​Welcome to another edition of Zilliqa Zebra! Are you unsure how to stake on the Zilliqa blockchain? Or are you confused with what gZIL is and how to earn it? Let Zilliqa zebra help. In this article, I am going to share with you some great tips on how often you should claim your staking rewards, and how to maximise your profits from Zilliqa staking.

To get a better grasp of what staking is, you’ll first need to understand how Proof of Stake (PoS) works.

PoS is a consensus mechanism that allows blockchains to operate more energy-efficiently while maintaining a decent degree of decentralization (at least, in theory).

Let’s dive into what PoS is and how staking works.

Before proceeding with this guide, it is necessary to have a few things to stake the cryptocurrency:

• A wallet that supports Zilliqa, we recommend ZilPay but it is also possible to use Ledger;

• At least one hundred ZIL on the wallet, because it is necessary to have the relative ZIL required for the fees, which will also be used for withdrawal and unstaking.

• The first step will be to unlock the wallet (we will use ZilPay) and go to the platform dedicated to staking.

• For example, if you are using Atomic Wallet, you can directly receive ZIL from any exchange such as Binance, CoinHako, etc.

• You can then stake your ZIL with the application.

• To stake, go to the Staking section, and then choose an amount to stake.

• Now, remember to set aside some ZIL for network fee.

• The network fee is deducted when you claim your staking rewards.

• The staking may take a day or two or slightly longer.

• You can then claim your staking rewards which would be added to the pool for further staking.

• FIrst of all, you can’t unstake ZIL immediately after you staked it.

• From the moment you delegate your funds to a validator they are getting locked for 8,000 blocks (approx. 1 day).

• After that you can unstake ZIL leaving 10 ZIL (unspendable balance) to a validator by doing this:

  • 1) Transaction to unbond the funds and waiting for its confirmation, which takes 24,000 blocks (approx. 10 days).

  • 2) One more transaction to claim the balance.

Staking profits depends on the percentage of return a validator provides per annum a.k.a APR (Annual Percentage Rate).

When the staking feature is provided by wallets or exchanges, it is usually told what a percentage of the profits are.

Percentages are usually given on a daily, monthly and annual basis.

The APR is important as it varies from time to time.

• Depending on the value, the related APR will change as follows:

• 49% if 10% of the supply is blocked;

• 25% if 20% of the supply is blocked;

• 17% if 30% of the supply is blocked;

• 13% if 40% of the supply is blocked;

• 10% if 50% of the supply is blocked.

Hence, it pays to stake as early as you can, as the staked supply will only get higher, leading to a decrease in the APR.

• gZIL, short for governance ZIL, is a ZRC-2 compliant fungible token contract.

• The rationale behind issuing gZIL is to capture long-term token holders and give them access to governance tokens that they can later use to make ecosystem-wide decisions.

• Its maximum supply is 722,700 tokens and the reward duration is 1 year w.e.f. 14 October 2020.

• gZIL derives part of its value from scarcity.

• Hence, it will only be issued for 1 year starting from the launch of non-custodial $ZIL staking (14 October 2020), with the objective of incentivising early birds.

• Zilliqa will control minting and distribution of gZIL, capping it at 722,700.

• The question that we all ask is “how often should we claim staking rewards?”.

• A reddit user by the name of Book-Administrative did a calculation using a Google spreadsheet.

• He made examples for daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly and yearly.

• Compounded interest comes into play when you re-stake but the fees take away from the potential so your frequency matters here.

• However, the less time your earnings are earning the entire concept starts to get hard to fit into a simple thought.

• It seemed to him that if you have less than 12,420 ZIL staked you should not be claiming rewards daily.

• As the year goes on and the real-time rate goes down this number will not be accurate but more like a better than nothing attempt to give you a close estimate.

• In fact, if you are planning to do some serious zilliqa staking, you might want to check out the real time staking calculator at My-Zilliqa-Wallet.

• Visit myzilliqawallet at https://myzilliqawallet.com/stakingapy.html to access the real time staking calculator.

• The calculator is a useful took which takes into consideration your potential gZil earnings.

• It then calculates the estimated annual returns factoring the returns from gZIL.

• In fact, using this example here, if you invest 100,000 ZIL at 14.2 APY, you should get an estimated annual return including gZIL of 3372 USD with an estimated actual APY of 26% which is really fantastic.

• With lots of great projects coming up, you are not only capturing the yield from staking but also the price appreciation of Zilliqa itself!