Decrediton Staking - Buying tickets the easy way

Decred’s staking mechanism is extremely attractive to investors wanting to gain yield whilst holding DCR. Currently, 80% of the block reward goes to proof of stake participation, this could move to 89% in the coming months. Decred’s staking works very differently from all other POS protocols, in several ways.

Firstly, to participate you have to buy a ticket, which has a random lockup time between 1 day and 142 days. Once the ticket votes, it will receive its portion of the block reward. At the time of writing, the reward is 1.48 dcr per ticket.

Another interesting thing about Decred tickets is the limited supply, approximately 41,000 tickets. Tickets have a variable rate to keep the 41k supply maintained. If the number of tickets being bought goes down, so does the number of dcr needed to purchase them, and vice versa. The current price of a decred ticket is between 210dcr and 250dcr, the theoretical highest price a ticket can be is 512 dcr.

Let’s have a loot at how easy it is to buy tickets using Decrediton.

After loading Decrediton and opening your wallet, head over to the staking tab. In this instance, the ticket price is approximately 211 dcr and I have a balance of 232 dcr, so I’m good to go. Before we buy our ticket, let’s have a look at some of the information on this page.

In the top menu bar, we have the “purchase tickets” tab, which is the one we’ll use for this example. Next is the “Ticket Status”, which is especially useful if you have multiple tickets, and you need to keep track of them. “Ticket History” shows you all of your ticket actions, including when you purchased them and how long they took to vote. And finally, “Statistics” which gives you an overview related to ticket activities.

The stake overview section gives you some basic information, including how many live tickets you have, In my case, I have one. How many tickets are in the mempool and how many tickets are immature. Immature is the lead in and out time for a ticket, e.g. 24hrs (256 blocks) before and after a ticket is live. Next, “Total voted” and “Total rewards earned” combined, this data shows how many tickets have voted and the total earnings from these tickets.

The purchase ticket section is where we’re going to buy our ticket. Firstly, select the account that you’d like to use to buy your ticket. In this case, we’re using the default account. Next, select your VSP or Voting Service Provider. All providers in this list have passed a series of checks to make sure they are suitable for consumer use, but be aware, fees do vary. The better providers tend to charge less than 1% fees. I tend to fluctuate between providers and have had good experiences with big.decred.energy (0.49%), vsp.decredcommunity.org (0.49%) and dcrhive.com (currently 0.1%). For this example, we’re going to use dcrhive as our provider.

Once you’ve selected your account and provider, then select the number of tickets. I tend to purchase one at a time, but you are of course free to purchase as many as you have funds for. After this, hit the purchase button and enter your password. And you’re done!

All that’s left to do now is leave Decrediton open and wait for the on-chain transactions to complete.

For a ticket to enter into the ticket pool, it has the following sequence:

• Purchase confirmation (green popup) Ticket enters the mempool
• Mining fee paid (yellow transaction)
• After one more confirmation, the ticket will get mined as immature.
• The VSP fee will complete approximately 6 confirmations. This can take a little time, but it’s important you leave Decrediton running until this transaction completes.

If you click on the transaction link, it’s also possible to check the progress on DCRDATA and see how many confirmations the transaction has. And that’s it!

Once a ticket votes, it will turn green and say “Ticket Vote”. After a further 24hrs, your funds will unlock and you’ll be ready to buy another ticket and be rewarded for your participation.

As you can see, the process of buying tickets is very straightforward, but as the process is done on-chain it does require your action and time to participate.