Staking for Vote Power

Your coins are always worth votes. When they’re not staked, each coin in your wallet represents one vote.

You can stake coins — meaning you lock them up for a duration — to increase your votes per coin. For example, each coin staked for one year will be worth ten votes instead of one.

On the Compendia Mainnet, the minimum you can stake will initially be 10,000 coins.

Here are the phases of staking:

1. Creation You can create a stake by configuring an amount and a duration for your coins to be locked (3 months for x5, 6 months for x7.5, 12 months for x10). The longer the duration, the more votes each staked coin is worth. Your stake will grant the extra vote power after 48 hours (grace period + power-up period).

2. Grace Once you created your stake, you’re free to cancel it in the first hour of creation and immediately regain access to your coins. This is called the Grace period. Unlike a “stake create” transaction which is free, there’s a fee attached to the “cancel stake” transaction.

3. Power-up After the one hour grace period you can no longer cancel the stake. Your coins are locked, and it will take 23 hours to gain the extra vote power. This is called the power-up period. Once your stake is powered up, you will receive the extra vote power on your wallet. The “stake duration” (e.g. 3 months) goes into effect after the power-up.

4. Release Your stake will grant bonus vote power for its entire duration. After the stake is released (for example 3 months after the power-up), its granted vote weight will be halved and you can redeem it at any time. Example: if you staked 10k BIND for one year, you’ll get 100k Power. After the stake is released, that stake’s power is halved to 50k. You can then redeem that stake after which you gain your coins back in your balance, losing the bonus vote power. Since the coins are back in your wallet, 10k points would be worth 10k power again, but you can re-stake them at any time.

5. Redeeming After the stake is released, you can redeem your coins back into your wallet at any time. After redeeming, the coins will be awarded back to your wallet balance (and the bonus Power from the stake removed) after 14 days.

Because of the “release” system, it’s always better to stake as soon as possible, since you can benefit from extra vote power after your stake releases while being able to redeem your coins at any time. You can always re-stake your coins after the release.

That’s all for this deep dive!

Note: The mentioned grace and power-up duration (1 hour and 23 hours) are the configurations on the Compendia Testnet. The durations may be different on the Compendia Mainnet.