Decred

FAQ's

How to stake Decred (DCR)?

PoS is used in Decred to validate PoW mining work and approve or reject proposed rule changes to the consensus protocol. Decred holders time-lock, or stake DCR to obtain voting tickets. Ticket holders currently earn 5.80 DCR per block (1.16 per ticket * 5 tickets per block), or 30% of the block reward for voting.

Decred uses a lottery system to select the active voting tickets for a block from a pool based on pseudorandomness contained in the block header. Each ticket is randomly selected to vote from a current pool of 40,820 tickets using a Poisson distribution with an average selection time of ~ 28 days and a maximum time of ~ 142 days (4.7 months). If a ticket is not selected (0.5% chance), it expires and the original ticket price is refunded. Once a ticket has voted, missed or expired, the funds (ticket price plus the block reward minus the ticket fee) enter a 256 block (~ 20 hours) waiting period before being returned to the owner. Factoring in immaturity periods, Decred has an average staking lock-up of 30.74 days (29.07 days + 1.67 day immaturity period), though it can be as long as ~ 144 days.

Which network metrics do the rewards depend on?

The price to purchase a ticket is determined by a difficulty algorithm using the weighted average number of tickets purchased and the size of the eligible ticket pool in prior blocks. Every 144 blocks (~12 hours), the stake difficulty algorithm calculates a new ticket price designed to maintain a target pool size of 40,960 tickets.

Is there a risk to stake Decred?

Staking Decred is safe as long you protect your private keys. There is no risk of slashing.

What are Tickets?

PoS Voting Rights are assigned through tickets.

They can be purchased inside the wallet and the price is determined by an algorithm to keep the difficulty for getting a reward at the same rate. 

So the more people participate in the PoS Voting, the higher the Ticket Price will be.

Please check the current Ticket Price above. This is also the minimum to participate in the staking.

What are Decred Staking Pools?

Usually the wallet which has purchased a ticket has to be online once it has the right to vote for a block.

An easy way to circumvent this is by joining a Staking Pool. 

Inside the Wallet Tickets can be assigned to a Staking Pool, who will keep the ticket online 24/7.

The Decred Staking Pool will charge a small fee between 1–5% on the reward to offer this service.

How does the Decred PoW / PoS Hybrid Model work?

New blocks are discovered by the proof-of-work miners roughly every 5 minutes, and each time this occurs new decred are created.

This block reward is split three ways:

60% goes to the PoW miner who found the block

30% goes to the PoS voters on that block (6% to each of the 5 voters)

10% goes towards the development subsidy

The block reward started at 31.19582664 and it adjusts every 6,144 blocks (approximately 21.33 days) by reducing by a factor of 100/101.

5 Staker are basically double-checking each PoW-mined block, if it is written correctly.

Therefore they get rewarded with 6% of the Block Reward each.