OP what have you found to be to a trusted staking mechanism? Still holding onto my crypto on my own. Bitcoin mainly and a smattering of other fun alts but not noteworthy. Basically just holding on to whatever earnings I have (virtually 100% crypto earnings if I'm honest now due to remote nature of work in past years).
Have examined all these staking options but it seems you either have to trust a company, or trust a blockchain network. And I don't really, other than the Bitcoin network itself.
But curious to see what other Bitcoin holders are willing to try out?
Well, staking coins I have are DOT, ETH, and ADA. Right now I only stake DOT though, but plan on doing the others soon.
DOT seems complicated to stake just from what I've heard, I haven't even researched it yet, and it (along with some trading profit) is what I'll be living off of starting next month now that my savings in the bank have run out, so I want it to be easily unstaked and sold with a few clicks of a button whenever I want so I just stake it on an exchange. Not the safest thing since I have a ton of DOT, but major exchanges seem a lot safer these days than a few years ago.
ADA sounds fairly easy to stake yourself, I still need to research it but probably in the next month I plan to get into that and try moving my ADA off-exchange and staking it myself.
ETH is currently nearly all in my own wallet but I will probably move it to an exchange soon to stake. I can't stake it myself because you have to be online to stake (and actually I think it's the same for DOT so I wouldn't be able to stake DOT myself anyways) and I don't have any way to keep a system running always online with my traveling lifestyle.
So yeah while I keep my Bitcoin in cold storage in my own addresses, and that is the vast majority of my money, for staking I feel pretty comfortable doing it on-exchange at major, regulated, secure exchanges, especially since I literally am unable to keep a staking node running due to my lifestyle.