All you need to start forging are two things:

1. You must have a positive effective balance in your wallet - All Apollo held in your wallet will eventually become part of this effective balance. To become part of the effective balance Apollo needs to be held in your wallet long enough to reach 1440 confirmations. You can monitor how many confirmations each transaction has on the bottom of your dashboard screen.

2. You must have a published public key - Every Apollo wallet is issued a public key at its creation, but this key needs to be published to the blockchain before it can be used. All you need to do to publish your public key to the blockchain is to perform your first action using your wallet. This only needs to be done once and can be accomplished by sending any Apollo wallet a transaction (even as small as one Apollo), creating an Alias, creating a currency or asset, voting or even a purchase on the marketplace. Keep in mind your wallet is secure regardless of whether or not you have published your public key.

Forging Effectiveness -

Forging is a form of proof of stake concensus. The effectiveness of forging is determined by the number of Apollo you are using to forge. After each block the transaction fees within that block are distributed to all forgers randomly. The larger your Apollo stake, the higher the chance you have to gain Apollo.