake pool issues a "stake pool token" to represent your stake in the pool.

# Deposit SOL

You can deposit SOL into the Parrot Stake Pool to receive prtSOL immediately.

Click on "Deposit to pool":

Enter the amount of SOL you want to deposit:

prtSOL will increase in value as block rewards accrue in the stake pool. Therefore, as time passes you will receive slightly less prtSOL for the same amount of SOL that you deposit. When redeeming prtSOL for SOL, you will get your deposited SOL back plus the block rewards that have accrued.

Note: There are no fees for depositing, but there is a 0.1% withdrawl fee. 0.1% is roughly equal to 1 epoch worth of rewards, or about 3 days. The withdrawal fee protects the pool from users that stake SOL and immediately withdraw the SOL from the pool into an activated stake account.

# Deposit Staked SOL

Another way to join the pool is to use the SOL you've already staked with another validator. You can join a stake pool with an activated stake account and immediately receive prtSOL. Right now the Top 30 validators are supported.

Note: your stake account needs to be activated, and then wait for at 1 additional epoch before it could join the pool. This is a technical quirk that will be fixed in an upcoming Solana release PR #18985 (opens new window).

Under "Staking Accounts", activated stake accounts that are supported would have the "Transfer to pool" button enabled:

# Withdraw SOL

You can redeem SOL from a stake pool token (i.e. prtSOL) at anytime.

First, select the stake pool that you want to exit from and click "Withdraw":

Enter the amount of prtSOL you want to redeem back to SOL:

After redemption, you don't get the SOL yet. Instead, you get a "stake account". Here, you can see that there is the 1 SOL from the redemption, plus 0.0012 paying for the rent of the stake account:

The stake account is what you'd have if you staked SOL directly with a validator, instead of through a stake pool. You'll need to undelegate to get the staked SOL back.

# Undelegate SOL

You can manage your stake accounts from Phantom, Solflare, or Steaking.io. To withdraw your SOL from a staking account, you need to first undelegate your

We recommend usinig Steaking.io because it supports many wallet types.