Everscale

FAQ's

How to stake EVER

There are several ways to earn a return on your EVER, including running your own validator, or nominating your tokens to various Depools or using the Boosted Stake option.

For the best security and control over your funds, we recommend using a compatible Hardware Wallet. To nominate your tokens to a DePool, you should ensure they are stored on your hardware wallet or EverSurf wallet, and then follow these steps below:

Step 1: Open your EverSurf wallet and click on ‘Everstaking’ on the right hand side panel. 

Step 2: Click ‘Choose a DePool’ and select a DePool from the table. If you are uncertain about how to choose a DePool, refer to our FAQ for guidance on selecting a DePool.

Step 3: Once you have chosen a DePool, you can see information such as the lock-up period, minimum stake, commission rate and other metrics. Once you are satisfied, click ‘Stake’.

Step 4: Enter the amount of tokens you would like to stake and click ‘Yes’. Finally, click ‘Confirm’ and sign the transaction.


Please note that there is also a Boosted Staking option, we outline how to use that staking option below.

Please see here for a more detailed step-by-step tutorial.

Do I need to maintain my staking in any way?
Once you have delegated your EVER, there are things you need to consider going forward. 
• Firstly, keep in mind that rewards are auto-compounded, but you may disable reinvestment at any time. A part of the ordinary stake can also be withdrawn. The remainder of the stake will keep being reinvested in this case. However, it’s important to consider that each transaction will incur gas fees, these fees are normally under 0.5 EVER, so you may want to use our Everscale Staking Calculator to determine the optimal re-staking frequency for your amount of EVER.
• As a participant in the Everscale ecosystem, you will have the opportunity to vote on Everscale Governance Proposals. While your contribution and vote are highly valuable to the ecosystem, it won’t affect your rewards.
• It is important to periodically check on the performance of the DePool you have selected to ensure they are still performing well and have not raised commissions unreasonably.
How do I choose Everscale Validators (DePools)? 

It is essential for users to stake their PoS tokens with a dependable and highly performant validator, which is why we have rolled out our Verified Provider Program in June 2022. Through this program, we thoroughly scrutinise potential validators, evaluating factors such as security measures, their on-chain reliability, their provider setup, and value-added services for the whole ecosystem.

You can find more information about the providers that have been verified in  VPP Batch 1 and Batch 2. Validators that are part of the VPP will have a blue checkmark displayed next to their names on our website. 

On Everscale network a DePool is run by an underlying validator, meaning that one DePool corresponds to one validator. When choosing a DePool to delegate to, there are numerous factors to take into account:

DePool Fee: When staking your tokens with a DePool, the fee represents the percentage of your rewards that the DePool will retain for themselves. A high fee can result in lower returns for you, while a low fee may lead to financial difficulties for the DePool in the future. It’s important to note that DePools may change their fees at any time.

Number of Users: A DePool may be more popular or trusted if it has a higher number of nominators than others.

DePools Self-Staked balance (Validator Assurance): A DePool with a high amount of staked tokens likely has more incentive to continue operating their services as they have more to lose than those with low self-staked balances. 

Current Status: You can do more investigation into whether your DePool is active or not by clicking on the DePool name or address in the Everscan Block Explorer. 

Network Share (Stakes): You typically don’t want to choose a validator with the highest network share or a validator with a low network share. Nominating to the most popular validators increases centralisation risks within the network as those validators will have more say in governance and a larger share of the blocks. A validator with a low network share, might not be profitable and hence increases the risk of them discontinuing their services.

Performance: Make sure you pick a validator with the highest possible performance (Least downtime). Our recommendation is to pick only those that have an uptime of > 99%.

How are the staking rewards generated?

The Staking Rewards on EVER consist of network rewards:

• Inflation on the Everscale Network (Block Rewards): Everscale issues approximately two million new EVER tokens each month as validator rewards. The reward schedule will remain fixed until EVER reaches its ~ 5B supply cap. This implies that EVER holders who choose not to stake will get diluted over time.

Please note that the total annual rewards are divided by all active stakers; hence, as the amount of staked tokens goes up, the reward rate goes down. You’re welcome to use our Everscale Staking Calculator to get a better understanding of how these factors can impact your rewards.

What are the risks to staking EVER?

We strive to make staking as safe and transparent as possible, however, it’s important to consider factors that may influence whether a particular staking option is appropriate for you.

Slashing risk: When delegating to a DePool, there is a risk of being partially slashed if the validator misbehaves. Remember that DePool owners need to put up their own self-staked balance (Validator Assurance) to set up a validator. In the case of misbehavior and slashing, a DePool owner’s funds will be lost first. Only if they are not enough to cover the losses of the total stake, will the funds of other pool participants be affected. So, the higher the validator assurance, the more the validator owner is motivated to ensure proper operation of their node and the safer the stakes of all other participants are.

Unbonding risk: When staking EVER tokens, there is a lockup period depending on the DePool you chose. This means that investors will not be able to sell their tokens immediately, but instead need to wait a period of time after initiating unbonding before they can be traded again. This is something to keep in mind when deciding to stake, as crypto markets are highly volatile. Consider keeping funds liquid if you do not intend to hold EVER long-term. 

Protocol security risks: There is an inherent risk that the protocol could contain unknown bugs, this risk applies not only to staking but also the investment in EVER.

This list is not exhaustive and other risks may apply.

What is EVER?
EVER is the native token of the Everscale network that is used to carry out the key functions of the platform as detailed below:
Token Utilities
• Staking: Users can temporarily lock up EVER to contribute to the security of the network. In return for the service, stakers are rewarded with staking rewards.
• Network Fees: EVER is used for network fees. Each transaction processed by the network requires a small fee to be paid by users.
• Governance: EVER is used to vote on governance proposals on the network. Only staked tokens are eligible to be used for governance voting. The amount of voting power is measured in terms of stake.
What consensus algorithm does Everscale use? 

Everscale consensus (dabbed Catchain by its author) is a Proof-of-stake consensus algorithm from a family of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithms. It includes the consensus algorithm as well as a protocol for message exchange between validator nodes in a network. The consensus mechanism implemented on Everscale is called Soft Majority Fault Tolerance (SMFT) Consensus. The SMFT allows practically subsecond finality, practical security guarantees of more than that of Bitcoin (a 99% thread fault tolerance) and does not limit the protocol unlimited scalability.

There are generally two classes of POS consensus algorithms. First (CBC Casper, Ouroboros, etc.) when block generation is very easy but forks are allowed with subsequent process of complex agreement on their resolution among the network participants. Catchain belongs to another class — the class of algorithms where block generation agreement is hard but forks are rare or impossible (PBFT, Tendermint, Algorand etc.)

From a life-cycle perspective, the Catchain consensus includes the following stages:

• stake-based validator elections
• validation session startup
• several block generation rounds

Each block generation round has limited time and consists of several attempts. So, if validators fail to agree during all available attempts, the round is skipped and the new block is not committed to the blockchain. In the course of a round, validators exchange messages about block candidates generated by collators, validate these candidates, select vote candidates, vote for them and finally commit the elected block to the blockchain.

To prevent consensus monopolization, the algorithm uses a round-robin role transfer from validator to the validator. So each round and each attempt several validators are assigned to generate blocks and one validator is assigned to propose a block for voting. As validators change roles from an attempt to attempt, the consensus mechanism cannot be blocked by a failure to get a decision from the majority of validators. The key idea here is to make sure that 2/3 of validator votes for a particular block are actually cast. The 2/3 cutoff threshold is a theoretical value that allows making sure that the decision via consensus is made.

To improve the overall network performance, partial cross-node message synchronization is used. It means that any validator only interacts with a randomly selected subset of validators and uses data obtained from them to make a decision during a validation round. This data also includes aggregated transitive data received from other validators and signed by their signatures.

What are the tokenomics of EVER?

EVER is an inflationary token with a fixed supply rate. Each month, two million new EVER tokens are issued as validator rewards until EVER reaches a cap of five billion tokens.

Initial token distribution

The Initial token distribution of EVER is as follows:

• 85% is allocated to Partnerships and Adoption
• 10% is allocated to Developers
• 5% is allocated to Validators

This was initially issued in the “Declaration of Decentralization”. In November 2021 the community voted and approved the proposal to burn 3 billion tokens from the Partnerships and Adoption allocation to set the foundation for the new direction of the project. This reduced the supply of EVER to just over 2 billion.