O3 Desktop: Claiming ONG
Now that the Ontology main net has been launched, and you’ve swapped all your NEP5 ONT tokens for main net ONT, let’s start claiming that sweet sweet ONG.
If you don’t already have the O3 desktop app, please see our setup guides before continuing.
What is ONG?
ONG is the utility token of the Ontology ecosystem, and is used to pay transaction fees for things like sending assets. For those familiar with the NEO ecosystem, ONG is to GAS, as ONT is to NEO, in the fact that ONG is allocated to ONT holders over time.
Precisely, for each block that occurs on the Ontology chain, a total of 5 ONG is allocated to all ONT holders. To calculate the amount of ONG you will earn over time for the amount of ONT your hold you can use this calculator.
How does claiming work?
While ONG is allocated to your address with each passing block, this doesn’t mean that it is readily available for your to transfer right away. This is where claiming comes into the picture. In order to get a grasp of how exactly claiming works, we need to first understand the different stages involved in the distribution of ONG.
Unbound ONG
With each block ONG is allocated to every address holding ONT. This amount has been in a sense “reserved” for this address, but is not yet available for claiming or sending.
Unclaimed ONG
Whenever ONT or ONG is sent or received from an address, including to itself, the amount in the Unbound ONG bucket gets moved to the Unclaimed ONG bucket. The amount in the Unclaimed bucket is ready to be claimed by the address in a single transaction. This Unclaimed amount is not readily available to send until it is claimed.
Available ONG
The amount of ONG that you have claimed or received from others in to your address is available to be spent at any time.
The costs of claiming
Every transaction on the Ontology network has a fee of 0.01 ONG associated to it. This fee applies to both sending assets and claiming. So in the case of moving your ONG from the Unbound bucket to the Unclaimed bucket, unless someone sends you assets or you send assets, this will remained unchanged. Therefore, to trigger by yourself, you can send yourself any amount of ONT, and this will cost 0.01 ONG.
Once the amount is in the Unclaimed bucket, you can then submit a claim submission which will also cost 0.01 ONG.
So in total, to move ONG from Unbound to Available without receiving assets from another account, this process will cost you a total of 0.02 ONG.
How often should I claim?
In order to protect users from syncing and claiming amount that are less than the transaction fee itself, our wallets disallow claims that would be detrimental to a users holdings. While we allow sync & claims for Unclaimed amounts over 0.02 ONG, and straight claims for amounts above 0.01 ONG, it is generally advised to hold off on claiming your ONG as long as possible (it’s not going anywhere 😉).
Lets take a look at the following examples.
Example 1 — Able to claim
A sample wallet has the following amounts:
- Unbound: 0.025 ONG
- Unclaimed: 0.000123 ONG
- Available: 0.02 ONG
In this case, the user is able to perform both a sync and then a claim transaction to move the Unbound balance into the Unclaimed bucket, and then the Unclaimed amount in to their Available balance. However, the amount to be synced and claimed is not the optimal amount, as shown below in the results of performing this claim.
- Unbound: 0.000000111 ONG
- Unclaimed: 0.0 ONG
- Available: 0.025123 ONG
Net claim: 0.005123 ONG
Even though there was 0.025123 ONG in total to be claimed, the result was that the net claim was only 0.005123 ONG. In this scenario, the user was able to claim, but had to use the majority of the amount itself to pay the transaction fees.
As such, it is advised to wait as long as possible to claim your ONG.
Example 2 — Wasted Sync or Claim
A sample wallet has the following amounts:
- Unbound: 0.005 ONG
- Unclaimed: 0.000123 ONG
- Available: 0.01 ONG
This user has enough ONG to either sync their Unbound ONG to Unclaimed ONG, or to claim their Unclaimed ONG to make it Available.
Result of syncing:
- Unbound: 0.000000021 ONG
- Unclaimed: 0.005123 ONG
- Available: 0.0 ONG
Result of claiming:
- Unbound: 0.005 ONG
- Unclaimed: 0.0 ONG
- Available: 0.005123 ONG
As shown above, executing either of these 2 transactions will ultimately result in a loss for the user, and they will be stuck with insufficient funds to perform any future syncs or claims. This user will then have to ask someone for more ONG, or buy more ONG from an exchange (CoinMex or Bit-Z).
Conclusion
We hope that this article has helped you to better understand how claiming ONG works in the Ontology main net, and will help you to make more informed decisions when thinking about whether to claim your ONG or not.
