A staker may request an unstake of any amount of their XRD tokens at any time, but must wait an unstaking delay time before they are available for use. This includes stake that the staker wishes to move to a different validator; they must perform an unstake, wait for the delay to complete for the XRD to become available, and then stake them elsewhere.
The unstaking delay is a fixed number of epochs (500 to be exact), that add up to a total of roughly 10-14 days of delay, depending on network speed. The delay is required for network security reasons; essentially there must be enough time provided to ensure that any bad behavior by a node (using the stake delegated to them) can be detected and punished. At initial mainnet launch, 10-14 days is estimated to be a sufficient time to confidently detect such bad behavior, but much shorter delays may be proposed to the community later once more automated mechanisms become available.
When a staker requests an unstake, they will stop receiving rewards for the stake starting in the epoch immediately following the unstake request. This means the stake will still earn rewards for the full epoch in which the unstake request was submitted.
Requesting an unstake of tokens will also be a matter of a few clicks in the Radix Desktop Wallet, selecting from a listing of current stakes.
The team says it’s for security reasons. Dan even talked about this in the latest AMA. Staking is actually the way you show your trust towards a particular validator node. They say it’s important for the time delay to be there to avoid bad practices and malicious actors.
The first post actually answers the question itself.
But to add something: When you initiate an unstaking, it will only “start” from the next epoch. Just like when you stake your tokens, you need to wait the current epoch to finish. (it can take a few minutes up to 30 minutes)
RadBag wallet will also show the current unstaking after the current epoch has passed.
The unstaking process, as you mentioned, takes 500 epochs, with every epoch characterized by 60 minutes. Epochs are 34 minutes when all the validators are running perfectly, which means a delay of something like 12 days. It takes roughly 10 days based on the unstake that I completed one week ago.
I’ve also been unstaking radix from validator several times, it takes 500 epochs to process, but I’m always confused at first why sometimes it’s so fast or so slow.
And finally I found that the epoch length has different opening and closing times, and it’s based on the health and smoothness of the network.
