The most important change for indexers is that the flow to get their stake used on any data service consists now of three steps instead of just two (stake and allocate):

• Deposit stake into the protocol (stake)
• Assign a portion of their stake to a specific data service (provision), for example the Subgraph Service. Only “idle stake” (i.e not assigned to a provision/data service) can be used here.
• Use provisioned stake within the data service (allocate)
  • Note that this third step will change depending on the data service implementation, some might have more complicated setups or more simplified ones.
    • For example, the Subgraph Service would require indexers to use provisioned stake to create allocations.
  • We use the term allocate here for familiarity with subgraphs, but other data services might have different naming conventions.

Note that ****the indexer’s stake is only locked (as in subject to a thawing period) on the second step, provision. The two step mechanism of “thawing / withdrawing” is now applied at the provision level not the stake level. This means that stake that is “idle” (i.e not assigned to a provision) can be withdrawn immediately. Provisioned stake on the other hand needs to be thawed prior to it being removed from a provision and put back into the “idle stake pool” for an indexer.

For the most part the indexer-agent and Graph Explorer will abstract this three-step flow into the usual two-step: stake (combined with provision) and allocate. During the transition period however (Stage 1) there are some differences that could be substantial for indexers that want to withdraw stake from the protocol. If you are interested in removing stake from the protocol during the transition period (estimated to last 28 days) please read the following section. If you are not, feel free to skip it.

Deeper dive on stage 1 un-staking mechanism