How I'd pick a ethereum:0x85f17cf997934a597031b2e18a9ab6ebd4b9f6a4 validator - back in Cosmos, competing for delegations was a second job. Uptime reports, governance votes, answering questions on X. I ran a few myself. Your delegation was the validator’s commission and its voting power, so they came looking for it. @NEARProtocol is quieter, but your choice still matters. Today there are about 410 active validators, 595M ethereum:0x85f17cf997934a597031b2e18a9ab6ebd4b9f6a4 staked, and the nine largest pools hold a third of it. NearBlocks itself tells you to delegate below them. What I’d look at, in order (and not too different from ATOM staking days) 1. Performance. Most validators here endorse chunks rather than produce blocks. Check that they’re doing it, and whether they’ve been kicked out of the active set. Kicked means no rewards that epoch. A cheap validator that isn’t earning isn’t cheap. And there’s no slashing on NEAR today, so a bad pick costs you rewards, not coins. 2. Commission. It comes out of your rewards, not your principal. The big pools run 1% to 15%. A few charge 100%: you get no staking rewards from those. 3. Size. A capable smaller operator over adding more stake to someone already dominant. Check the operator, not just the pool’s rank. 4. A person or a company you can find outside the explorer. Familiar Cosmos names are here: @everstake_pool @polka_chu ,and others. Independents too. @vinibarbosabr runs thecoding.pool.near and answers questions. Just sharing who I'd look up - no endorsements. How to stake ethereum:0x85f17cf997934a597031b2e18a9ab6ebd4b9f6a4 : ▫️@MeteorWallet -> Staking -> Standard Staking -> pick a pool. ▫️Fees, stake and status are on nearblocks.io/validators; near-staking.com shows performance. ▫️Check the exact pool address. ▫️Rewards: Start in the following epoch, roughly 7–8 hours. ▫️Unstaking: Four epochs, approximately 30 hours, though the actual wait can vary. On NEAR, a staking pool is usually the smart contract accepting delegations for one validator. It's not a group of validators. Liquid-staking providers like Meta Pool are different: they spread deposits across multiple validators. One thing Cosmos _conditioned_ delegators to expect that isn’t here: delegating doesn’t give you a House of Stake vote. That’s a separate lock. Your stake still helps decide who secures the chain. NEAR has 100 block producers, and their adoption of upgrades is weighted by stake: last year’s inflation cut activated once validators holding 80% of block-producing stake ran it. Who you delegate to matters beyond the yield. I asked @vinibarbosabr where his pool’s stake comes from. Individual holders, the liquid-staking providers (stNEAR, LiNEAR, rNEAR), and a 40,000 NEAR @meta_pool cohort delegation that ends next month. He also confirmed there’s no slashing live today. the cohort and LST stake isn’t as sticky as a person who picked you. Validators still have to earn individual delegations by being useful to delegators. So the Cosmos-style courting isn’t gone, it just moved to the bottom of the set. Seat price is about 9,500 NEAR, and a new validator like @skyempire90 skynode.pool.near is out there asking for every delegation to get in. 🫡