Commission Rate (Validator)

A validator's commission rate is the percentage of staking rewards it keeps for itself, out of the total rewards earned on behalf of the delegators (see Kaavon's "Delegation (Staking)" glossary definition) who've staked their tokens with that validator, before distributing the remaining share back to those delegators proportional to their stake. The commission compensates the validator operator for running and maintaining the infrastructure and taking on operational and slashing risk.

A lower commission rate generally means more of the gross staking reward flows through to delegators, making an otherwise comparable validator more attractive, but commission rate alone doesn't capture everything relevant to choosing a validator — factors like uptime reliability, slashing history, and infrastructure quality also directly affect a delegator's realized net return, since a validator with a low commission but frequent downtime or slashing incidents can still underperform a slightly higher-commission validator with a stronger operational track record.