Aceolm
3 min readDec 27, 2020

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Thoughts of the average user in solving staking problems KEEP Network

In this article I would like to touch on such a topic as staking in the KEEP Network project.

Quite a lot of articles have been written on this topic (I hope I don’t repeat myself with anyone).
I read the official documentation, but in my opinion it is not very detailed there.
It is described more in the unofficial documentation (for example, here https://staking.keep.network/).

And so I would like to first touch on the basics of staking, and then move on to my own thoughts.
According to information from the resource — https://github.com/keep-network/keep-core/blob/master/docs/random-beacon/staking/index.adoc
“Anyone with tokens can stake them, setting them aside as collateral for network operations.
Staked tokens are delegated to an operator address who performs work for operator contracts.
Operators can earn rewards from contributing to the network, but if they misbehave their collateral can be taken away (stake slashing) as punishment.“

And this usually applies to any staking.
“Stakers that provide services in the network will be rewarded at certain points.
Rewards may be either tokens or the currency used to pay for network services.
Rewards earned by a staker will be sent to the staker’s beneficiary address. “

Further, which is probably the most important thing, it should be noted that to start staking, you need a certain minimum of tokens that you can delegate.
At the moment, this minimum is 70,000 KEEP. Which is a pretty big amount.

There is a lot of talk about this on the official KEEP discord, and it seems that it plans to lower this threshold in the future.

My thoughts are that this threshold is very large, for example, for other projects there is none at all.
But here the principle of network security is followed, therefore this threshold was made.

I have thoughts on how to fix this without violating security principles.

Not so long ago, we all heard about the beginning of the transition from ether to ether 2.0. ether 2.0 instead of miners provides for staking tokens.
Basic principles:
- You must have at least 32 ETH
- You need to raise your node
- Freeze assets for an indefinite period (optimistic scenario — end of 2021)
The same picture as with Kip Network. The entrance threshold is very high, and not all users are available, because you will have to freeze your money for about 2 years before the network is launched.

To solve this problem, some services have proposed this model:
they combine to collect user funds and delegate them to their nodes, in return, users receive wrapped ether, which reflects the share of the service.
At the moment, I know several providers, they are quite reliable:
Ankr, Lido and Rocketpool.
That is, for 1 ETH staked, you will receive 1 stETH in case of staking through Lido or 1 rETH in case of staking through Rocketpool.

And I think that a similar decision could have been made in the KEEP, this greatly facilitated the entry for ordinary users into taking.

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