What precautions should be considered before staking $VENOM with Venom Pools?

Staking tokens in Venom Pools is a relatively low risk investment mechanism because users do not suffer from impermanent loss as they do in cases of liquidity pools.

Also, if there is no locking period, the tokens can be pulled out at any moment, thus if the owner expects that the tokens are going to significantly drop in value, the tokens can be pulled out. The main risk comes from the high volatility of crypto market itself.

Some risks, however, do come straight from the Validators - there is a slight possibility of users losing part or all of their stake in case of a node malfunction or slashing – those are the penalties which would be incurred by Validators that make mistakes when they set up or configure nodes. Always do your own research.