Longer staking benefits ICON through higher security of the network (as more ICX is delegated for longer periods of time). Additionally, this helps reduce the float that can be traded, lowering supply. This is a win-win for ICON. I believe ICX holders should be incentivized to stake for longer periods of time and would like to see higher percentage rewards for staking for 6 months and 1 month periods.
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Agreed: a focal component of any sustainable ecosystem, whether in cryptocurrency, nature or the political arena is the notion of self-interest. I believe this will garner a larger sense of sentiment universally throughout the entirety of the ecosystem.
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agreed. this is the only way I see a cryptocurrency won’t become too volatile = if people actually find holding the token will be beneficial for them.
I think this could be good if the reward is applied to all ICX stakers.
If this extra staking reward is only applied to voters who vote for a specific P-Rep, EEP, or DApp, we run the risk of creating tribes of ICON holders making different staking amounts. This can lead to voting for gains, instead of voting your conscience. ICON is specifically designed to not incentives voting just curtain proposals for gains. ICON has created the idea that equalizes gains so everyone can vote for the ideas they value. In other DPoS you have to vote for the current winners to make rewards. ICON has balanced this out, and we need to be careful we don’t bring unbalanced gains to only some voters.
If this is applied to the entire network, I think it’s worth considering. It should give equal opportunity for any ICONist, preserving the mechanism to vote your conscience without diminishing your return.
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I have faith that Ubik is going to be an integral part of our ecosystem going forward. With that in mind I’m not too concerned to see you offering bonuses for locking up coins.
Having said that I am concerned that a new staking service provider (this comment is lot aimed at anyone) will promise a high % return of all P-Rep income, take 5% off the top, and just AFK. That’s a really bad scenario for us going forward.
Maybe this is an unavoidable problem as we are always going to have members in both categories of hosts and stakers whose only interest is profit.
Thank you for the kind words regarding Ubik.
The scenario you described would be negative for ICON, especially if several p reps then to this strategy and are elected for it.
I hope that iconists will diversify their votes and vote for multiple p reps who contribute to the ecosystem. But there’s no guarantee this is what will happen.
To eliminate this, P Reps could pass a proposal to disallow incentives to voters, if that was desired. Then obviously it would take away Ubik incentives too. So it would take away some freedom of proposals from P Reps but also eliminate bad actors who give back large percentages and then go AFK.
We strongly believe that the price of ICX matters, both in the short and long-term. Higher price draws more positive attention, attracts more people (developers, users, investors, etc.), and enables P-Reps to do more with less ICX (e.g. at $2 ICX value, you can accomplish the same monetary efforts with only 10% of the ICX required than at $0.20 ICX value).
We are working hard on ways to help restore investor confidence, while also building for the long-term with technical development, community engagement, and content creation/marketing. In traditional finance, it is common to incentivize investments for longer periods of time and we believe ICON should offer this as well. Long-term incentives will help to stabilize both ICON price and network (more ICX staked = less ICX on exchanges to sell).
The support for this idea continues to grow, and we thank everyone who has shown support for this concept. Long-term rewards will be most beneficial if applied to all ICONists. To do this, we need to work with all P-Reps and ICONists to add long-term staking incentives to IISS at the protocol level.
The incentives we have in mind to IISS would be along the lines of a growing reward % as ICX is staked for longer periods of time. An example distribution could be as follows (based on 15% rewards). This rate would be based on staking time, allowing moving votes from a P-Rep team to another without penalty.
Less than 1 Month = 0.5 * reward rate (7.5%)
1–2 Months = 0.75 * reward rate (11.25%)
3–4 Months = 0.9 * reward rate (13.5%)
5 Months = 1 * reward rate (15 %)
6 Months = 1.1 * reward rate (16.5%)
7–8 Months = 1.25 * reward rate (18.75%)
9–10 Months = 1.4 * reward rate (21.0 %)
11+ Months = 1.5 * reward rate (22.5%)
Current staking annual rewards are roughly 20%. The system needs to be variable to encompass a growing reward for long-term staking, but still work within the intent of the current IISS system, which sets rewards based on the amount of ICX staked on the entire network.
We believe adding a mechanism for increasing rewards over time, at the expense of lower up-front rewards, will result in higher stability and price growth for ICON.
We look forward to your feedback. After feedback and discussion, if there is enough support then the next step would be to put forth a proposal on the topic, for voting by the P-Reps. If this proposal passes, then it would open the door to start the development and implementation of the long term staking system.
Support this 100%! May be slightly biased here as i intend to stake for a while, but nevertheless feel you should be rewarded for locking your tokens down for a longer period of time, as it is better for stability and security (i believe).
I see your point, but it does not appear you’ve done much research or any data modelling on how this could actually influence the network. If you did, then please do share it. Experimenting with live system without prior research is certainly not something we should suggest to do.
As I understand it, your suggested staking time / rates would negatively affect absolutely everyone who’s currently staking and the resulting effect could even be the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve.
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I agree this has potential to be positive for the ICON Network, but I also agree with Tomas regarding the amount of research into potential affects. I’m also considering the development time and cost relative to other priorities.
Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to believe that staking would help ICX price, it didn’t appear to have much of an affect. I had hoped that having ~20% of ICX locked and staked would have had an impact.
Genuinely curious, do you have any thoughts regarding why adding longer term incentives will have an affect, while the current structure did not? No worries either way just something I have been thinking about. My thought is that the majority of people who engaged in staking were already planning on holding for a while, and had been holding their ICX off-exchange in preparation for staking. I think we all hoped more people would pull ICX off exchanges to stake.
In the short term, I think we can all (ICX Station included) be more active in promoting the staking/validating rewards on the ICON Network in an effort to drum up some demand.
I agree with your sentiment regarding staking- I thought the premise of passive income combined with lockup with result in price increases. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get quantitative data until actually testing. Staking makes the supply / sell side remain a subset of the circulating supply, however, we have not seen the buy side demand increase. I think long-term staking may not have immediate effects on price, but when demand increases, it would increase the potential ceiling. I agree that most who stake likely have set price targets above the current price. Whether that is $0.50, $1, $10 or even higher remains to be seen. All-in-all, I think this would be a proposal to help most significantly when buy side demand enters the market for icon.
I think one of the main near-term benefits of a long-term staking incentives would be counter the effects of exchanges staking. Exchanges can stake some of their tokens, based on risk tolerance and expected liquidity, but they may have to shift tokens from time to time to be able to satisfy customer requests. Any time they unstake, the reward counter would be reset.
As a long-term staker, I would love to get these extra rewards. However I am more concerned about the effect that would happen if we decentivize the short-term stakers
According to my understanding, one of the main reasons for implementing staking in the first place is to protect ourselves from short-term price fluctuations. That is why I think that Velic’s ‘staving’ option should be labeled as counterproductive for the system, instead of praised, but thats imho.
Although I could see that somewhat working as more people would be incentivized by the ‘opportunity loss’ and keep their funds in, in order to be in such situation (and be motivated by the extra gains) they should have already staked for a long time and would still have the standard unstaking period, so we are not motivating anyone to stake that has not done so already.
Also, there is something that I do not quite understand in the proposal. Does the multiplier reset when you unstake a part of your wallet and/or add extra icx to it or are the calculations done for the period that each icx was staked for?
As if it resets on every transaction, then not being able to claim I-score, to pay for something or to use even a minor part of the icx in your wallet in any way altogether, does not justify the extra rewards. If each icx in the wallet is set to give rewards separately though, than the exchanges would be able to operate freely without an issue (but will receive higher rewards), so Im not sure which option is better…