Crypto Staking Calculator

Staking is the proof-of-stake equivalent of earning interest: you lock up tokens to help secure a network, and the network pays you rewards in its own token. The mechanics rhyme with a savings account — a rate, a balance, compounding — but with one critical difference. Your rewards are paid in tokens, not dollars, and the token's price can move far more in a week than a year of rewards adds.

That's why the calculator above reports your result in token units first. A 4% reward rate on 10 ETH reliably grows your ETH count to about 11.27 ETH over three years. What those 11.27 ETH are worthdepends entirely on ETH's price on the day you sell — which no calculator can predict. Treat the dollar figure as a snapshot at today's price, not a forecast.

Crypto platforms quote rewards in both APR and APY, and the difference is the same as in traditional finance:

• APRis the nominal annual reward rate, before compounding. It's what you earn if you take your rewards out as they arrive and never restake them.
• APY is the effective rate after rewards are restaked and begin earning their own rewards. A 4% APR auto-compounded daily becomes roughly a 4.08% APY.

The catch unique to crypto: a headline APY only materializes if rewards are actually restaked. Platforms love to advertise the bigger APY number, but if you claim and spend rewards as they come in, you earn the APR. And on protocols where you have to claim and restake manually, every restake can cost a network (gas) fee and create a taxable event — friction that can quietly eat the compounding benefit. For the underlying math in either direction, see our APY vs. APR calculator.

Restaking frequency is the crypto version of compounding frequency. Some protocols auto-compound every epoch (frequently less than a day); others pay rewards that sit idle until you manually claim and restake them. The more often rewards rejoin your stake, the sooner they start earning — but the effect is smaller than most people expect.

On a typical single-digit reward rate, the gap between annual and daily restaking is a fraction of a percent of APY. It grows with higher rates and longer horizons, which is why it's more visible on high-yield tokens than on ETH. The frequency table in the calculator above shows the difference side by side for your own numbers. For the same idea applied to a savings account, our daily vs. monthly vs. annual compounding breakdown puts hard dollar figures on each frequency.

A staking yield is not a high-yield savings account, even when the headline rate looks similar. The reward rate is the easy part; the risks are what actually decide whether staking was a good idea. None of these are reflected in the calculator's projection.

• Price volatility. Your principal is a volatile token. A 5% annual reward means nothing if the token drops 30% — you can end the year with more tokens and far fewer dollars.
• Lock-up and unbonding periods. Many networks lock staked tokens, and unstaking can take days or weeks. You may be unable to sell during exactly the window you most want to.
• Slashing. On many proof-of-stake networks, a validator that goes offline or misbehaves can be slashed— losing part of the staked balance, including delegators'.
• Platform and smart-contract risk. Staking through an exchange or DeFi protocol adds counterparty risk: hacks, smart-contract bugs, freezes, or insolvency can cause partial or total loss.
• Yield farming adds more. Supplying tokens to a liquidity pool exposes you to impermanent loss, where the position underperforms simply holding the tokens. The highest advertised yields usually carry the highest and least durable risk.
• No insurance, and taxes apply. Staking rewards are not FDIC- or SIPC-insured, and in most places rewards are taxed as income when received. This page is information, not financial or tax advice.

A useful gut check: compare the staking yield against lower-risk, dollar-denominated options before committing. Our HYSA vs. CD vs. index fund comparison lays out what a comparable rate looks like without token-price risk, and the investment growth calculator projects a diversified portfolio over the same horizon.