What is voting weight in Nano?

Voting weight is the balance delegated to a representative. It sets how much that rep's vote counts when the network confirms a block. Delegating does not move your funds.

Consensus by vote

Nano confirms blocks by vote, not mining or staking. Your account holds votingweight equal to its balance and you delegate this weight to a representative that votes on incoming blocks.

Delegating weight

Your representative is a field on your account, changed by publishing a block. Nano is feeless, so the change costs nothing and applies on confirmation. What it does not do:

• Your balance does not move.
• The rep cannot spend or freeze your funds.
• It is not staking. No lock-up or waiting period.
• If the rep goes offline you keep your weight, but it stops counting.

Weight behind an offline rep does not count, so check uptime before picking one.

Quorum

A block confirms on votes from at least 67% of online voting weight. That is quorum. Confirmation is final, usually within a second.

The node tracks three totals, all shown on the home page:

• Online weight, behind reps seen voting in the last few minutes. The live figure.
• Trended weight, the median of online weight sampled every five minutes over two weeks. A brief outage cannot lower it.
• Minimum weight, a fixed floor. Quorum is never calculated below it.

The node uses whichever is highest.

Principal representatives

Any account can be named a representative. Only those holding at least 0.1% of trended voting weight are principal representatives. Other nodes rebroadcast their votes, so they arrive in time to count. Below that bar a rep adds little toward quorum.

The weight distribution page rolls small reps into one "Non rep nodes" row in its "Include offline weight" view. That cut is 0.1% of all weight, not trended weight, so it sits above the principal bar.

Offline weight

A rep's share depends on what you count. Include reps whose nodes are switched off and the same share drops by roughly a third, because the total grows.

Quorum uses online weight, so that is the basis for questions about disrupting the network. The weight distribution page defaults to it, with the other view behind a toggle.

Why distribution matters

If a few reps hold most of the online weight, they can stop confirmations by going offline. No coordination needed: an outage at a shared host would do it.

The number of reps needed to disrupt the network is the Nakamoto coefficient. Spreading weight across independent reps raises it, which is why the health score rewards reps holding less.