Injective Equinox Staking Public Launch

We are delighted to announce the public release of Equinox Staking.

This is a landmark milestone for Injective and starting today anyone can delegate to top-tier validators in order to join the staking competition and earn rewards.

This is also the first time that users can interact with the native Injective Chain which offers limitless capabilities such as zero gas fees and rapid transaction times.

Stake Your INJ: Link

Equinox Staking Walkthrough: Link

Background

We launched Equinox pre-staking earlier this month which allowed users to lock up their INJ in order to earn a yield on their assets. The community was stunned by the sudden demand as users saw over $20,000,000 (nearly 2,000,000 INJ) locked into the Injective platform within just a few days.

Over the past few weeks, Injective has also onboarded some of the best validators in the industry. Behind the scenes, they have helped test the infrastructure as the community carried out a number of upgrades to the native Injective Chain. This environment helped in creating a process via which Injective's agility was able to be retained with respect to carrying out real-time improvements for users.

Recently the Discord channel was fully revamped to allow anyone to come and speak directly with contributors in the community. This upgrade took into account all feedback for the user flows as well as UI, while also recording any errors that users may have encountered during the pre-staking process .

All of this feedback from users and validators has culminated in the release of Equinox Staking, which far exceeds all of the initial goals and provides an unparalleled staking experience for everyone.

Equinox Staking

Equinox staking will provide everyone with an opportunity to stake INJ on the native Injective Chain staking competition testnet.

For an overview of staking and how it works please navigate to the “What is Staking?” article on Injective Learn here.

Note: Even if you have previously pre-staked your INJ, you will need to delegate to a validator now in order to continue earning the 15% baseline APY. INJ must be staked for the duration of the staking competition in order to qualify for rewards.

Validators

Validators perform the critical role of securing the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus of the Injective Chain. Validation is a non-trivial endeavor, as validators must maintain minimum uptime requirements, conduct routine upgrades and monitor the proper functioning of their node. Due to the fact that a validator’s funds can be slashed if the validator misbehaves, validation carries risk and must be done responsibly. Some validators include the likes of Stakewithus, Audit One, Figment, Citadel One, and Hashquark. Each of the validators were onboarded based on their past successful experience validating other Cosmos-based chains such as Terra and Band Protocol.

Upon the launch of mainnet, anyone can become an Injective Chain validator.

Delegators

Anyone can delegate their INJ to an Injective validator in order to earn rewards.

Users can delegate their tokens to a validator. In return, the validator earns a commission. For instance, if you stake 100 INJ with a 15% APY, that means you earn 15 INJ over the course of the year. However, most validators take around a 10% commission so they will take 1.5 INJ from your 15 INJ reward over the course of the year. This helps compensate the validator for securely hosting their node infrastructure which can be quite expensive on an annual basis.

All validators and their respective commission rates can be found on the Equinox Staking dashboard once you sign in using your wallet here.

Rewards

The best avenue for determining staking rewards is to use the calculator on the Equinox Staking dashboard.

The baseline APY is 15%, but with the addition of exclusive APY boosts you can earn up to 29%. A detailed explanation of how to earn APY boosts can be found here.

As an added bonus, there will also be surprise drops for those who stake (details will be revealed in the coming days).

Here is a quick timeline

Final Thoughts

The Equinox public release marks the culmination of the community's ability to both execute and drive meaningful upgrades based on shared feedback.

With the addition of Equinox staking, Injective is well on its way to becoming the first fully decentralized derivatives exchange protocol.

About Injective

Injective is a lightning fast interoperable layer one blockchain optimized for building the premier Web3 finance applications. Injective provides developers with powerful plug-and-play modules for creating unmatched dApps. INJ is the native asset that powers Injective and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by prominent investors such as Jump Crypto, Pantera and Mark Cuban.