Short introduction

The Elrond network is aiming to be a highly scalable, fast, and secure blockchain platform. The Elrond (ERD) token is the unit of value that will be native for the Elrond network and will be used to pay for the resources used on this network.

Current status

The Elrond network is currently in the pre-mainnet phase. For the time being, ERD is floating around as ERC-20 or BEP2 tokens. The ERC-20 tokens staked during the Genesis Staking will be burned from the ERC-20 network and minted as native ERD when the mainnet launches.

Requirements and staking procedure

1. ETH wallet

Have MetaMask installed in your web browser and generate an address. Alternatively, if you already have a MetaMask wallet, you can import it into the Brave browser by using your password and seed (i.e that 12 word sequence). If you don't already use Brave, I would strongly recommend it.

The Elrond staking websites are able to interact with the crypto wallet built into Brave. The built in crypto wallet would otherwise take precedence over the MetaMask extension, therefore it is rather redundant on Brave. The mobile MetaMask wallet is not recommended and in fact the people behind Elrond network don't support this. MetaMask has been chosen to simply the otherwise complex procedures for the staking.

You need the ERD ERC-20 tokens in this wallet and some ETH to pay for the gas fees. For example 0.1 ETH would be more than enough. I have tried with this amount. Even with high gas fees as the transactions would take forever otherwise, I still have plenty left.

You need to add the ERD token to your MetaMask / Brave Crypto Wallet. Hit the Add Token link, click Custom Token, then add the Token Contract Address: 0xf9986d445ced31882377b5d6a5f58eaea72288c3. You can find the details on Etherscan. The search function in Add Tokens doesn't return the ERD token, so you must follow the Custom Token import process.

2. ERD ERC-20 tokens in your ETH wallet

You need to buy some from an exchange if you don't have any. Bear in mind that only ERC-20 tokens may be sent to the ETH wallet address. Not all of the exchanges which allow you to buy ERD would also allow you to withdraw the tokens just yet. Crypto.com is such example where I have bought some, but there's no possibility to withdraw.

Since the Elrond network is on the Binance Launchpad, I strongly recommend Binance as exchange for this token. In any case, make sure you withdraw ERC-20 tokens to your ETH wallet address. Binance will eventually convert your tokens to native ERD, but you won't be benefitting from the staking rewards. Beware of the withdraw fees which are steeper for ERC-20 tokens on Binance as this is a fixed amount per transaction, not a percentage.

I don't have any left in Binance as they are all staking.

3. Elrond wallet

This is the native Elrond wallet available at this address. While this wallet is on the testnet for the time being, the same wallet address can be used on the mainnet when this is launched.

Make sure you safely keep your keystore, password, and recovery seed. You need your keystore and password to access the wallet.

The Elrond address used for staking can not be changed without unstaking your ERD and lose your staking earnings in the process. You can restart the staking if you do decide to unstake, however, you will have to pay the gas fees again. All the native ERD addresses start with erd1, so make sure you use the correct value.

4. Stake

There's two types of staking which may be done:

• Delegator - ERD holders who delegate their state to other node operators. For bootstrapping the network, Elrond themselves are going to briefly act as a staking-as-a-service operator and run the foundational nodes.
• Validator - ERD holders who have at least 2.5 million tokens. All nodes for pre-mainnet need to be whitelisted by Elrond and the people who took part in the testnet Battle of Nodes have priority.

In this pre-mainnet phase, both yield 25% APR, so the only reason to run your own validator node at this point: you intend to do this in the future as well to help with the network decentralisation. Post-mainnet, the rewards for staking would be rather different i.e 29% for delegators and 36% for validators. The 7% difference is the service fee for the people who run the validator nodes.

The number of foundational nodes is limited to 1005 and 2.5 million per node, so the total stake for delegation may be 2.5125 billion tokens.

Since the people running validator nodes don't really need to read this article, I am going to focus onto the delegator procedure. Basically, head onto this address, connect with your ETH wallet described in the first step, hit the Connect with MetaMask button, then follow the on screen instructions.

You can stake multiple times, however, you will have to pay the gas fees for every transaction onto the ERC-20 network.

This article is not investment advice. Should you need it, please hire the services of an independent financial advisor.

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