Sirius enables delegations and Concordium's staking

Sirius has become one of the most awaited updates in the Concordium blockchain, the scientific blockchain that aims to be the bridge between the economies of the present and the future, and it is finally up and running. Yesterday, June 23, version 4 of the protocol, named Sirius, went into effect. All bakers, as Concordium calls validators, have had to upgrade their nodes in order to continue validating. Now, any CCD holder will also be able to participate in Concordium staking by delegating their tokens, although Sirius involves other new features that we will explain below.

Concordium Node 4.1.1, which is what the update is called, as far as the structural part of the blockchain is concerned, will allow bakers to open staking pools and CCD holders who do not want to run their own node the possibility to delegate part of their capital to such pools.

We will now review the main features of Concordium's delegation system:

Staking limits

The pool is subject to certain limits. There's a minimum stake set to bakers, an amount that they will have to allocate in the pool from their funds. On the other hand, the limits of a pool will be equal to 3 times what a baker sets as stake in its validator.

In addition, there is an overall limit to ensure that a pool doesn't grow too much in relation to the other pools or that its misbehavior affects the proper functioning of the network. This limit is set at 10% of the total staked CCD. In the event of having a capital greater than this 10%, it could be distributed among several validators.

In addition, there is no minimum delegation amount and any CCD holder can delegate, even those who have tokens that have not yet been released.

Cost of delegations

Both the staking and the unbonding transaction incur a cost. Concordium proposes a transaction fee system that will decrease over time. It is set at €0.01 for the first two years. Thereafter, it will decrease as the number of transactions increase. We should keep in mind to leave enough tokens to pay the cost of transactions in addition to the amount we are going to stake.

Rewards distribution

The rewards that a baker receives for validating blocks are distributed proportionally to the staking of each pool. The bakers will get a part of that reward (10%) and the remaining will be distributed among the participants in accordance with the amount of delegated tokens.

The pools are updated every 24 hours, so any modification or increase of the staking will be reflected at the end of each day. Rewards will be distributed once a day, always at the same time.

ncreased cooldown period

With the arrival of Sirius, bakers who decide to reduce their stake or undo their baker will have to wait for a three-week cooldown period. For delegators, the cooldown period will be two weeks.

Passive delegation

On the one hand, you will be able to use the standard delegation method. In other words, you will be able to choose a baker to delegate your tokens to by staking them, which will increase the chances of the selected baker to be chosen to validate a block and receive rewards for it. However, Concordium will also use a passive delegation system, which consists in not staking your tokens to a specific baker, but in distributing the delegation among all the existing pools. This will generate a smaller reward but will increase the security of the delegation. You would avoid the risk of your tokens being affected by the poor performance of the chosen validator.

If you want to delegate CCD to a baker's pool or if you want to stake through the passive delegation system, you will need to create a desktop wallet in Concordium and have a Ledger Nano S.

Concordium is working to offer the possibility to delegate from its mobile wallet. This function is expected to be available soon, as it is currently in testing process.

To stake CCD, you have to create and verify your identity and create an account in the desktop wallet, to associate it with your Legder Nano S device. To start the delegation process, you must select the account you choose to delegate, register as a delegator, select either a baker's pool or passive delegation, and enter the amount you wish to delegate. Finally, you will need to connect your Ledger to sign the transaction, and that's it!

You can consult the Concordium staking guide for more detailed instructions.

This update comes with significant improvements to the network's smart contracts:

• It has increased the use cases that the Concordium blockchain will support.
• It has improved interoperability with other contracts to support fungible tokens, such as ERC-20.
• It added support for cryptographic functions such as: verify_ed25519_signature, verify_ecdsa_secp256k1_signature, hash_sha2_256, hash_sha3_256, and hash_keccak_256. This will reduce transaction fees.

All notes on the updates to the smart contracts section and the Concordium client are available on the development page.

This update is definitely a major milestone in the Concordium blockchain roadmap. However, no less important are the goals they aspire to reach, including providing the ideal environment for the development of infinite use cases such as asset issuance (tokenization), DeFi, metaverse, gaming, governance, traceability or privacy, in which the unique feature of having the ID layer integrated into the protocol will be the greatest differentiating value.

We will also be watching for their grant program for developers and open source projects that support the Concordium and RustLang ecosystems.

For more information about the project and its community:

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