Boost Staking Rewards By Up To 3x In The Active Staking Alpha

Active Staking will be launching in alpha and is still under active development. Any information such as numbers or formulas contained in this article is subject to change.

TL;DR: By actively liking new content on Subsocial, stakers of SUB can increase their staking rewards by 50% or more.

The initial launch of Creator Staking only featured Lazy Staking, where SUB holders stake towards Registered Creators (by locking their tokens for at least 7 days), and earn rewards for themselves and their favorite creators every day, without any effort.

Active Staking will be joining the Creator Staking system to supercharge network growth by rewarding stakers that actively use the network and interact with others, while also incentivizing new authors to join Subsocial.

Stakers that participate in Active Staking will be able to increase their total rewards up to 3x compared to simply Lazy Staking. Make sure to read the whole article to see how you can take part in the alpha phase of Active Staking!

But how does the system work?

The Active Staking System

Participating in Active Staking requires staking SUB, and actively liking content on Subsocial every day, in order to boost your rewards, and distribute more rewards to authors that you like. The more SUB you have staked, the higher your rewards, and the more rewards you can distribute to authors as well. Let’s look at an example to see how it works in practice.

If Alice stakes 700 SUB in Lazy Staking, she will have 700 points that she can use in Active Staking, which will be reset daily (if she staked more, she would have more points). To maximize her point usage, she will need to use all 700 points everyday. In other words, Alice will have 4,900 (700 x 7 days) points to use during the week, but she can only use 700 per day. If she uses only 600 points on Monday, and 700 every other day of the week, she will only have used 4,800 points, and will miss out on some of her rewards.

In the current version of Active Staking, users will need to like at least 10 posts per day to maximize their rewards - each like will use 10% of their points.

Every post that Alice likes during the day will increase her Active Staking rewards pot (which is separate from her Lazy Staking rewards) by 10%, up to 100% (this may be changed to, for example, a 5% increase per like instead of 10%, which would mean users need to like at least 20 posts per day to maximize rewards). Every week, rewards will be distributed to stakers and authors. In order for Alice to maximize her rewards pot for the week, she will need to like 10 posts per day, every day of the week, for a total of 70+ during the week.

Alice’s reward pot will be split 50/50 between Alice and authors of the posts that she liked. If she liked more than 70 posts that week, her points will be split accordingly:

• 700 points / 10 likes → 70 points per post she liked
• 700 points / 20 likes → 35 points per post she liked

Thus, she can support more authors and content, but with fewer rewards for each particular author. Alice's personal rewards will not be changed regardless of how many posts she liked, as long as she liked at least 10 per day.

If Alice earned 100 SUB in Lazy Staking rewards the previous week, and liked enough posts to maximize her rewards pot, she will receive an extra 50 SUB, for a total of 150 SUB. The other 50 SUB will be distributed to the authors of the posts that Alice liked, based on points.

But wait, there’s more!

The Magical Reward Multiplier

The Active Staking system includes a feature called the Reward Multiplier, which enhances the rewards you earn based on overall staker activity (liking posts). Here’s how it works in simple terms:

The Active Staking Reward Multiplier boosts Active Staking rewards based on total Active Staker activity. Initially, Alice’s Active Staking rewards are the same size as her Lazy Staking rewards, e.g., lazy rewards of 100 SUB will also give her active rewards of 100 SUB.

The multiplier then increases her Active Staking rewards depending on the amount of Active Staking activity across the entire network, using the multiplier formula: 1 divided by last week's total points usage (as a %) across the entire network.

For instance, if 750 out of 1,000 points were used (75%), the multiplier is 1.333x (1/0.75), raising her 100 SUB Active Staking rewards to 133 SUB. She will get 50% of this (66.5 SUB), with the rest shared among the authors of the content she liked during the past week. The multiplier will cap at 4x, corresponding to 25% point usage. This system encourages daily interaction and highlights potential new Registered Creators based on their content's popularity.

As another rough example, if there are 100,000 Lazy Stakers, and only 100 of them are Active, it is likely (though it depends on the specific points calulcations) that all 100 Active Stakers will receive the 4x bonus. If instead, 90,000 of them are Active, the bonus multipler for Active Stakers will be somewhere around 1.2x.

For more details on how Active Staking works, you can read the documentation.

Rules

Points are only used when liking posts that were posted within the last 7 days by authors that have a Subsocial Usernames and staked SUB. Liking a post from an author without a Subsocial Username and some stake will not increase your rewards pot, and authors cannot like their own posts.

Rewards

Existing staking rewards are not decreasing, but active users can now earn additional rewards. The extra tokens will likely come from inflation in the future, however, for the alpha they may be taken from the Subsocial treasury (310M tokens). The first month of the Active Staking alpha will use up to 803,520 SUB, depending on the percent of stakers that become active. In the next week, an on-chain poll will be held to determine the source of these tokens.

Joining The Alpha

To join the waitlist for the Active Staking alpha, you will need to join the Active Stakers chat on Grill.chat, log in with a Polkadot identity and enable at least one notification option. Make sure your account has some SUB staked too!

Active Staking will turbocharge activity and engagement on Subsocial in preparation for the launch of FanFair in a few months, and provide a great funnel for new creators to show their worth. Make sure to join the Active Stakers chat on Grill, and we’ll see you on-chain!