Piconbello Report Regarding Mina Staking Services
Dear Mina community,
This report will go over what Piconbello has done so far for the Mina ecosystem, as well as the path forward from now on.
As Piconbello, we always go for the projects that have the technology we endorse. Mina was no exception to this, its cutting edge design and possibility of disrupting the blockchain ecosystem seemed amazing to us. Hence, we have been an infra partner and validator since the genesis of the project. We have been providing staking service to the whole network with our own baremetal servers and Google’s cloud infrastructure to provide high reliability, as well as snarkworker to ensure transactions are happening as intended.
Piconbello has always been on the community side since its inception, Mina is again no exception to this aspect. We have been very active in the community side, through Discord and Telegram, both in technical and social aspects. We strongly believe that an ecosystem is nothing without the users, hence we have always tried to seek what is best for the community, providing how-tos and answering any questions where there is.
Our initial plan for the Mina ecosystem as a group was to provide 0% fee staking service for at least a year to support the community and go with a competitive rate after some time from genesis. We have decided to extend this period previously, but now the extension part is coming to an end and Piconbello will have a 2% staking fee from the start of 2023. This was already implemented for locked rewards that have been staked to us, through some conditions to ensure the owner of the funds was not idle. Now, it will be for the whole stakers, regardless of locked/unlocked.
Since our staking services have been running for more than a year, let’s go over our previous statistics to get the feeling of how the 2% staking fee change impacts the stakers.
Below, you can see a table of our staking returns in APR, which was taken from our Github repo. The table consists of Epoch 7 to Epoch 30, which makes 24 epochs and almost a year of data. Feel free to bookmark the link since we have been updating the repo for transparency and keeping track of the rewards.
Now, for this period, let’s assume a delegator to Piconbello, Alice. Let Alice have 1000 Mina delegated to Piconbello. Let’s assume Alice started delegating on the 5th epoch, which makes her eligible for their first rewards on the 7th epoch’s end.
The table below shows the balance for Alice and compares how much of a difference it makes with 0% fee to 2% fee, starting with the first reward. Internal compounding effect of the Mina, staking balances are utilized with 2 epoch delay, is also put into the calculation to give a better idea.
To summarize the table, Alice would have received around 211 Mina as a staking reward when we were 0% fee. For the same period, Alice would have received around 207 Mina as a staking reward, around 4 Mina would be taken by us as a fee.
All of the numbers and calculations were done on a yearly basis, with epoch based data calculation, hence it should give great insight into our staking reward percentage return, as well as the difference between 0 and 2 percent fee.
We believe that the 2% fee is still competitive in the Mina ecosystem. It will enable us to have some funding for the projects as well as ensure funding for our high performing infra setup.
For the development side, we are incredibly excited to finally have some apps on the Mina ecosystem, named as ZkApps. Although the timeline for their release is not certain, the possibilities are endless in terms of technical design and user experience. As a developer team, we also conducted a developer meetup for the Turkish community to describe how ZkApps will be structured, went through some examples and such. This new fee structure will also fuel our endeavours towards designing ZkApps that are performant, useful and adopted by the community.
In essence, moving to a fee structure was always a plan of ours. It is necessary for any developer/blockchain team to sustain a healthy income stream to fuel the development and high performing infrastructure setup. We believe that 2% fee should be enough to make the fee competitive, as well as create some funds for us to utilize on the network in the long run.
We believe that Mina is a great project that we support and we have always tried to help/support the project in any way, including infrastructure, community support and such. Although we believe that many delegators are supporting us in our work, in case it was for the 0% fee structure, we need to give a timeline for such a migration for those delegators.
Since the distribution of staking rewards is a manual process for the validator teams, trusting the validator is incredibly important to ensure rewards are being paid on time and correctly. Hence, if you want to change a delegator, it is of great importance to select a validator with that you can communicate well, ask questions and essentially trust that they are going to pay out. We have always been transparent and helpful towards the community, hence we believe that we fit the “trusted” criteria.
The 2% fee will be enabled at the start of the first epoch of 2023, which is the 44th epoch. In order to not miss any 0% epoch rewards, a delegator should change the validator at the 42nd epoch latest, which enables 2 epoch 0% fee rewards and rewards will come from the new validator that the delegator should select after that period.
We hope that this report gives the community some insight into how Piconbello has been performing as a Mina validator, as well as some information about future operations.
