Winning CMC Earn contest and How to claim staked IoTeX Rewards

By Aakasha | AakashaBlogs | 18 Sep 2021

I’ve often participated in promotional campaigns and later wondered if anybody ever won these competitions. I finally got my answer when I won the CoinMarketCaps' Learn and Earn quiz for IoTeX! I had taken part in about a dozen of these so far and started to doubt the outcomes. It was either, You did not receive a score of 100% on the quiz, or Due to overwhelming demand, kindly note that only a limited number of users would be eligible for distributions…The only reason I carried on was that I found it a sound way to gather the gist of projects and find interesting ones. My persistence eventually paid off, when after about two months later, I won 200 IoTeX tokens, dropped straight to my wallet!

CMC Campaign

If you’re new to CoinMarketCap or their Learn & Earn program, it is their project showcase, where one can go through short lessons before responding to their quiz. It requires some personal details to be submitted, like email and Binance ID, to begin with, followed by questions about the project, and occasionally ends with typical marketing activities like social media follows and shares. The answers are available in the lessons and barely takes any time to complete. The awards vary with each campaign.

IoTeX bounty

It felt incredible to win an airdrop. However, my initial feeling of euphoria on seeing the tokens in my wallet was slowly replaced by confusion as I noticed that the withdrawal button was inactive. I did not intend to sell them, but they were no good to me if I couldn’t move them at all. Then I figured these were locked. That would have been fine, but alas, there was no interest accrued in the two weeks since the airdrop. Anyway, the more I looked at it, the more questions I had. Where was the promised NFT? What was the staking duration of my tokens? What was the reward frequency? Etc. Here is what I found out after digging around and putting together my research. If you’re one of the winners, this will be of use to you. If you aren’t one of those, you can still learn how to get lucky and win some freebies by staking.

Claim Staked IoTeX:

The airdropped IoTeX tokens are pre-staked in the IoPay wallet, which I had downloaded as a requisite to completing the exercise. To claim your prize, all you need to do is sign in to the wallet and stake the tokens. The IoTeX tokens give you voting power for participation in network governance. There is more detail about it on their website here, which I recommend you read for a thorough understanding of the mechanics. Going back to the wallet, you will notice that your staking bucket shows that your stakes are assigned a random delegate. Reward distribution is in Vita (VITA) tokens, and if your designated partners have disbursed your earnings, you will find VITA + free CMC NFT under the respective tabs. If you are happy with all of this, you can adjust the staking duration and continue to stake your free tokens and earn rewards. If, like me, you do not see any earnings or perks on logging in, contact your delegate. You can lock your stake for 91+ days for extra rewards. Bear in mind that this works the same as any fixed duration staking lock and means you won’t be able to withdraw your tokens for the duration.

Hermes Delegates:

The rewards disbursal method varies with each team, with Hermes Delegates auto distributing rewards to voters. See the Delegate List to understand how each party functions. You can identify them by the winged icon against their name. Randomly chosen 24 of the top 36 delegates, get a chance to mine blocks every hour.

Withdrawing a Stake:

It makes sense that withdrawal is unavailable for now, or the price would most likely crash with everyone trying to sell off their free tokens. The project has some good use cases and, rewards for holding appear better in contrast to the gains of an outright sale. If, however, you are adamant about trading yours, you can turn off lock stake, unstake them, wait for three days – which is the standard time needed for unstaking, then withdraw. Note that I haven’t made any withdrawal yet, so my experience on this is limited. Based on information gathered from community platforms, my a priori assumption is that this method works. These steps will require gas, so you will need to add some IoTeX which you can get off of Binance. Gas costs are nominal, so even if you add a couple of bucks, it would still be worth claiming them.

How to choose a Delegate:

You can reassign your votes any time you wish. My returns were not processed automatically, and when I looked at the details, I learned that it was a manual process. Although they sorted everything promptly as soon as I contacted them, I decided on changing my delegate for ease. Additionally, I wanted someone with a better chance to be picked for mining.

Things to consider while choosing a delegate –

Delegate rank is significant as only the top 36 get a chance to mine the blocks.
Ensure they are online.
Should not be on probation.
Consider the number of voters for reward distribution.
Remember to check reward distribution frequency.
Manual versus auto reward distribution.
The proportion of reward distribution between voters and delegates.
Reward utilization - for instance, development, community, project awareness, etc.

Extended Campaign:

If you’ve stuck around and read till here, I come bearing good news! The promotion is not over yet and is currently open to new participants. You need just 100 tokens to start a new stake. Considering the current price of the tokens, it’s roughly around 6.5 USDT. Some of the bonuses are applicable even if you did not win the CMC campaign. You also stand to win a free NFT by participating, which will be distributed by mid-October. The tips detailed above are beneficial when scouting for an IoTeX nominee for your votes in general. However, it's wise to do your research before you invest anything at all.

Closing Thoughts:

I have received all of the perks and plan to HODL my winnings to see what else is in store. As a parting note, all I have to say is - if you stick around long enough and endure, things have a way of working out!

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