What is voting weight in Nano?

Voting weight is the total balance delegated to a representative. It decides how much that rep's vote counts when the network confirms a block. It is not the rep's own money, and delegating never moves your funds.

Nano has no mining

Most cryptocurrencies decide who writes the next block by burning electricity or by locking up a stake. Nano does neither. It confirms transactions by vote, and the votes are weighted by balance.

Every account holds voting weight equal to its balance, and nominates a representative to vote on its behalf. That nomination turns a balance into influence.

Delegating weight costs nothing and risks nothing

Your representative is a field on your account, set by publishing a block. Any send or receive can carry a change, or you can publish a block that does nothing else. Nano is feeless, so the change costs nothing and takes effect as soon as the block confirms. What it does not do:

• Your balance stays where it is. The change transfers no funds.
• The representative cannot spend, freeze or touch your funds. It only votes.
• Delegating is not staking. You can spend your full balance at any time, with no lock-up and no waiting period.
• You keep your weight if the rep goes offline. It simply stops being counted.

The network cannot use weight sitting behind an offline representative, so check a rep's uptime before picking it.

Quorum, and the three weight figures

To confirm a block, the network needs votes from more than 67% of online voting weight. That threshold is quorum, and reaching it makes a Nano transaction final, usually in under a second.

67% of what? The node tracks three totals, and the home page shows all three:

• Online weight is the weight behind representatives seen voting in the last few minutes. This is the live figure.
• Trended weight is the median of online weight sampled every five minutes over the last two weeks. It moves slowly by design, so a brief outage cannot lower the bar for confirming blocks.
• Minimum weight is a fixed floor. Quorum is never calculated below it, no matter how much of the network goes dark.

The node uses whichever is highest, so the quorum bar can rise but never quietly collapse.

Principal representatives

Any account can be named as a representative, but only those holding at least 0.1% of online voting weight are principal representatives. The distinction is practical: other nodes rebroadcast votes from a principal rep, which is how those votes reach the network fast enough to count.

The threshold exists because the alternative does not scale. A rep holding a millionth of a percent adds nothing toward a 67% quorum, and rebroadcasting its votes would cost more traffic than it is worth.

This is the 0.1% on the weight distribution page, where everything below it is grouped into one row.

Two ways to measure a share

A rep's weight is usually quoted as a percentage, and the same rep can honestly carry two different percentages depending on the denominator.

Counting only online representatives gives one number. Counting every account with weight, including reps whose nodes are switched off, gives a smaller one: the total it divides by is larger. Plenty of weight sits behind offline reps, so the gap is wide, and a rep near the top of the list looks noticeably smaller on the second basis.

Quorum is measured against online weight, so that is the basis for any question about whether the network can be disrupted. The weight distribution page defaults to it and offers the other view behind a toggle.

Why the spread matters more than the total

If a handful of reps hold most of the online weight, that handful can stop confirmations just by stopping. They can be entirely honest and uncoordinated. An outage at a shared hosting provider would do it.

Spreading weight across many independent reps prevents this, and it is the one thing holders control. The number of reps needed to disrupt the network is the Nakamoto coefficient.

It is also why NanoTicker's health score rewards reps holding less weight. Picking a good rep from further down the list is the most useful thing a holder can do.