An additional long term staking contract (i.e. 12 months) with favorable fees when withdrawing for the agreed upon duration may be helpful.
Having more than one staking contract length may be helpful for various reasons. The user may save on network fees if they chose to only withdraw once a year, for instance. Additionally it would help tax wise for holders in countries that require users to disclose staking rewards for tax purposes. Of course the interest rate would not be affected, only the network fee upon claiming.
A primary motivator may be, as motioned above, for tax purposes. Claiming staking rewards daily/weekly is very difficult come tax day. Actually holding and staking on an exchange would be easier, as you can import those tax documents directly from the exchange. But in the spirit of true ownership and interest in direct network participation, many holders prefer to use self-custody wallets (i.e. Moonlet). Withdrawing early could result in an increased fee.
A potential negative on this would be the network may appear less busy, as users would not be claiming often. Not all users would partake in the long term staking contract, as they wouldn’t need too. The interest rate would remain the same, so this would be for those that don’t want to claim daily without incurring unfavorable network fees.
There are some discussions around creating a token vault that does compounding on behalf of the token holders, users will just have to pay performance fees. It should help with the tax purposes.
I think 12 month’s may be a bit long. Perhaps 3 to 6 month’s seems a bit more reasonable. The stake fee is my main concern. Example…I earned 10 zil from staking this month. If I want to claim them on my atomic wallet it will cost me 12 zil .Then it cost another 4 zil to stake my claimed 10 zil. Leaving me in the negative .At this point staking becomes useless for me and many others that don’t have large amounts of zil to begin with. I could add more zil as time goes on and most certainly will. But if you are new to crypto and staking would you not be turned off by this method of fee structures. I will admit that I once had a larger stake in zil but my rewards seemed too low when you take into account the larger fee for holding then trading. It costs less to sell then to hold and thats my biggest concern.
I would suggest a good better best system for staking.
GOOD: Less APY with less unlock period. (Say 1/2 the APR of current system.)
BETTER: More APY with more unlock period. (Perhaps the current system as is.)
BEST: Most APY with with longest unlock period. (Say 3.5% more of current system. Perhaps also a continuation of GZIL rewards fo this premium plan.)
Examples: So if the current APY is 14%, then the GOOD option would yield 3.5%
with (example) 7 day unlock. The BETTER option would be what it already is (14 days) & the BEST option would yield 14% plus + 3.5% = 17.5%. Plus, perhaps also more GZIL as well. An example unlock could be 28 days.
In summary, I think too many options kind of makes things too complicated, both for regular ZIL stakers and for the coders that would have to implement this.
But I think folks should be able to easily understand just 3 simple options.
The previous suggestion (from xxxFrog) sounds a bit like a Certificate of deposit at a Bank which could be implemented also I suppose. Thanks for reading.
The best thing would be a vault that automatically collects staking rewards and reinvests them evrey few days. The fees will be paid for one transaction and be minimal as it is split between all users of the vault
That sounds pretty good. But it may be a nightmare to make something like that possible. Each person is staking with their own wallets. Meaning the resources are not exactly being pooled together in one lump sum. If they took the staking fee from each person and pooled that together though it may be possible. Then add a sort of auto compounding option with a longer tiered unlocking period that allows the funds to be staked for a longer period, Thus allowing zil to retain and grow its value. At the same time keeping the stakers happy.