Hedera Staking

Staking is a common mechanism in the world of blockchain and distributed ledgers and part of many consensus mechanisms. Basically, it is a technical measure and financial incentive to keep Hedera secure. In exchange for users who stake their hbar, Hedera distributes a so-called staking reward (i.e., basically an interest rate on the staked hbar) every 24 hours. In contrast to other DLTs, the Hedera Hashgraph uses a form of staking where funds are never locked or slashed. That means that staked HBARs can be spend at any time by the user. Therefore, staking causes no disadvantage for the users’ liquidity, while still securing the Hedera network.

The Renderhive project will use the two forms of staking provided on the Hedera network:

• Direct staking. The Renderhive project will stake all hbars that are stored in its smart contract and/or escrow accounts to Hedera's consensus nodes. That is, the total amount of the safety deposits as well as all hbars temporarily sent to the Smart Contract by client nodes for the purpose of paying render nodes after execution of their render jobs will be staked.

• Indirect staking / proxy staking. All node accounts will be indirectly staked to the funding account(s) of the Renderhive project. By this special mechanism, Renderhive will receive all staking rewards generated from hbars stored in these accounts without charging the user.

It is important to highlight again, that staked hbars are always safe and can be withdrawn and spend by their owners at any time. Funds will only be locked in cases, where this is required to establish mutual trust between network participants. This is, for example, the case for hbars that were transferred from client nodes to the Renderhive Smart Contract to be stored in an escrow until the related render job was executed and the render nodes can be paid. All circumstances, where funds are locked to secure the interest of other network participants will be explicitly defined in the documentation of the network.

Due to the dependence of the staking rewards on the total amount of hbar circulating in the Renderhive network accounts, escrows, and smart contract, it is to be expected that staking rewards will be very low at the beginning. With an increasing number of render nodes, client nodes, and render jobs, the funds will also increase.

To learn more about staking on Hedera, please visit the Hedera documentation.