Solana staking doesn't require a smart contract — SOL holders create a native 'stake account' and delegate it to a validator of their choice directly at the protocol level. Rewards are distributed automatically each epoch, roughly every 2-3 days, and there's no minimum stake amount required to delegate.
Unstaking triggers a 'deactivation' that completes at the end of the current epoch, meaning your effective wait time is typically under a couple of days rather than the multi-week unbonding periods seen on some other chains.
Solana also has one of the most active liquid staking ecosystems outside Ethereum, led by tokens like mSOL (Marinade), jitoSOL (Jito, which also captures MEV rewards), and bSOL (Solblaze) — each spreading delegations across different validator sets with slightly different risk and yield profiles.