More than the continuous delivery of innovative products and features for our ecosystem, we love to educate our community on what we do, why we do them, and what it means. The same goes for today’s post as we break down what staking is and why you should stake your $REBUS.

One common thing with every blockchain network is that transactions need to be validated. For example, Bitcoin does this with mining via the Proof-of-work system. However, there are other consensus mechanisms for validation. One such consensus is the Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and even though it has other variations and hybrid models, we’ll simply refer to it as staking.

What is Staking?

If you’ve been in crypto long enough, you’ve probably heard of staking.

Staking in crypto gives you, as a holder, some decision-making power on the network while you generate passive income. Staking isn’t so different from putting money in your savings account. When you stake, you transfer your asset to a trusted source (validator) who looks after your asset for your set time.

Why you should care about staking your $REBUS

A core part of decentralization on the Rebus chain is staking, where holders stake and delegate their $REBUS to active and healthy validators to secure the blockchain and facilitate network operations. Some reasons to stake your $REBUS are:

• Secure the network — With $REBUS, you have the power to contribute to the security and governance of the Rebus Chain through staking and voting on governance proposals.
• Earn rewards — By staking to a validator, you are contributing to the security of the network and are rewarded with $REBUS through staking rewards. Presently, at the time of writing, you can earn more than 500% per year on your stake.
• Vote for the Community and Ethical projects — Staking $REBUS grants the wallet owner the right to vote on governance proposals for the Community and Ethical fund pool.

When you stake and delegate your $REBUS, you get rewarded. These rewards will be generated on a block-per-block basis, rewards that you can easily claim at any time on our intuitive staking portal via a supported wallet.

However, before delegating your $REBUS to any validator, you’ll need to ensure they are the right validators to look after your tokens. If a validator underperforms or is inactive, a percentage of $REBUS delegated to them may be ‘slashed.’

To mitigate potential slashing risk to stakers, we’ll tell you what you need to check before committing. The variables listed below should provide some points for consideration when selecting a validator to stake your $REBUS.

Choosing a Validator

Choosing a good validator from available candidates is important. You can find out more about a validator by clicking on the validator’s name in the Rebus Explorer. Here are five pointers that could make your decision easier:

Network decentralization

Presently, there are a limited number of validators in the active set on the network. And since each validator will vote on consensus for each proposed block, their voting power is based on the amount of $REBUS token staked to them. Therefore, no one validator must gain too much voting power to ensure continuous network decentralization. As such, you can look to delegate your tokens to validators lower on the list as long as they meet some other important criteria.

Slashing/Downtime risk

Being active and keeping the highest uptime possible is essential for validators. Occasionally, a validator may be ‘jailed’ for double-signing a block or for too much downtime. When this happens, they and those staked with them are penalized by losing a portion of their staked tokens. This is known as slashing. Before selecting a validator, you’ll be able to see their jail history by checking their transaction history in the block explorer.

Reputation and reachability of the validator

Each validator is responsible for providing further information about themselves to potential delegates looking to investigate or reach out to validators they want to stake with. Most validators provide bios containing their own websites, Telegram, Discord, or Twitter communities.

Many validators also have representation in the official Rebus Telegram and Discord channels if you want to ask about any validator.

Project and community involvement

Another pointer to identifying a healthy validator is their involvement in the project and the community. Ordinarily, anyone can become a validator as long as they are technically capable. However, actively trying to help the community in different ways means such validators are up-to-date on the project’s progress.

It’s important because simply missing a software upgrade means they cannot reach consensus with the rest of the network, and thus, can lead to them getting jailed and slashed for downtime.

How much commission you pay

Validators have ongoing costs for running their service, which is in addition to the time, effort, and other resources they commit to their operation. It’s only fair they get rewarded. A validator commission is a percentage of $REBUS reward paid to them for their service.

Validators are free to set their commission rates as they see fit because while some provide the bare minimum infrastructure for their operation, others use enterprise-grade hardware with a higher operation cost. You can see commissions set by each validator when you’re looking to delegate. You pay a percentage of your rewards to validators as a commission.

The Rebus Staking Platform

Our staking platform is now easier to use with enhanced performance capabilities. We want to make staking your $REBUS as seamless as possible.

Here is a basic walkthrough of our staking platform:

1. Your available $REBUS that can be staked. Click on the ‘STAKE TOKENS’ button, and approve the transaction to stake.
2. Amount of $REBUS you stake. Click on ‘UNDELEGATE’ to unstake your tokens from a validator and ’REDELEGATE’ to switch to a new validator. Note that when you undelegate and redelegate your tokens, there is a 21-day unstaking process.
3. You staking rewards. Click on ‘CLAIM’ to claim your reward to your wallet.
4. Your $REBUS waiting to unstake, redelegate or undelegate.
5. Toggle between a list of your staked validators, all validators, and inactive ones. For each category, you can check different info on each validator to help you decide.

How to Stake Your $REBUS

This short video will help you navigate the choices and actions available when you stake, unstake or claim your $REBUS.

Wrapping Up

Now you know more about the Rebus staking platform, how to stake and why you need to stake. Rebus staking is safe as long as you select an active validator to stake to. $REBUS staking is appealing as it’s a way of earning passive income in addition to making the chain faster and more stable.

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Learn more about Rebus

• Official website
• Follow us on Twitter
• Join our community on Discord and Telegram

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