Introducing the Injective Equinox Staking Rewards

Today, Injective launches the reward mechanisms that will govern Injective’s Equinox Staking testnet. This article serves as an overview of the reward design process as well as explanations behind the various ways to earn rewards.

Introduction

Equinox staking aims to showcase the true breadth of Injective’s staking capabilities.

Traditionally, incentivized staking programs are events that only target validators. However, members of the Injective community reject this notion and wish for the entire userbase to be able to participate within the staking program from day one.

The paramount objective of the Equinox Staking Competition is to secure and maximally decentralize the operation of every component of the Protocol prior to the launch of the official Injective mainnet. To this end, stakers will play a vital role in the network through participation in actions such as delegation and governance.

Whereas the Solstice Trading Competition sought to familiarize the community with the derivatives exchange protocol, the aim with Equinox Staking is to narrow the knowledge gap for individuals who are ready to participate in the full scope of the Injective network consensus upon mainnet launch.

Reward Design Process

The reward design was devised based on a comprehensive analysis of Injective’s staking process. In the end, goals for Equinox Staking were the following:

Properly rewarding active participants on the network in a fair structure
Enabling both validators and delegators to take part in governance and listing
Maintaining creatively across Injective so that new ideas can be applied to the ecosystem
Rewarding participants for finding vulnerabilities or bugs within the testnet
Amplifying Equinox by adding gamification mechanisms into the reward design

*Please note that these rewards only refer to the Equinox staking testnet, so reward parameters will change upon the launch of mainnet

Equinox Rewards

Delegator rewards will consist of a baseline APY and APY boosts.

Baseline APY

Earning the baseline APY (3%) requires delegators to complete the following tasks:

Transferring INJ (ERC-20 version) to the Injective Chain
Delegating INJ to a validator

APY Boosts

APY boosts can be earned through completing the following tasks:

Claim and re-stake (+0.5% APY Boost)

Rewards are not going to be automatically staked, so you must take some time to re-stake your rewards.

Un-staking does not mean un-staking your entire holding but rather a small portion of your holdings. For example if you have 100 INJ staked you only need to un-stake 1 INJ in order to get this boost.

Please note that claiming, re-staking, and un-staking must ALL be done in order to get this 0.5% APY boost.

Re-delegate (+0.5% APY Boost)

This means re-delegating INJ to a different validator. Only a portion of your INJ has to be re-delegated. So if you have 100 INJ, only 1 INJ has to be re-delegated for example.

Participate in 2+ Governance votes (+2% APY Boost)

Injective will be governed via a DAO structure. During the Equinox staking process some governance votes will be carried out such as new listings. Participating in these voting processes will be a critical component of Injective moving forward.

Propose a new market for listing (+3% APY Boost)

New listing proposals will come from the community. New proposals will need specifications of all market parameters and rationalizations behind the parameters you chose. For this testnet process, determining whether a proposal is sufficient will depend on the judgement of the Injective team.

Further details on how market proposals operate will be released soon as well.

Have a proposed market successfully listed (+5% APY Boost)

After you create a successful proposal, the community will be able to vote on whether they wish to list that market. This APY boost is earned after you successfully win the voting process.

Special epic tasks (+3% APY Boost)

Throughout the Equinox Staking testnet, some special tasks will be held to further test the network. This can include aspects such as finding bugs or taking part in new optimizations.

A New Age of Decentralization

Equinox Staking is introducing an entirely new model of incentivized staking in which both validators and delegators can participate. This provides unique avenues for testing both the staking features and the governance processes that will be integral for Injective moving forward.

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.