Sunsetting a Staking Pool

If you are a stake pool owner and want to wind down your validator service, follow these steps to ensure delegators can safely recover their funds.

Step 1: Notify Delegators

Before making any changes, inform your delegators that the pool is shutting down. Give them enough time to unstake and withdraw their tokens. They need to:

Call unstake_all on the pool.
Wait for the 4-epoch unbonding period.
Call withdraw_all to retrieve their tokens.

Share the unstaking and withdrawal commands with your delegators.

Step 2: Pause Staking

Call pause_staking from the pool owner account. This causes the contract to unstake everything (stake 0) and stop restaking, without affecting share balances or reward calculations.

near call <my_validator> pause_staking '{}' --useAccount <owner-account.near> --depositYocto 1 --networkId mainnet

The contract will unstake all tokens at the next epoch boundary. Delegators will still see their shares and can unstake and withdraw normally.

Step 3: Withdraw Owner Balance

Once your own staked tokens are unstaked and the unbonding period has passed, withdraw them:

Staking CLI
Function Call

near staking delegation <owner-account.near> withdraw-all <my_validator> network-config mainnet sign-with-keychain

near call <my_validator> withdraw_all '{}' --useAccount <owner-account.near> --networkId mainnet

Step 4: Resume (Optional)

If you decide to keep the pool running again, you can re-enable staking at any time:

near call <my_validator> resume_staking '{}' --useAccount <owner-account.near> --depositYocto 1 --networkId mainnet

Concepts

Tutorials

Sunsetting a Staking Pool

Step 1: Notify Delegators

Step 2: Pause Staking

Step 3: Withdraw Owner Balance

Step 4: Resume (Optional)

​Step 1: Notify Delegators

​Step 2: Pause Staking

​Step 3: Withdraw Owner Balance

​Step 4: Resume (Optional)

Step 1: Notify Delegators

Step 2: Pause Staking

Step 3: Withdraw Owner Balance

Step 4: Resume (Optional)