Ygthkb

I am wondering if my baker will miss any endorsements ( or blocks ) being 100% delegated.

I have heard that they still must have some free capacity because required deposit may vary from cycle to cycle and at some point it may affect staking bond and/or staking capacity and/or available capacity.

What may happen potentially to those bakers who have negative available capacity? Will it affect their delegators?

It looks like amount required from baker each cycle reminds a saw, and it is not constant. If someone could explain that process in detail, I would appreciate. Thanks

Unless you have infinite funds, you cannot prevent from being over delegated, since you cannot prevent users from delegating to you.

So, you shouldn’t care too much about it, maybe only give rewards to the delegators that were the first to contribute to the 100%, and not reward the other ones. This way, it is a clear incentive for them to find another delegate.

From a purely theoretical perspective when you are a baker who is capable to reaching 100% target of its priority 0 baking rights, the optimal situation in terms of your capital is to have all of it blocked as security deposit because it means all your capital is working. In such situation as soon as some bond is unlocked it would get relocked again by a new baking and at the same time you would never miss a single block/endorsement baking right. To be in this situation means that the baker is exactly 100% delegated at all times: there's just enough delegators pointing to you as your capital can absorb. It is the optimal situation for both the baker and the delegators.

In reality bakers are rarely in this situation, in practice they are either "under"-delegated or "over"-delegated.

• if you are under-delegated: it is suboptimal for the "baker" this means that you could have accepted more delegations and received more baking rights without impacting your success rate, your personal ROI is suboptimal. On the other hand this situation is fine for delegators because they still receive 100% of their expected rewards on average for their level of staking (minus the baker's fee of course), their personal gross ROI is optimal (assuming you don't make any operational mistake while baking of course)


• if you are over-delegated: is is suboptimal for the delegators because your capital is not enough to cover for all the baking rights of the operation. There's less rewards coming in the bakers' account than the expected amount to pay all the delegators. In such situations the baker usually pays himself first (his personal ROI is optimal) so he received his expected value however the effective amount received by delegators will depend on the policy of the baker (pay those who came first in priority ? or distribute the loss equally to everyone ?). So in this scenario the baker rewards are usually "covered" by the baker policy but not the delegator's rewards (the delegators gross ROI is suboptimal).

So all in all, given that delegators often enter into a delegation and do not monitor day to day situation of the baker's bond and pay a fee to that baker, they usually expect the baker to do this monitoring job and give them a heads-up if they believe they might get over-delegated in the near future in order to give appropriate time for delegators to find an alternative.

For example in the beginning of mainnet, as per the protocol the initial bond requirement was kept intentionally low (started from 0%) and gradually ratcheted up over the cycles. This means that many bakers have been to start their operation with quite small actual bond requirements which allowed them to ride the opportunity and accept much more delegations than their capital would allow once the bond requirement would achieve its long term level (512XTZ per block and 64XTZ per endorsement). This created a situation where a number of baker got not immediately over-delegated but forward-over-delegated.

Bakers who are over-delegated will miss bakes/endorsements due to insufficient bonds. Depending on your baker's policy, everyone may be diluted rewards-wise, or the last delegators will simply receive no rewards.

The bond requirements do vary, so it's good if bakers have some reserves to cope with this. As staking increases (e.g. the % of staking out of the circulating supply increases), bond requirements will start to drop as bakers receive less baking rights for the same stake.