How much fund do I need to create a validator?

We recommend you to have at least 20300 CORE tokens to become a validator, and here is the reasoning behind it. You can have less or more but you should do your math and understand the process.

One of the variables that you specify when creating a validator, is min-self-delegation, which indicates the minimum funds that you must stake with yourself so your validator might be active. The minimum value for min-self-delegation is 20k core tokens. If you set that value higher when creating the validator, it means that you must always have that amount staked with yourself, and if your validator gets slashed, and your self delegation goes below min-self-delegation your validator will not be active unless you stake some more tokens. Given that, we suggest you stake some extra amount with yourself (e.g 1%) to cover the possible slashing of your validator.

Having said all that, we recommend that you have at least 20300 core tokens, if you set the min-self-delegation to 20k, 20k will go to self delegation, around 200 will stay there to cover possible timeout slashing (currently 0.5%), and you will have 100 extra to cover for fees of transactions.

As a side note, it should be mentioned that creating a validator with min-self-delegation does not guarantee you will in the active set. In order to go to the active set, the total delegation of your validator should be in the top 32.