Navcoin: The Ultimate Guide To Staking

Navio
Navio Collective
Published in
8 min readJul 1, 2020

When it comes to your money, the only thing more important than spending it wisely, is investing it wisely. With international interest rates for savers slashed, and inflation about to fly through the penthouse roof, nurturing our nest eggs to maturation through traditional financial vehicles is a long and slow road nowadays.

What features does Navcoin possess then, which make it an ideal safe haven for steering our savings through these unprecedented times?

Interest(ing) Rates

Let’s get right to the point — there is no minimum amount of NAV required to begin staking. The rate of rewards you will receive is dependent on two things; the size of your stake and the number of other’s coins staking on the network. This is because rewards are generated by the process of validating blocks (verifying user’s transactions on the blockchain).

As Navcoin has a quite predictable and fixed count of blocks per day, staking turns into a competition for being their creator. For those who begin staking sooner, when fewer competitors “fight” for those blocks, there are more chances of finding a valid one, hence more rewards to receive. This way of working gives incentive to early adopters who provide stability to the network. Your chances of building a block will increase with the amount of coins you hold. Therefore, the more you stake, the more blocks you are able to validate, and the more rewards you can receive. For each block that your wallet finds, you will receive 2 NAV as a reward. Combining these factors, staking with Navcoin can offer an ROI upward of 6.9% per year (https://static-rewards.nav.community/).

Easy in, easy out, easy shake-it-all-about

Many other crypto investments offering POS returns require the user to lock their coins for a period of time, similar to stocks or bonds, for example. When it comes to accessing your NAV though, there are no lock-ins or penalties for making a withdrawal. Your funds remain liquid and accessible to you at all times, whatever is your staking method.

Your first choice

Getting set up with staking on Navcoin is a hassle-free experience. You have the option to choose between running your own node or using a pool. A pool is a server operated by a third party, who lends its technical resources in exchange of a fee taken from the rewards you would receive. Navcash, Whisper Wallet and NEXT Wallet all offer this option.

You can, of course, negate the fee and receive the whole reward by running a node of your own with only the bare minimum of technical-know-how. All you need is a home PC (2CPU 8GB ram) — or a VPS. If ever you run into issues, the helpful Navcoin community is always available to lend a hand. And by running your own node, you help to keep the network decentralised. The more nodes the network has, the more resilient it will be against external attacks, hence increasing the security. And anyone staking NAV (with or without running a node) has the opportunity to participate in the governance of the project. By holding NAV, you become a part of the project and a say in its future direction.

Taking back control

We have put a lot of effort into making the process of running your own node as simple as possible. We will teach you how to do it with a rented VPS, which will not require you to have your computer turned on 24 hours.

The first step would be to get a VPS. We recommend you to make this step in Hetzner, a German provider which is famous for its low prices and high quality service. Simply create an account there and log in. Choose ‘Add Server’, select Ubuntu 20.04 and CX31 (2vCPU and 10GB RAM). The costs are as low as 10,59€ per month.

Once the server is created, you will see the details to access it over SSH. Connect to it and one command will be enough to set it up.

curl -s https://index.nav.community/setup.sh|sudo -E bash

It will take about 30 minutes to complete.

You will be prompted with two important values when it’s finished: your staking address and the address of your Electrum node. Take note of them, because we will need them for the next step.

NavCash

Now we will have to download NavCash. You can find versions for Windows, Linux or MacOS. When you launch it for the first time, you will be asked about which server you want to connect to. If you did set up your own and have an Electrum node address you can introduce it manually here, otherwise just check “Select server automatically” and click next.

The next window will ask you for a name for your new wallet. We will create two different wallets. The first will be a wallet which you will use for voting in the Navcoin DAO. We will call this wallet “voting”. Although creating a voting wallet is optional, we highly recommend you to do it. Isn’t it cool to have your voice on the governance of a project like Navcoin? ;)

We need to select the right wallet type. Which in this case is “Voting wallet for cold staking”.

You would have to create a new seed if it’s the first time you are going through this process. If you already created a voting wallet before and you would like to recover it, you’ll see the option to enter the seed words to reconstruct your wallet.

You will see the voting interface when the process completes:

Now, after correctly creating and backing up the seed words from the voting wallet, you need to create a second wallet which will be used for storing the NAV you want to stake. This is called the spending wallet. You will only access this wallet when you want to spend the coins.

In the menu File, select “New/Restore”. It will open a new window with the same wizard we’ve seen before. As a name, you can write “spending”. In the next step choose “Standard wallet”.

You will be asked if you want to enable staking.

If you don’t want to set up your own node, and want to use the pool from NavCash, you should choose the first option. The staking address will then be filled in automatically.

If you otherwise have an address from another pool that you’d wish to delegate your coins to, or you did set up your own node, you should choose “Yes, but I want to specify the staking address” and paste in the pool’s address.

After this, you will be asked for your voting address. You can get this from the tab “Voting address” in the voting wallet we created earlier. You should also deposit some coins in this address, in order to fund your future votes.

Complete the rest of the steps, and you will be set. In this case, for the spending wallet, you can also use a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S to secure your keys and this is something we strongly recommend you to do.

Lastly, you will need to send your NAV to the spending wallet to start staking. Click “Create Address” in the receive tab, and you will see the address where you can receive the coins.

Now you can sit and relax. Even when your wallet is closed, or your computer turned off, you will still earn rewards and your balance will grow.

NEXT Wallet

NEXT Wallet offers a great staking alternative. The process is the same for both mobile and desktop. Download the app and create a new wallet or load up an existing one by entering your seed phrase. Deposit NAV to your wallet by going to the “Receive” tab and sending coins to the shown address or by scanning the QR code.

Once you wallet it filled up, go to the “Staking” tab (top bar on desktop) or “Cold Staking” (side menu on mobile). Select “Start Staking” and confirm the pop-up message. A cold staking address will be created for your wallet and your balance will be automatically transferred to the Cold Staking address. Done!

Whisper Wallet

Another option is staking via Whisper Wallet mobile. Create an account by following the detailed tutorial here or load an existing wallet by entering your seed phrase.

There’s two ways of filling your staking wallet. The first and easiest way is to transfer (“Move to another account”) public funds to your NavCash Pool staking account. Otherwise you may also simply send NAV to your staking wallet’s address. Should you want to stop staking coins, you may transfer or send them back to your public or private accounts at any time.

Alternatively, to connect your own node to the wallet, tap Settings in the top right corner of your Whisper main screen and select “Staking nodes”. Tap the pencil icon and type in the name and address under “Add new node”. Your node will now be visible under “Accounts” on the home screen.

We wish you a great time watching your balance grow!

Find out more: navcoin.org

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Navio
Navio

Written by Navio

Empower your privacy. Embrace your freedom.

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