We have just passed the Big Bang on Story, the point where the active set of validators is expanded to 64 and rewards start to be issued. But before we look into the staking design, let's explore the Story tokenomics.
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The Tokenomics of $IP
Overview
The IP token is central to Story's vision of creating a decentralized, programmable market for IP, particularly in the context of AI applications. It serves multiple key roles: staking for network security, gas for transactions, and governance.
The project is developing a "GitHub for IP" to allow users to explore and register IP seamlessly.
The IP token is listed on major exchanges, including Coinbase, Bybit, and OKX.
Token Allocation
- Total Supply: 1 billion IP tokens.
- Initial unlocked supply: 25% of the tokens were unlocked at launch, with the remaining tokens released gradually over 48 months.
- Deflationary mechanism: With each transaction, IP is burned, which could lead to a deflationary token economy under certain conditions.
- Token distribution:
- Ecosystem & community: 38.4%
- Early backers: 21.6%
- Core contributors: 20%
- Foundation: 10%
- Initial incentives: 10%
- Community focus: A significant portion (58.4%) is allocated to the Story community to encourage adoption and ensure a robust foundation.
Story Protocol Staking
The staking mechanism is designed to prevent early rewards for founders and early investors, ensuring fair participation.
As we mentioned, the Big Bang stage on Story marks the beginning of reward issuance.
The previous period was called Singularity, which lasted 1,580,851 after Genesis or approx 42 days. During this period only 8 validators were in the active set and anyone was able to create a validator with the minimum of 1024 IP.
Any stake has/had to be in increments of 1024 IP tokens.
The structure is in line with Story's commitment to rewarding genuine users and preventing exploitation by "farmers" or Sybil attacks. Measures are in place to block attempts to game the system, ensuring that only legitimate users benefit from the rewards.
This design ensures a fair launch and prevents unfair advantage. It eliminates the advantage that early investors or founders might have if they could start staking before the broader community. The staking mechanism schedule improves decentralization by providing a fair and equitable opportunity for all token holders to participate in the staking process and earn rewards.
There are two types of validators to choose from, depending on whether you have locked or unlocked tokens. Locked tokens refer to those following an unlock schedule, not those bought in the open market. Both tokens may be slashed.
For any unlocked token that is unbonded, the unbonding period is 14 days. During this period the delegator/validator will not earn block rewards but may still be slashed. Locked tokens can only be unbonded, once they have vested.
Both locked and unlocked tokens may be staked for staking rewards but they have different rewards multipliers.
Unlocked and locked tokens may be staked but locked tokens earn half of the rewards of unlocked tokens:
Multipliers:
- Locked tokens: 0.5x
- Unlocked tokens: 1x (unstake any time)
- 90 days: 1.1x
- 360 days: 1.5x
- 540 days: 2x
Any unlocked tokens still staked past the staking period, will continue to earn the same corresponding amount, until the user manually unstakes.
Redelegation to another validator can happen at any time, for a 1 IP fee, to prevent spamming. The redelegated validator must be of the same category type as the previous validator, ie locked or unlocked. The user must redelegate a minimum of 1054 IP, though lesser amounts are possible if the user was slashed and wishes to redelegate.
Chainflow supports both locked and unlocked delegator types. You can find them below:
- Unlocked: https://staking.story.foundation/validators/0xb4c106a8206cf8b23ab377a4e9b779fddb9d3427
- Locked: https://staking.story.foundation/validators/0xdac8443398a1647b1a63ddfb8d595b2970d86152
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