Short answers. Each one links to the lesson that treats it properly.
Is delegating the same as staking?
No, and the difference is not cosmetic. Staking is what an indexer does with their own GRT, and it is what gets slashed if they misbehave. Delegating is putting your GRT behind an indexer without running anything.
A delegator takes a share of what their indexer earns, minus a cut the indexer sets. See what delegation is.
How long until I can get my GRT back after delegating?
28 days after you start the undelegation, and you earn nothing during that period. This is the single most consequential number for a delegator and it is routinely left out of advertised returns. See undelegation and thawing.
Do I pay a fee to delegate?
Not any more. The delegation tax was removed under Horizon and is now 0%. Be aware that at least one official page has not caught up and still describes the old charge. See the parameters page, which records the contradiction rather than quietly picking a side.
Can my delegated GRT be slashed?
Not currently for the Subgraph Service. Horizon introduced the technical capability for delegated stake to be slashed, and it is switched off. Treat it as a future risk that exists in the code, not as current behaviour, and not as something that cannot happen. See what changes for delegators.
How much do I need to run an indexer?
100,000 GRT of your own stake as the protocol minimum, plus the infrastructure and the attention to operate it. The minimum is the cheapest part of the answer. See should you index or delegate, which tries to talk you out of it honestly.
Where does the yield come from?
Two places. Query fees are revenue somebody actually paid. Indexing rewards are new issuance, targeted at 3% a year. The second is dilution funding useful work, which is a reasonable arrangement and is not the same thing as revenue. See the value loop and tokenomics.
Is curation risky?
There is no slashing for curators. The risks are that you pay 1% to enter and it is burned regardless, and that signal on a subgraph nobody queries earns you nothing while your capital sits there. Losing money slowly to opportunity cost is still losing money. See curation strategy and risk.
Is this financial advice?
No. Nothing on this site is financial or investment advice. The site’s job is to explain mechanisms accurately enough that you can make your own decision, and to tell you the date it last checked its facts.
Why does this site keep telling me to read somewhere else?
Because it is not the reference. The official documentation carries the exact procedures, flags and configuration, and it is maintained by the people shipping the code. Dashboards carry the live numbers. This site explains why the protocol is shaped the way it is, and links out for the rest. A learning site that duplicated the docs would be wrong within a quarter, which is roughly what happened to the last version of this one.
What happened to the old Graph Academy?
It was built on WordPress, last substantially updated in 2022, and it taught Cobb-Douglas rebates, L1 bonding curves and the Hosted Service. All three are now wrong. Rather than patch it, this rebuild moved every protocol number into a single registry with the date somebody read the source, and made the build fail when a page goes past its re-verification date. See about.