Signer Onboarding

The Stacking DAO protocol delegates stake to onboarded signers in the ecosystem (see Signer Delegations & Analytics). Running a signer on the Stacks network is permissionless. Anyone can run the software and participate in signing. The onboarding process for a new signer on Stacking DAO, however, is permissioned in order to prevent malicious actors.

To onboard as a signer, you may get in touch by filling out this contact form or through X (@StackingDAO or @philiphacks).

The steps to onboard are as follows:

1

Intro call and SLA

After a short intro call with the Stacking DAO team, we formalise the agreement with a simple SLA, which has details on required uptime and rewards processing.

2

We deploy your on-chain contracts

Under the current PoX-5 architecture you no longer run a separate delegation pool, and you are no longer set as a "pool owner." Instead, Stacking DAO deploys two contracts dedicated to you:

• a signer-manager — the contract that PoX-5 recognises as your signer, and

• a staker — which pulls STX from the Stacking DAO reserve and stacks it behind your signer-manager.

Stacking DAO deploys and controls these contracts; you do not deploy or manage anything on-chain.

3

One-time signer-key grant (the only signature we need from you)

To authorise Stacking DAO's signer-manager to use your signer key, you provide a single signer-key grant — one SIP-018 signature, produced with the same key you sign Stacks blocks with, over your signer-manager's identity. You generate it once (through our UI or a script of your own) and send us the resulting output, which contains four values:

• signerKey - your public signer key (33 bytes)

• signerManager - the signer-manager contract we deployed for you (e.g. SP4SZE494VC2YC5JYG7AYFQ44F5Q4PYV7DVMDPBG.signer-manager-<you>-v1)

• authId - the auth-id used when signing

• signerSignature - the signature (65 bytes)

We submit this once, on-chain, via register-self on your signer-manager, which records the grant in PoX-5. That is the entire on-chain interaction required from your side.

Unlike the previous model, there is no per-cycle signature. Once the grant is in place it is permanent, and Stacking DAO can stack through your signer every PoX cycle with no further action from you.

4

Ongoing delegation and rewards

Each PoX cycle, based on the net inflow the protocol sees and a queuing system, Stacking DAO allocates stake to your signer and aggregate-commits it into PoX. Your signer signs blocks as normal. Bitcoin rewards accrue to the Stacking DAO reward address, and your agreed commission is paid out to you.