It’s quite simple to delegate purchased Tezos coins (XTZ). The main steps for delegating Tezos remain the same for most wallets
Let us see an example of each of these steps using Atomex wallet
Go to https://wallet.atomex.me/. Select My Wallets in case you already have an account otherwise click on CREATE NEW WALLET
If you are creating a new wallet then follow the onscreen instructions.
There you go! You have your Tezos wallet.
Press Wallets, select Tezos and press Delegate.
Upon the successful completion of your transaction, you will see the success message as below
Congratulations now you are baking your XTZ!!
After you click “Delegate”, the corresponding operation is sent to the blockchain and your delegation status becomes “Pending”. You can check that everything went well in Tezos explorer.
As you can see, your delegation is not applied immediately right after delegating. You need to wait a while before it’s confirmed. There are three stages of delegation:
This stage lasts 2 cycles = ~ 6 Days
1 cycle = 8192 blocks = 4096 minutes (each block every ~30 seconds) = ~2.8 days
In this stage you’ve successfully delegated, but your rights are not transferred to the baker yet. This delay is required to prevent the network from some forms of abuse. See more details in the Tezos documentation.
This stage lasts 5 cycles = ~ 14 Days
Your delegation is confirmed and the baker received future baking rights (to produce and endorse future blocks). So, now you know that you will definitely participate in Tezos staking in the near future and therefore you can estimate future staking rewards.
Now you are completely in Tezos staking and earning rewards. As you can see, you have to wait ~20 days after delegating to start staking.
All Tezos staking rewards are credited to the baker and not to delegators directly. Moreover, every time baker receives rewards, those rewards are frozen for the next 5 cycles (~14 days), so the baker can’t spend them. Only after ~14 days rewards are unfrozen and the baker can transfer it to someone else.
That’s why you can see that Tezos staking rewards for cycle N usually comes in cycle N + 6 (after ~17 days):
Every time the balance of a delegated account is changed (e.g. you raise additional funds, or withdraw funds, or even receive reward payments) you have to wait the same time as described above (37 or 23 days) until these changes are applied.
