How to maximize your ICP staking income is a problem that troubles many friends who enter the ICP circle, because ICP staking is not the same as the traditional POS staking system and involves many factors.

I will tell you in detail about the influencing factors of ICP staking, governance follow-up settings, convenient manual voting methods in OpenChat and a practical staking return calculator.

I believe that through this explanation, you will have an in-depth understanding of the methods to increase ICP staking returns, okay, let’s get started.

First of all, everyone needs to understand that staking income is calculated based on Voting Power.

Voting power =（ICP staked + maturity staked）x Dissolve Delay Bonus x Age Bonus

Therefore, we summarize the four factors involved based on this formula.

four factors

  • Amount of staked tokens

This is easy to understand. The more ICP you stake, the greater your income will be.

  • Staking duration

You can check the estimated annualized staking income through the governance page of the IC dashboard. The minimum period for obtaining staking income is half a year, and the annualized income is 9.6%. The longer the staking time, the higher the annualized income. At present, The highest 8-year staking return is 18.1%, and this annualized rate will gradually decrease as the ICP issuance decreases.

There is another concept here: whether the neuron is in the unlocked state. When you click Start Dissolving in the neuron, your neuron enters the state of countdown dissolving. Every day that passes, the pledge time will be reduced by one day. Until the time reaches 0, the ICP you staked can be taken out of the neuron.

If you have not unlocked neurons, your neurons will always maintain the pledge time you set. The advantage of this is that you can enjoy the bonus of age rewards, which I will talk about next.

IC Dashboard：

  • dashboard.internetcomputer.org/governance

  • age bonus

Starting from the first day of staking and locking, it continues to increase. The maximum staking reward rate increases to 1.25 times in 4 years. However, once you click to unlock, the age reward will return to 0, and you will not be able to enjoy the age reward bonus. So be careful when you click to unlock.

The screenshot above shows that the named neurons of 8YearGangDAO have an age reward of 4.9%, so the staking return is a little higher than the standard 8-year staking return of 18.1%, reaching 19%, which is the reason for this age reward bonus.

  • Compound interest or not

Neurons have the function of automatic compound interest. Once turned on, compound interest operations will be performed by default to maximize returns. I will share a calculator later to see the difference between compound interest returns and non-compound interest returns.

Vote to follow

Voting is crucial to obtain staking benefits, because ICP is not a standard POS reward system, but a governance-based reward system, which means that in addition to staking ICP tokens, you must participate in governance voting to receive rewards.

Therefore, after everyone stakes ICP, you must set up following neurons or vote manually. Otherwise, even if you stake 100,000 ICP, you will not get any benefits without voting. Therefore, the governance of neurons is very important. So how to correctly set the following of neurons? Let me give you an introduction.

I recommend that everyone follow 8YearGangDAO to vote for governance proposals and SNS CommunityFund. First, because the weight of governance proposals is higher than other proposals. Secondly, Dfinity and ICA often do not vote for governance proposals. If you follow Dfinity or ICA, they do not vote for governance. Proposal, if your neurons follow them, you will give up voting, which means that you will not be able to obtain benefits, resulting in greatly reduced benefits!

Therefore, I recommend that everyone follow the 8YearGangDAO neuron for the following reasons:

  • 8YearGangDAO is a named neuron truly built on the consensus of the 8Year staker community. Its mission is to speak out on behalf of the 8YearGang community and is also one of the backbone of IC;

  • 8YearGangDAO will analyze every governance proposal and publish it on the official blog and official Twitter. It has rich experience in governance;

  • 8YearGangDAO not only translates texts, we also comment on governance proposals and analyze the pros and cons of proposals for community reference. We are a true NNS governance builder;

  • We will treat every governance proposal carefully to ensure that we do not miss the vote for every proposal and ensure everyone's staking income.

For other types of proposals, we recommend that you follow ICA or Dfinity.

How to vote manually in OpenChat

If you want to vote manually, it will be troublesome to log in to Neuron to vote every time. Is there an easier way to vote? Of course, if you are an OpenChat user, you can vote on NNS proposals directly in OpenChat by simply setting a few steps.

Below I will introduce the method to you:

  • First log in to OpenChat, find the User ID in your Profile Settings, which is your own Canister ID, and copy it;

  • Log in to NNS, add a Hot keys to your neuron, paste the ID just now, and click OK;

  • After searching for the NNS Proposals group in OpenChat, join;

  • Click the filter button in the group configuration and only open Governance and SNS CommunityFund. In this way, every time there are these two types of proposals, you can directly vote manually in OpenChat. OpenChat does not need to log in every time, which is much simpler than NNS. You'll be able to vote manually soon.

Staking income calculator

Depending on the amount of pledged ICP, the length of time and whether compound interest is compounded, many friends do not know how to calculate future income. Here I will share with you a tool to facilitate calculation.

This table is calculated starting from May 11, 2022. The staking yield and the final yield combined with age rewards will be displayed for you day by day. The most important thing is that the 8-year compound interest pledge and 8-year non-compound interest are displayed respectively. The difference between pledges.

We can see from the table that if you initially stake 1,000 ICP, you will receive a total of 3,186.75 ICP by May 11, 2029, under compound interest mode, and you will be rewarded with 1.24 ICP per day.

In non-compounding mode, you will earn a total of 2159.27 ICP, at which point you can earn 0.39 ICP per day.

Please refer to this Excel table:

  • docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vW9v4MnJIehLthY17gors0HjRWNG7b3Gp7PegriC8jI/edit?usp=sharing

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