How IOST staking works, from node votes to exchange rewards

The short answer

On the IOST mainnet, “staking” means voting. You lock IOST behind a node that wants to produce blocks, each IOST counts as one vote, and voters receive part of the tokens the protocol issues. When you want out, you withdraw your votes and wait 72 hours before the IOST is free again. To do it yourself you need a mainnet account and a wallet that can sign the vote.

The other common routes are custodial. Japanese exchanges have offered IOST staking and lending, and Binance runs a flexible IOST earn product. IOST 3.0 also added a one-off StakeDrop on BNB Chain in 2025. Each route pays in IOST, so your result in yen, won or dollars depends heavily on the price. Nobody publishes a reliable live APR for node voting.

The calculator in the header uses an assumed 5% APR purely as an illustration. It is not a quoted rate, real rates move, and some products pay far less or far more for short periods. Change the slider to see how the numbers shift, and treat the output as a rough sketch, not a promise.

Node voting on the IOST mainnet

IOST’s consensus is called Proof of Believability. In practice it works much like delegated proof of stake: token holders vote, and the nodes with enough votes join the set that produces blocks. The live chain runs with 17 block producers, re-elected every 10 minutes from a much larger pool of registered candidates. Our technology page explains the original design and how it compares with what actually runs.

The docs describe three node types. A candidate is any node that has registered. A partner node has passed the vote threshold but does not produce blocks. A Servi node produces blocks. To move from candidate to partner or Servi, a node needs more than 2.1 million votes and an audit. Each account can bind at most one Servi node, and node operators can vote for themselves.

As a voter, you can split your IOST across several nodes. One detail trips people up: IOST pledged for gas and IOST spent on RAM carry no voting power. Only free balance that you actually vote counts. So if you have 5,000 IOST and 10 of it is pledged for gas, you can vote up to the remaining amount.

Over the years, exchanges and staking firms have run IOST partner nodes. Project press releases name Binance Staking, Huobi Wallet, Moonstake, Everstake, Japan’s HashHub and Stir, BITPOINT, HashKey DX and CoinTrade’s node among others. Some of those relationships are years old, so check iostscan.com for the current producer list before choosing where to vote. A self-custody wallet is required; see our IOST wallet guide for options that support mainnet accounts.

Where staking rewards come from

Rewards are newly issued IOST, not fees paid by users. The original mainnet design issues 2% per year. Half of that, 1%, goes to block rewards paid only to Servi nodes, which the docs put at about 3.3 IOST per block. The other 1% funds vote rewards: half of it goes to partner and Servi nodes in proportion to their votes, and half goes to the voters of those nodes, pro rata.

Rewards accumulate every 172,800 blocks, roughly once a day, and they do not arrive on their own. You claim them with the voter withdraw action, and the docs say unclaimed rewards never expire. Anyone can also top up a node’s or a voter pool. That is how some nodes “share” extra rewards with their voters, and it is one reason effective yields differ from node to node.

There is a catch in the numbers. The IOST 3.0 documentation describes block rewards on an “annual halving” schedule, which contradicts the 2% per year in the mainnet docs. The live supply has also grown faster than 2% a year would explain. We cannot tell you which description is current. Our tokenomics page lays out the supply figures and where they disagree.

Rewards are paid in IOST

Every staking route on this page pays you more IOST, not yen or dollars. If the price falls faster than your rewards grow, you end up with more coins worth less. Run the numbers in IOST first, then in your currency.

What APR to expect

There is no official live APR for IOST voting, and we did not find a dependable public tracker. The useful reference points are the rates exchanges have published. OKJ’s staking help page used an estimated annual rate of 8.88% in its 2022 worked example. BITPOINT launched IOST staking in December 2024 with an expected rate of up to 12.5%, the highest in Japan at the time.

Then there are campaigns. OKJ ran a 10-day Halloween “Flash Deal” at 31.31% in October 2025, and BitTrade advertised a 100% annual rate on a special IOST lending offer in May 2026. Those were short promotions with caps and conditions. They tell you nothing about what ordinary staking pays, and quoting them as “IOST APR” is misleading.

A worked example, using the header calculator’s assumption: if you vote 50,000 IOST for a year at an assumed 5%, you would end up with roughly 2,560 extra IOST with daily compounding. At 2% it would be closer to 1,000 IOST. Whether that is worth it depends on the price, which you can follow on the live IOST price page, not on the rate alone.

StakeDrop Season 1 on BNB Chain

StakeDrop was part of the IOST 3.0 token plan, separate from mainnet voting. It used BEP-20 IOST on BNB Smart Chain, staked through MetaMask or another BSC wallet, and drew on a pool of 1.4924 billion IOST in total: 852.8 million for Season 1 and 639.6 million for Season 2. The minimum stake was 10,000 IOST.

Terms ran from 90 to 730 days, with multipliers of 1.5× for 90 days, 2× for 180, 3× for 365 and 4.5× for 730, interpolated in between. Anything under 90 days earned nothing. Season 1’s offering period ran from 23 April to 24 May 2025, when stakes became locked. Rewards vest over 48 months from 24 May 2025, and the claim window lasts 90 days after 21 May 2029.

Leaving early is allowed but costly. The multiplier is recalculated on the days you actually stayed, and then a 30% penalty applies to the rewards. Your principal is not cut. The staking contract was audited, and the audit report is linked from the official FAQ. We could not find any dates or status for Season 2, so do not trust a site that claims to be taking Season 2 deposits unless iost.io itself announces it.

Under IOST 3.0, the largest slice of the new 21.32 billion tokens, 60%, is labeled node rewards to be released over 60 months. Beyond StakeDrop, we found no public, permissionless validator staking program for the Layer 2 with a published rate. Our IOST 3.0 guide covers the Layer 2 and the token split in more detail.

Exchange staking and lending in Japan and beyond

Japan has had the most IOST earn products, but the list has shrunk. OKJ (formerly OKCoin Japan) has offered IOST staking since January 2022 and added 15- and 30-day plans that February. Its help page calculates daily rewards as amount times estimated APR divided by 365. OKJ also counted staked IOST toward the IOST 3.0 airdrop and has run campaigns such as a 2 million IOST reward split for stakers over its third anniversary.

Coincheck offers IOST through its 貸暗号資産 lending service, not staking. Coincheck’s lending page advertises rates of up to 5.0% a year across terms of 14 to 365 days, but per-coin rates require a login and we could not check the IOST rate. One detail matters for airdrops: Coincheck’s FAQ excluded IOST that was actually lent out at the IOST 3.0 snapshot. BitTrade offers IOST lending as well, including the May 2026 special offer. Read our Coincheck review for its wider fees and safety record.

BITPOINT is the cautionary tale. It launched fee-free IOST staking in December 2024 with the 12.5% expected rate. BITPOINT, now merged into SBI VC Trade, then stopped handling IOST on 5 August 2026, according to the JVCEA’s records. CoinTrade, which let Moppy points be converted into IOST and staked, dropped IOST on 8 July 2026. The four FSA-registered exchanges that still list IOST are Coincheck, OKJ, BitTrade and Binance Japan; our IOST in Japan page covers them.

Outside Japan, Binance Earn lists a flexible IOST product that you can redeem at any time. Its rate varies and the figure shown may include tiered bonuses, so check it in the app. Binance.com is not registered in Japan, so it is not an option for Japanese residents. In South Korea, we found no IOST product on Upbit’s staking service, and Thailand’s Bitkub showed no IOST staking either.

Staking routes compared

The table puts the main routes side by side. “Lock” is how long your IOST is tied up, and the last column is the risk we would think about first.

Want IOST to stake? Start with crypto

CEX.IO, running since 2013, lets you buy crypto or BNB with a card. It does not list IOST and does not serve Japan, so the usual path is crypto to an exchange that lists IOST, then to your own wallet for voting.

Start with crypto

Can you mine IOST?

No. IOST has no proof-of-work mining, so no graphics card, ASIC or phone can mine it. People search for “IOST mining” in many languages, including Thai searches for ขุดเหรียญ iost, but new IOST only comes from protocol issuance to block producers and voters on the mainnet, and on IOST 3.0 from the scheduled token issuance on BNB Chain.

The word “mining” still shows up around IOST for three reasons. In 2020 some DeFi apps on IOST, such as the Pumpkin farm, ran “liquidity mining” rewards. More recently, the IOST Signet ring was marketed with talk of “mining” IOST rewards, which is a purchase-linked reward scheme, not mining. And some old allocation tables label the public token share as “miner, ICO, trader”, a misleading label that still gets copied.

Anything sold as IOST cloud mining, a mining pool or a mining app should be treated as a scam. There is nothing to mine, so the only thing such a service can do is take your deposit. Our IOST safety page covers the wider scam landscape.

Risks of locking IOST

The first risk is price. Rewards of a few percent a year are small compared with IOST’s swings; the token has fallen more than 99% from its January 2018 high. A year of staking can easily be wiped out by a few weeks of price moves, and a lock stops you selling when you want to.

The second is the lock itself. Mainnet unvoting takes 72 hours, which is short, but StakeDrop terms ran up to two years with a 30% reward penalty for early exit. Exchange plans have their own terms, and during the go-iost v4.0.0 upgrade in October 2026 exchanges paused IOST deposits and withdrawals for days. A short exit window only helps if the network and the venue are both working.

The third is custody. On an exchange, the exchange holds your coins, and it can delist the asset, as BITPOINT and CoinTrade did in 2026. Products also interact with airdrops in different ways, so lending at the wrong moment can cost you a distribution. Finally, self-custody shifts the risk to you: one leaked key and the staked balance is gone. Check the official sources, such as the IOST vote docs, before trusting any guide, including this one.