Aptos uses an owner-operator-voter model for staking. This model enables the creation of delegations and staking services by separating the account that holds the funds from other accounts responsible for managing those funds, such as operators and voters. This separation ensures that delegations of responsibilities can be made securely, without compromising the safety of the funds held in the account.

Owner: When someone creates an account on the Aptos blockchain, they become the owner of that account and the funds it contains.

Operator: An operator is the validator operator. The Owner can delegate the management of their funds to the Operator. The Owner can assign the accounts operator address to the Operator allowing for the account to participate in transaction validation on the chain. 

Voter: The Owner can designate a Voter to participate in governance. The voter will use the voter keys to sign the governance votes. Traditionally, voter privileges are assigned to the Operator. 

Each epoch is 2 hours long.

Epoch length is subject to change only through a proposal to change its length.

Governance is managed within the Aptos Governance forum, where it is then proposed to the community of validators to be agreed upon for commitment to the core network code.

Scope of governance proposals: 

• Changes to blockchain parameters such as epoch duration, max. Min. allowed validator stake, etc.
• Change core blockchain code.
• Upgrades and deploying new framework modules.

Rewards on Aptos are set through governance and all validators receive the same amount of rewards at a global rate of 7%, which will be set to decrease by about 1.5% until a lower bound of 3.5%, rates that will change on the basis of governance proposals that must be agreed upon before being implemented. The proportion of rewards issued to a validator are a function of the number of successful proposals that a validator accomplishes, i.e. if a block proposer (validator) successfully attests to 8 out of 10 blocks, they will receive 80% of the rewards that would have been received as a function of the total amount staked to their validator and the number of proposals that they were chosen for in an epoch.

Rewards are distributed every epoch (2 hours).

The Unbonding Period on Aptos is 1 epoch (2 hours).

Yes. If you are interested in using a third party custody provider, Aptos staking is currently supported through Anchorage and Coinbase.

Currently, slashing is not implemented on Aptos.

Staking rewards are auto-compounding. Therefore any rewards earned in an epoch are automatically added to the current stake. In order to withdraw rewards, token holders would need to unstake their APT.

Your potential rewards depend upon Operator performance, as indicated here. When your Operator is down, you will not be earning staking rewards. Since there are no slashing or downtime penalties on Aptos – if your node is down, the penalty is in the amount or rewards that could be earned, but the principal stake allocated to the node will not be slashed.