Mina is the first blockchain encryption protocol with a constant block size. The Mina protocol compresses the entire blockchain into a snapshot as the size of a Twitter tweet. And this means no matter how many transactions are being processed, it’s still convenient for people to verify the blockchain and the access is available for everyone.
Holders of MINA token can store their MINA in wallet and delegate them to nodes to obtain the BP rewards. There are two types of tokens for holding, and one is locked tokens: those tokens were for the early private sales and rewards for early participation in the MINA testnet, which are locked in the address and will be released linearly. The other one is non-locked tokens: generally, we consider that all tokens that can be transferred are non-locked tokens. For example, tokens that purchased from Coinlist are all non-locked tokens. For the non-locked tokens, it won’t be allowed to have even one single locked token in the address.
Except transferrable or not, the other difference between locked tokens and non-locked tokens is the rewards of staking. The BP rewards for the locked tokens in staking is 720 MINA, but for the non-locked tokens it would be 1,440 MINA, and the APY is 24% theoretically (current standard).
Regarding staking, there are a few points need to be clarified:
- The tokens that users delegated to the nodes won’t be locked. You can transfer them at any time, but at the cost of not getting the rewards.
- The reward of staking is not fixed, it depends on the performance of the Block Producer node in the current cycle, which is mainly determined by the stability of the Block Producer node, so it is very important to choose a stable and reliable Block Producer node.
- You don’t need to fill in the quantity of tokens you want to stake. When you execute the delegation, it means you are delegating all your tokens to this node.
- You only need to stake once. After this no matter you transferred your tokens in or out, you won’t need to re-delegate, and this only affects the weight of the staking.
- Mina’s staking rewards will be distributed offline, which means after you delegated your tokens to a node, your staking rewards won’t appear right away in your account; they will be distributed to you offline after a certain epoch by the node through the agreed rate.
- Mina’s snapshot period T (epoch) is 14 days. After you completed your delegation, the rewards will start calculating after T+2. Usually nodes will distribute the rewards of T+2 after the end the T+2 and at the beginning of T+3. For example, now there are 10 days left before the end of this period T; after you completed your delegation, you need to wait (10 days + 14 days + 14days) to receive the rewards, no matter which nodes you delegated your tokens to.
- Best time for delegation. It's not the best time to do delegation near the end of an epoch. You must delegate before the last 290 slots of each epoch, approximately 1 day. According to Mina algorithm, delegation before the last 290 slots that took effect before the end of the Epoch will be successfully snapshotted in that Epoch.
A picture to help you understand all the timelines about Mina staking.
In this article, we will take the Chrome extension of Auro Wallet as an example to show you how to delegate your MINA to the nodes and get rewards.
- Go to https://www.aurowallet.com and download a wallet, which is available for the browsers of Chrome, Firefox, and Android/iOS phones. Open the wallet and select [Create Wallet]
- Create a password after agreeing to the [Terms of Use], then enter the page of [Backup Mnemonic Phrase], and read the instructions. Be sure to back up the mnemonic phrase, and it’s the only way to retrieve your wallet, if you changed your device or the device failed. You will never be able to retrieve your wallet if you lost your mnemonic phrase.
- After backing up the mnemonic phrase, you will see the the page that congrats you’ve created a wallet successfully.
- Go to the homepage, and you can check your wallet address by tapping the button [Receive]
- This address can be used to receive MINA from exchanges or other wallets. Note: memo is not required when transfer tokens to the wallet.
- After deposited tokens into this wallet, you can tap the button [Staking] at the bottom to enter the staking page. You can check the node list by tapping [Go to staking].
- Select the node you want to delegate, and click [Next]. If tokens you are holding are unlocked tokens, we recommend you to delegate them to Auro Wallet, and we explained it at the end of the article.
- You don’t need to fill in the memo, go directly to the next step by tapping [Next].
- Go to the page [Send Details] to confirm the information then tapping the button [Confirm].
- Your staking is completed after the following page appears.
Auro Wallet is a supercharged pool. The purpose of building this pool is to guarantee the BP rewards will be 1,440 MINA tokens with the APY of 24% theoretically.
Auro Wallet node only accepts the delegation of non-locked MINA tokens. Youn won’t get any rewards if you delegated Time-locked tokens to Auro Wallet.
If you are using Auro wallet, you will see Auro Wallet node at the top of the node list, and the staking address is:
B62qq3TQ8AP7MFYPVtMx5tZGF3kWLJukfwG1A1RGvaBW1jfTPTkDBW6
