Akropolis open-source development — Staking Portal

Dear Akropolis community,

As mentioned in our latest update, our development on Substrate is going fast and steady.

The Staking Portal is now ready and open for everyone who wanted to have a simple UI for staking and nominating nodes on Substrate.

What is it?

Crypto ecosystem products are mostly built for product developers or tech-savvy people — keeping users with high-level knowledge due to complexity, extensive documentation, and technical language.

Oftentimes manuals and technical specifications are not developer-friendly as well, deeming some products hard to use, no matter how needed they are.

As Polkadot is approaching mainnet, the ecosystem needs tools with better UX aimed towards users from all backgrounds. To this end, we decided to build the staking portal with a simple UI/UX for the new users who want to stake or nominate for validators on Substrate-based chains.

How does it work?

You only need an account on Polkadot and Polkadot-js for signing transactions. Here is the link to the portal, as well as the link to Polkadot-js extension and a useful manual for setting up an account on Polkadot.

Please note that currently, Polkadot uses NPoS (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) as its mechanism for selecting the validator set. It is designed to maximize chain security. To learn more, please refer to the Polkadot Wiki.

What you can do with our staking portal:

• Check your overall balance and amount of all bonded tokens — as well as check each wallet connected
• Check the current validators set, their commission, how much is staked for them, etc. and decide whether you want to nominate them or not.
• Check and edit stake conditions — add/withdraw funds, edit the list of nominees, stop nominating, redeem funds, etc.

Why should I use it?

The existing Polkadot-js extension is a universal tool for calling functions and methods of various Substrate-based nodes, and therefore it is quite complex and developer-oriented. Our staking portal offers an intuitive, simple and user-friendly interface where everyone can check the current set of validators, nominate a validator, stop staking, etc.

As it is an open-source solution, any project developing on Substrate will be able to adapt it to their needs.

We will be sharing more on our Substrate development in the future updates — so stay tuned!