Moonstake adds staking support for Polkadot (DOT)

Staking pool protocol, Moonstake, today announced the support of staking Polkadot’s cryptocurrency DOT, one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, in Moonstake’s Web Wallet. Moonstake also offers staking on Cosmos, IRISnet, Ontology, Harmony, Tezos, Cardano, and Qtum.

Polkadot is a blockchain protocol connecting multiple specialized blockchains into one unified network. Polkadot is the flagship project of the Web3 Foundation, which was founded by Ethereum co-founder and former CTO Dr. Gavin Wood. Other key members of the Web3 Foundation include Dr. Aeron Buchanan, former Head of European Operations at Ethereum, and Reto Trinkler, co-founder of Melonport.

As of January 2021, 63% of the total supply or $6 billion of DOTs have been staked since Polkadot’s mainnet launched in May 2020. The price of DOT, the native token of Polkadot, and a cross-chain protocol for data and asset interoperability has risen more than 40% in December 2020 after two confidence votes by Binance, the largest crypto exchange by spot trading volume and placing it at ranking 7 cryptocurrencies by the market cap.

How DOT Staking Works

When staking, users can select multiple validators (up to 16 validators) to stake. Simply choose 1-16 validators (staking providers) and nominate them. If more than 256 nominators nominate the same validator, it is “oversubscribed” and only the top 256 staked nominators (ranked by the amount of stake) are paid rewards. If a user’s stake is in place 257 or higher, they will not receive staking rewards.

How to get Rewards of DOT Staking

APY is 13.32%. To receive staking rewards, users must manually claim their rewards using the function inside the staking tab. Staking rewards are kept available for 84 days only. If users do not claim rewards by this time, then they will not be able to claim them and some staking rewards will be lost.

How DOT Unstaking Works:

Users must unstake when sending a DOT during staking. However, for 28 days after the unstake, it will be in the “cancellation request” state and will be locked. After the 28-day lock period has expired, users can withdraw their DOT. There are no staking rewards during the lock period.