You maintain custody of your KAVA at all times.

Your KAVA stay in your wallet and you can change your delegation at any time.

All KAVA token transfers, including rewards, are processed within the Kava protocol.  Figment never has custody of your tokens or rewards.

There is a 21-day unbonding period to transfer your tokens after staking. During the unbonding period, your KAVA are illiquid and may still be subject to slashing.

Delegated KAVA are subject to Kava slashing under certain conditions (see below)

Figment provides a  100% missed reward guarantee for any missed rewards due to liveness (downtime).

Your tokens are subject to a potential 5% slashing a validator “double-signs.” See how Figment approaches infrastructure and operations to protect against double signing here and here.

If Kava validators that have poor performance or violate protocol rules may have up to 5% of tokens staked slashed

Slashing occurs when a validator signs two blocks at the same height, which is called equivocation. This is most likely to occur when a validator mistakenly activates a backup validator when their primary validator is still online.

For this reason, Figment has prioritized avoidance of double signing over liveness (uptime). There is no slashing for limited validator downtime (up to 16 hours). Be cautious of validators that have only cloud-based infrastructure or complicated software based redundancy systems aimed at minimizing liveness. Complicated redundant backup systems to optimize for uptime can result in double signing and thus slashing.

Rewards are liquid and do not go through the same unbonding period as the staked tokens.

There is no minimum amount of tokens required to validate, as long as the total delegation allows the validator to breach the top 100 among its peers.

Both transaction fees and inflation-based rewards for each block are split by validators and delegators according to weighted stake.

Transaction fees are required for all Kava transactions, which includes transferring pegged assets (e.g. pXRP) to other users, transferring pXRP to the Kava collateral module, drawing USDX from a CDP, closing a CDP, and sending USDX between users. 

The target rate of inflation for KAVA is designed as an incentive for ⅔ of the total KAVA supply to be staked. At launch the target rate is 7%. If less KAVA are staked, KAVA supply via block rewards increases up to a ceiling of 20% annualized inflation of the total supply. If more than ⅔ are being staked, KAVA block rewards decrease gradually down to a floor of 3% annualized inflation.

Delegator rewards are liquid, so they must withdraw their rewards and then delegate them, if they wish to compound their rewards. Validators are never in control of the rewards.