Skip to main content

How to stake

Stake INVEST and you get one of two things back, your choice at the moment you stake:

  • SHARES — rebasing. Your balance itself grows every epoch.
  • gINVEST — non-rebasing. Your balance stays fixed and its value per token grows instead. This is the voting token.

They are two views of the same position, and you can convert between them at any time without unstaking. Unstaking goes back to INVEST whenever you want; there is no lock.

Which one you want depends on what you are doing. gINVEST is the one to hold if you intend to vote, or if a rebasing balance would be awkward — for tax accounting, or for a contract that expects balances to sit still. Otherwise SHARES is the simpler thing to watch.

Rebases​

Emissions are distributed once per epoch — 8 hours at launch. Governance can change the epoch length, and two things follow from that:

  • A change takes effect at the next epoch, not mid-flight. The epoch you are in ends when it was always going to end.
  • Your emissions per day do not change with the cadence. When the epoch length moves, the emission rate moves with it, so a shorter epoch means proportionally smaller rebases, not more tokens.

Emissions come out of excess reserves. If there are none in a given epoch, the rebase pays nothing — it does not fail, and staking is never stuck.

Warm-up positions​

If governance has set a warm-up period, staking does not hand you SHARES immediately. It opens a warm-up position that matures a set number of epochs later.

There is no warm-up at launch — this matters only if governance switches one on.

A warm-up position still rebases while it waits, so you are not giving up emissions by warming up. You may hold several at once, and you can walk away from any of them at any time — matured or not — and get your original INVEST deposit back.

Does a position rebase while warming?Yes
Maximum open positions per account64
Maximum warm-up length30 epochs
Can you forfeit before maturity?Yes — refunds the deposit in full

You can claim every matured position at once, or one at a time.

By default nobody else can stake to your account or claim on your behalf. That is opt-in, and off unless you turn it on.

Where the numbers come from​

The staking contract always holds at least as much INVEST as it owes everyone — every SHARES balance in circulation plus every open warm-up position. That relationship is the thing staking is built around, and it is enforced on-chain rather than monitored.