New Staking Program Rewards for Season 6
HOPR’s sixth staking season begins on January 26th. As with all our previous seasons, season 6 brings changes and new ways to earn tokens. The focus this season is on node running, with a whole new kind of reward for people signed up to our network registry. So if you haven’t got your access NFT yet, there’s never been a better time to join the waitlist.
New Node Runner Rewards
In late September 2022, we publicly launched our Monte Rosa release with our new network registry feature which allows us to control the scaling of the HOPR network while we stress test it.
Since then, we’ve been slowly growing the network, and we recently hit the milestone of having 100 community-run nodes with high availability and low latency. You can see all the current network stats on our network dashboard.
Now that the network has been shown to be stable and scalable, it’s time to start transitioning towards the kind of incentive scheme which will power the permissionless HOPR network.
In staking Season 5, node runners have been receiving HOPR Boost NFTs for their Monte Rosa participation, with ranks based on their node uptime, as measured by our pingbot.
Starting with Season 6, node runners will be receiving additional HOPR tokens based on their node performance. These tokens will be sent directly to staking addresses as staked xHOPR tokens. So there will be no more waiting for NFTs, and rewards will be more granular.
How Will It Work?
The rewards will be issued in two week cycles. Every two weeks, we’ll announce a particular node metric or set of metrics that we’re measuring, and at the end of the period a budget of HOPR tokens will be divided between registered node addresses based on node performance.
For example, if we were measuring uptime, we would sum up all the pings for the period and divide the reward budget proportionally between nodes based on their ping count.
To start with, uptime will continue to be our primary metric, but as we progress through Season 6 we intend to use different and potentially more meaningful metrics, such as channel events or redeemed tickets.
We’ve already modified the dashboard at https://network.hoprnet.org to show certain network statistics, and we’ll be further updating the dashboard and the staking website at https://stake.hoprnet.org to give a clear overview of your expected and earned rewards.
We’ll also be expanding our Dune queries to give you access to deeper analytics data for the HOPR network, while more advanced users will be able to use Grafana to monitor their node performance. There’ll be more information on these updates throughout January as we head into Season 6.
And of course we’ll be continuing to issue new Network Registry NFTs based on the waitlist as we head towards our next goal of 250 nodes.
Why Are We Doing This?
A couple of reasons. One of our major goals for 2023 is to transition the staking program to be closer to the real incentive scheme which will power the completed HOPR protocol.
In the finished HOPR protocol, most earnings will come from protocol revenue, with additional rewards paid out via cover traffic from the HOPR Association. It’s this second set of rewards that the staking program must ultimately transition to, and one of the biggest differences is that cover traffic will have a monthly budget split between all participants, while the current staking program has a functionally limitless budget, since everything is calculated on an APR basis.
It’s not time to phase any of that out yet, but for this new set of rewards we will be moving to a budgeted system, so we can get a sense of how that affects the numbers and incentives for node running.
This system is also largely automated, which allows for more regular rewards and less overhead creating and distributing NFTs.
Will Stake Matter?
Rewards for each period will be allocated based purely on node running metrics. So in that sense this system disfavours whales, in keeping with most of our recent staking program adjustments.
On the other hand, stake is a factor in ordering the waitlist, and there is a minimum stake to participate, which will increase over time.
As we move closer and closer to the final version of HOPR incentives, stake will become increasingly relevant again, but for now we want to encourage participation and engagement, which isn’t always strongly correlated with token holdings.
What About The NFTs?
There will be more NFTs for current node runners, but once this system starts the node running rewards will replace the node running NFTs. There will still be NFTs during Season 6 for other HOPR activities, such as DAO participation. There are also other rewards planned for people who are on the waitlist but have not yet received an NFT.
As before, NFTs remain the dominant factor in ordering the waitlist, so their value is still high. As always, NFTs for the current and previous two seasons (so Seasons 4, 5 and 6) can still be staked and will pay out their APR boosts as usual. For now the node running rewards are just extra on top of the standard system.
When Does This Start? What Do I Need To Do To Prepare?
These rewards won’t start immediately with Season 6, to give people a chance to migrate their tokens. But expect the first reward period in the first half of February, with new reward periods every two weeks.
If you haven’t registered for the waitlist, you can do that here. For more information on the waitlist and how it works, head here.
And of course make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Telegram for the latest information.
Sebastian Bürgel,
HOPR Founder
Staking: https://stake.hoprnet.org
Network: https://network.hoprnet.org
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
