What is Staking?
Look, we all want to make some extra money. There is nothing shameful in stating this. Some people start businesses, some become freelance bloggers, some start investing in cryptocurrencies — we all have different ways. The result, however, is one and it is PROFIT.
Crypto trading is a great way to earn yourself some coins, but it is not for everybody. So, the blockchain-based currencies provide a different way for people to start earning. This way is called Staking.
What is Proof of Stake?PoS (short for Proof of Stake) is an algorithm some of the currencies used for creating new blocks and adding them to the blockchain. You hold some existing coins, stake a new block and the whole thing helps to validate the transactions. The more coins you have, the more powerful of a staker (and creator/validator) you are.
How does staking work?
Unlike the usual way of creating the blocks — look at Bitcoin, where transactions are processed with a mining node, PoS protocol chooses their “influencers” randomly. There is a pool of holders of a taken coin and a miner can be added to it by staking some coins in their wallet.
Afterwards, the node stakes the coins in the bound wallet and creates a block. The block in this case is proportionate to the number of coins staked.
You see, the system is quite simple. However, there is a major question — why is staking good for you as an individual?
Why should I start staking?
There are various benefits to mining operators brought by staking.
First of all, with staking, there is no need to buy the expensive mining hardware. All you need to have is a wallet and some coins.
Besides, experienced stakers with a bigger number if coins can validate the transactions of the network. Cool, right?
PoS does no harm to the environment. So, all our green friends out there, consider staking as a much better alternative to usual energy-consuming mining.
Last, but not least, is the coin perks — stakers get a percentage for holding their coins. Consider this as a good source of passive income.
Which coins can I stake?
DASH
DASH was one of the first currencies to introduce the new system to the world. Build on the basis of the Bitcoin core, DASH also utilises PrivateSend and InstantSend features. The crypto coin of this kind can be staked through a master node — the minimum amount of this cryptocurrency to run a master node is 1000 DASH coins.
Komodo
Komodo is a network helping in launching independent blockchains and ICOs. Besides, Komodo is majorly focused on the privacy of their community and implements various anonymising systems to improve transaction privacy. KMD — the cryptocurrency of the network — has a staking opportunity, too. The users can hold the KMD coins in their wallets and get a 5% reward for their work as Komodo stakers.
Callisto
Callisto Network is one of the prosperous platforms on the current cryptocurrency market. The whole project was created by the developers of Ethereum Commonwealth — one of ETC development teams. Callisto added Cold Staking special feature as a way for the long-term holders to receive some crypto coin perks. With CLO, you need to freeze some amount of coins in the cryptocurrency wallet, wait for a period of about a month and then get the reward (receive their staking percentage).
Well, as you can see, there are some opportunities of becoming a contributor to the certain crypto society while still getting some coins for your own. Generally, we advise you consider staking as an option (after, perhaps, reading some more about the process). Staking crypto coins is quite a simple activity that can bring good profits — both speaking about materialistic side of life and the general satisfaction from being important to a taken blockchain. As they say in Callisto, #HappyStaking!