AQL tokens may be staked to earn staking rewards and access to voting rights in the DAO.
Time-Weighted Staking
Tokens may be staked for anywhere between 5 to 150 weeks. Each additional week staked gives the user an additional 1% AP (compounding). For example:
- 100 AQL staked for 5 weeks = 110.41 AP (5.10% bonus)
- 100 AQL staked for 75 weeks = 210.91 AP (110.91% bonus)
- 100 AQL staked for 150 weeks = 444.84 AP (344.84% bonus)
The rewards get exponentially better based on the time staked.
Fixed Staking Time
Users who stake tokens will initially choose how long they want to stake for. They will retain the same amount of Aqualis Power for the entirety of their stake. Users cannot decrease their staked time, however users can withdraw early, see "Early Unstaking Fee" below. If a user chooses to increase their staked time, it will reset the stake timer completely. An example of this is given below.
Increasing Staking Time
Any increase in the stake time will reset the time remaining timer. For example, if a user increases their staked time from 100 weeks to 150 weeks after 10 weeks of staking, their new stake timer will reset to the full 150 weeks.
Staking Additional Tokens
Users can add additional tokens to their existing stake at any time. However, to prevent exploits, the remaining stake time will increase proportionally to the amount of newly staked tokens with this formula:
- New stake time remaining = (initial stake time - stake time remaining) * (portion of new tokens) + stake time remaining
This formula is essentially a weighted penalty proportional to the ratio of newly staked tokens.
Early Unstaking Fee
Staked AQL may be unstaked earlier for a fee of 1% plus 0.4% per week remaining (rounded up), for example:
- Less than 1 week remaining 1% + 0.3% = 1.3%
- Between 10 to 11 weeks remaining = 1% + 3.3% = 4.3%
- Between 149 to 150 weeks remaining = 1% + 45% = 46.0%
This fee will be distributed in the following way:
- 50% will be burned
- 40% will be distributed to the AP Rewards Pool
- 10% will be distributed to the Treasury
Staking Example
One day Alice was reading an article titled "Most Efficient DeFi Platforms in Existence" and found Aqualis! Alice wanted to learn more about this innovative platform so she read the docs and found the governance system to be quite intriguing, thus decided to stake 100 Aqualis tokens for 10 weeks just to test it out, Alice now has 110.46 AP.
After 1 week, she had earned 10 Aqualis tokens from staking rewards and excited by this high APR, she decided to add 10 tokens to her stake. By doing so, Alice has now increased her remaining time staked to 9.09 weeks, using the formula above. Furthermore, she now has 121.51 AP.
After studying the protocol, Alice decides to deposit her stablecoins in the SP and her ETH in the Aqualis lending protocol to earn more rewards. By this stage, Alice has fallen in love with the Aqualis protocol, so she buys 2000 more tokens and decides to increase her stake time to the maximum of 150 weeks with all her 2110 tokens. Alice now has 9386.17 AP, but her stake time remaining has reset to 150 weeks. This is because any increase in stake time will reset the timer completely.
Ten weeks later, Aqualis launches an NFT sale that Alice wants to partake in. Alice decides to unstake 100 AQL tokens with 140 weeks remaining. After the early withdraw fee of 57%, Alice receives 43 tokens. Alice now has 2010 tokens remaining staked for 150 weeks with a total of 140 weeks remaining. Her AP is now 8941.33.
Alice regrets this decision as she could have simply taken a stablecoin loan using her ETH as collateral using the Aqualis lending protocol.