Staking is often presented as a miraculous thing that can earn us many. This approach is also used by scams (see my article sbout stakedwallet) for hiding their ponzi scheme. But, no one says what's really staking and different kinds of.

disclaimer : Staking implies buying coins, so it's a riskful activity. I'm not responsible of your potential losses.

 

So... let's go !

 

Cold Staking / delegated staking

Cold Staking is probably the most known kind of staking. It's because you only have to lock your coins in wallet for getting interest on them.

I mentionned delegated staking because of, on some blockchains, you've to vote for a masternode (delegate your vote rights) for earning interest.

 

Wallets supporting cold-staking

• Trust Wallet (tron, tezos, cosmos, kava, algorand)
• Atomic Wallet (cosmos, tezos, tron, ontology, neo, komodo, algorand, vechain and awc)
• TronWallet for tron only, see this article for more info
• Flare wallet (thanks to @ProjectJourneyman)

thanks to @Igweto for remembering me that awc was stakable

 

Pros

• No full-node requirement
• Good yields (from 3 to 15% per year)
• Low skill requirement
• U has the private key

Cons

• Lock time
• Less secure than pow or hot staking

 

Hot-Staking (solo)

This method is probably the most complex. With this method, you should keep a full node running on your computer.

It's a bit like solo mining, so you gets reward when you find a block (but rewards are lower)

 

Hot-Staking coins (not exhaustive list)

• Peercoin (in addition to mining)
• Gridcoin (in addition to proof of research)
• Navcoin

 

Pros

• No lock time
• You has the private key

Cons

• Full nodes store a copy of blockchain (heavy !)
• You have to hold many coins for finding blocks frequently

 

Hot-Staking (pool)

Staking follows the same things like mining : pools are now widely used for finding blocks. It's a bit the same thing as delegated staking, but u gives the coins instead of voting rights, it's more dangerous.

 

Staking pools

• Stakecube (it has some faucets so you can try it for free)
• SimplePoSpool
• Feel-Mining

 

Pros

• No need of running full node
• Block found (and rewards paid) very often
• Shared masternodes

Cons

• You doesn't control the private key (exit scam, platform hack...)

 

 

Trustless Proof of Stake (thanks to @SolarEclipse)

There is also TPoS, Trustless Proof of Stake, invented and used by Stakenet. For TPoS you need a Merchant or you set up a Merchant-Node by yourself. The Merchant want’s some fees to maintain his infrastructure.

 

Pros :

• Staking is possible with a cold wallet (soon with Ledger and Trezor too)
• You have the private key
• No lock time
• It’s trustless and secure

Cons :

• You have to deal with a merchant because of the fees
• You have to find a merchant with a good uptime
• If you do it by yourself, you have to pay for a VPS

 

Staking in smart contracts

Like @MRKWHG remembered me, we also can stake erc20 tokens. The way for staking is depending on the token but it's often in a dapp.

 

Stakable tokens (not exhaustive)

• Loopring
• Dai (lending)
• SNX (curve) rewards

 

Pros

• Verified smart contracts
• Many DEXes (erc20)
• reliable blockchain

Cons

• ethereum-dependent
• high gas fee

 

   

 

It is the end of this article, I hope that you learned something in

If you did, please give a tip and a like (thanks to all my tippers/likers)

If you see something to improve, feel free of writing it in the comments (thanks too)