# 🚄 Setup and run a Collator

## ⏳ Bond KMA​

Prospective Collators must post KMA as a bond on-chain before they are considered collation candidates. This amount must be present as a transferable balance within the collator account at the time that the joinCandidates extrinsic is run.

At launch (Calamari v3.4.0), this bond is set to a minimum of 4 Million KMA. The current candidacy bond amount can be confirmed on-chain > parachainStaking > minCandidateStk().

note

The bonded KMA are locked in the account, i.e. until you remove the lock by exiting the candidate set, they are:

• NOT TRANSFERRABLE, but
• Available for other on-chain actions like voting in governance

Unlocking these tokens is possible through unbonding and takes a minimum of 7 days

### 💓 Starting collation​

Run the joinCandidates extrinsic from the account you set your session keys to in a browser.

note

bond is 4_000_000_000_000_000_000 KMA ( 4 Million KMA with 12 decimals )
candidateCount is a hint for transaction weight ( i.e. gas fee ) that should be larger than the current number of registered collators ( or the transaction will fail ). The current number can be found by counting the entries on the calamari chain > parachainStaking > candidatePool(): u128. It is safe to just set a high number, but reducing it as much as possible reduces the estimated gas fees that must be available in your account in addition to the bond amount for the transaction to succeed.

Your collator will join the set of block producers and become eligible for rewards at the beginning of the next round ( i.e. after a maximum of 6 hours ) if it is in the top 63 of registered node candidates by total stake ( i.e. your collator bond + sum of all delegations on your node )