Delegate Transaction

The Delegate transaction deposits ANM principal into an operator’s pool — the delegator-facing half of pooled staking. It mints principal shares for the delegator at the pool’s current loss-adjusted share price and checkpoints the position’s reward accounting, so a new delegator inherits neither past losses nor past rewards. The pool must already be registered by an operator (a pool-registration Bond).

The Payload Type for Delegate is 9.

Payload Structure

• Delegator address is the account that owns the new position; it is the transaction signer.
• Validator address is the pool to deposit into.
• Amount is the ANM principal to deposit. A new position must deposit at least the minimum delegation (100 ANM); a top-up of an existing position has no lower bound.

Behaviour

• The deposited principal becomes part of the validator’s stake and earns rewards. It is slashable: losses are socialised pro-rata across the operator and all delegators.
• Rewards accrue separately into a slash-immune reward escrow and are withdrawn with a Claim Reward transaction; principal is released with an Undelegate followed by a Withdraw.
• A deposit that would push the pool above its maximum stake is rejected (pool full).
• Because committee power is live, a Delegate against a pool whose validator is currently in the committee (or joining at the next height) is accepted and escrowed: your principal is locked immediately and held in a pending-delegation record, but the shares are minted and the stake grows only once that validator rotates out of the committee. If the pool no longer exists by then, the escrowed deposit is refunded. (Your funds are committed right away — this is not a deferred mempool tx.)