The simplest thing to do is stake your account directly to a Hedera node. However, you can also choose to stake your HBAR to another Hedera account which then stakes all the HBAR staked to it (possibly from multiple accounts) to a particular node. Only one level of indirection is supported on Hedera and the account that directly stakes to the node will receive all the staking rewards for all the indirectly staked accounts.

There are several reasons you may want to do this. For example, you may want to consolidate all your staking rewards across a number of your accounts. Or you may change the node you stake to at some point so you only want to change that in one place for your multiple accounts. Or you may choose to stake to some other company’s account in exchange for some additional benefit they may provide you. Just remember that when using indirect staking, your staking rewards will be paid to the account that you have staked to, which may not be in your best interests.

If you have enabled advanced features in Settings => ADVANCED => Enable Advanced Features, you will see that the label indicates you can enter either a node id or an account id. Even though you don’t see the label with advanced mode off, you can still enter an account id. You never want to stake to a Hedera node’s account id, only to its node id. Whenever you enter an account id, you are staking indirectly via that account.

If you move HBAR from one indirectly staked account to the account which it is staked to or vice versa, our understanding is that you will not lose rewards on that amount of HBAR for the current staking period (once they are eligible for payout). In the case that both accounts are directly staked, you will lose the rewards when you move the HBAR out of the account for that HBAR amount for that staking period.

If you stake indirectly, the Collect Rewards button in Wallawallet will not work if you trigger rewards collection for the indirectly-staked account until Hedera allows this triggering for a single tinybar debit from that account (and according to Dr. Baird, they will be making this change at some point.) But if you manually transfer at least 1 hbar out of the indirectly staked account, the rewards will be triggered, if they are available. Alternatively, you should use the directly-staked account (that which is configured to stake to a node id) for collecting rewards using the “Collect Rewards” button.