Votes for the oracle
Delegation corresponds to an address on Flare assigning its own WFLR token votes or F-Asset votes and any votes already assigned to it, to another address on Flare network. The votes for the oracle (and the votes for the governance) can be delegated some or all of these to another address without transferring the tokens themselves.
One can delegate a fixed number of votes (nominal delegation) to one or more delegates or a percentage part of its votes (relative delegation) up to three delegates, providing that each vote is delegated only once. In relative delegation, the actual voting power is always calculated before use.
Delegation can be done or undone at any time, providing some FLR tokens are spend for transaction fees.
The number of non-delegated tokens held by an address plus any tokens delegated to that address, that are themselves not further delegated give the address' voting power. An address must have some minimum vote power in order to submit prices to FTSO contract.
Managing infrastructure
Since managing a reliable infrastructure to calculate accurate price estimates and provide them to the Flare Network comes with costs and special skills, this job is not for everyone.
Any FLR or F-asset holder could choose to delegate their votes to whoever they believe will provide honest votes. In return, the oracle signal provider might take a fraction of the (now bigger) earned reward in exchange for their service.
Rewards
The reward accounting is done on-chain. Rewards are assigned according to data provider’s cumulative vote power, where the data provider will be able to claim only its share of the reward, corresponding to its balance, plus the fees from delegators’ shares. On the other hand, only delegators will be able to claim their own shares of the reward, according to their contribution to the total vote power minus data provider’s fees.
Data providers will, at least in the near future, have a single fee percentage setting for all signals they provide and for all delegators they serve. Each data provider will be able to set this percentage freely. However, the update will not take effect immediately, but will be valid with a certain delay (timelock) after the settings change. The delegators can observe the change and switch the delegation to other data providers, if the fee becomes uncompetitive.