I have a Solflare wallet acting as view only to my hardware cold wallet address. I have staked SOL via the Solflare app, all fine. I check my hardware cold wallet address on Solscan and the staked SOL is not showing…is this because they are delegated to the SOL validator? If so how is my SOL safe if it isnt in my hardware wallet address?
Your SOL is not 100% safe. The validator can get “slashed” if they try to submit malicious/false transactions. It is obviously highly unlikely this happens, especially if it is being run by a reputable company, but you just don’t know.
There are some services that let you stake across hundreds of validators so you mitigate that risk as much as possible