Staking and the yield

The return is a share of fees the network actually collected, paid in ETH. That makes it small, honest and dependent on real usage - which is the opposite trade from most staking you have seen.

The idea

You lock up PKL. While it is locked, you receive a share of the fees the network collects. You can take the earnings out whenever you like; getting the locked PKL back takes seven days.

That is the whole mechanism. The interesting part is what it is not.

Where the yield comes from

This is the question to ask about any staking offer, and most answers to it are uncomfortable. There are broadly two ways a chain can pay you for staking:

Issue new tokens. The number goes up, everyone's share goes down, and the "yield" is partly you being paid in dilution of yourself. It can be advertised at almost any percentage, because the chain controls the printer.
Share income it actually received. The return is limited by real usage, cannot be set by decree, and may be close to nothing when the chain is quiet.

Pickle's design is the second, and pays in ETH

There are no PKL emissions - the token has no mint function, so there is no printer to use. The reward is a share of collected gas fees, and because fees are paid in ETH the reward arrives in ETH rather than in more PKL.

The honest consequence: if nobody uses the chain, staking pays nothing. No percentage can be quoted in advance, and this site will not quote one.

The intended share is 30% of gas fees. Two caveats belong with that number rather than after it: the split is currently applied to the gross fee, before the chain's own costs of settling on Ethereum and storing data are taken out, and a corrected version that pays those first is specified rather than running. See where the fees go.

The rules that would apply

Seven days to unlock. Withdrawing your stake starts a seven-day wait. Claiming earnings has no wait.
A limited number of pending withdrawals. Each withdrawal request queues separately, and there is a cap on how many can be outstanding - so unstaking in many small pieces will eventually be refused until earlier ones mature.
Earnings that cannot be delivered are held for you. If a payment to your address fails, it is recorded as owed rather than lost, and you collect it yourself later.
No lock-up bonus and no early-staker multiplier. An early-cohort lock was considered and removed.

What is actually built

You cannot stake today

The contract exists and the network does split its fees. What is missing for you is simpler: no address is published to stake at, and this site publishes none - there is no authoritative list of deployed addresses, and guessing at one is the single most expensive mistake available on a blockchain.

When the testnet is publicly live and the addresses are published, this page gets the steps. Until then it describes a mechanism rather than instructing you to use one.

One more thing that would be invisible from the outside: for stakers to be paid at all, the network has to be told where the staking contract is, and it reads that once when it starts. Deploy the contract while the network is already running and stakers earn nothing while everything reports success. That is a real failure mode, it is documented on the developer side, and it is the kind of thing worth knowing exists before a number on a dashboard convinces you it does not.