The Decred Altcoin is About To Start Their PoS Phase

The Decred (DCR) altcoin that has been generatijng a lot of attention lately is essentially a PoW + PoS crypto coin, however before the block 4096 it is going to be in Proof or Work mode and after that you would be able not only to mine, but also to Stake the coins you own in order to earn more DCR. The Decred block reward is divided in three parts: 60% for a mining, 30% for staking and 10% for the developers with a starting block reward of 31.19582664 DCR coins. This means that the PoW reward for a block is currently about 18.72 DCR, the total PoS rewards is going to be about 9.36 DCR (it could be divided in multiple parts) and the remaining about 3.12 DCR goes to the developers. Furthermore the per-block reward adjusts every 6144 blocks (approximately 21.33 days) by reducing by a factor of 100/101 or with other words ((31.19582664 * 100) / 101) for the first halving.

Since in a couple of hours we are going to reach the 4096 block and the PoS phase will also become active you could start staking any mined DCR coins that you have available in your wallet. Decred staking is a bit different than what most other coins use as a method for PoS and the fact that there is still no official GUI wallet and you need to use the command line wallet to activate staking makes it even harder for non advanced users. To enable staking you need to add the extra command line parameter “enablestakemining”, though there are some extra options also available that might help you such as the max price you pay for ticket or the minimum balance to maintain in your wallet.

Staking in Decred works in a similar way to a lottery, you purchase tickets with the available DCR coins you have (ticket price starts at 2 DCR), then wait for your ticket to be randomly chosen to validate a block or to be taken out of the lottery in 142 days. The coins you use for staking (purchasing tickets for the lottery) will be locked until they are either chosen and you get a reward or 142 days pass. According to the information the lottery lasts about 28 days average and the chance of a ticket not being selected in 142 days are less than 1%, but we’ll have to wait and see. Do note that in order to be successfully staking you need to have your wallet running and online 24/7 and have the wallet unlocked, otherwise you might miss your chance of winning.

The Decred team is also working on a PoS pool where you can delegate your voting rights and participate in the staking without having to run a local wallet all the time in order to stake and you don’t need to send DCR coins anywhere. There is already a test Decred Stake Pool running on the testnet, but you’ll have to wait for the staking phase to start and a pool for the mainnet to become available.