📖Staking Q&A

What is Ethereum upgrade(ETH2.0)?

The Ethereum roadmap involves interconnected protocol upgrades that will make the network more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable. The first step is to change Ethereum’s consensus from PoW to PoS, which means it will no longer be possible to use graphics card GPUs or ASIC chip mining machines for PoW mining.

What is The Merge?

The beacon chain (Consensus layer) shipped on December 1, 2020, it doesn’t change the Ethereum you use today, they execute in parallel, The Merge means Beacon chain and current ETH PoW chain will work together to create blocks, and also means Ethereum change it’s consensus from PoW to PoS.

When will Ethereum upgrade launch(The Merge)?

According to Ethereum Foundation’s blog, it will happen between 2022/09/10 and 2022/09/20, the most possible date is 2022/09/15.

What is Staking?

Staking is a way of earning rewards for holding certain cryptocurrencies, for ethereum, you need to stake 32 ETH to be a validator and lock it up a period, and continue to get pledge income.

How can I join Staking and get the reward?

If an individual wants to participate in the stake and obtain income, he needs to stake 32 ETH on the stake launch pad of the official Ethereum website to create a validator, and then he needs to purchase a series of hardware that meets the requirements, start validator program, consensus layer node, and execution layer nodes on it, are must guarantee to be online 7*24 hours and need to be upgraded to the latest version on time.

Why XHash is the best choice?

Individual participation in staking requires a lot of time to learn the knowledge of Ethereum staking, purchase hardware, build, maintain and upgrade software, which is very labor-intensive and does not necessarily guarantee income. In XHash, you can create your validator node in just a few simple steps, and the rest work will be done by XHash's professional team, users only need to sit back and receive the benefits.

What is Non-Custodial Staking?

XHash provides Non-Custodial staking service, which means customers’ ETH are controlled by their wallets, XHash just has the validate key but can’t access your ETH, which ensures maximum security.

How much can I earn?

The staking income is represented by APR(annualized rate of return), APR depends on the percentage of the total supply of ETH staked on the network, currently, it’s 4.3%. However, at present, the validator only obtains the revenue from the beacon chain. After the merge the validator will obtain the additional revenue from the execution layer, it’s expected to be 7% if the staking percentage doesn’t change.

When can I withdraw my fund?

In order to safely transfer the network to PoS, Ethereum currently does not have the function of withdrawal, and it has to wait for another hard fork(Shanghai) after the merge. The merge is expected to happen in mid-September 2022, but the time for the Shanghai hard fork is still uncertain. It may not happen until 6-12 months after the merge, which means that your staked Ethereum will continue to be locked until Ethereum opens the withdrawal function.

What are the risks of Staking?

The main risks of staking are penalties that result in a loss of funds, there are two kinds of penalties, one is the network will penalize validators who are offline for a sustained amount of time, this penalty is tiny, for example, if you obtain 0.001 ETH per hour for online, then you will be punished for 0.001 ETH per hour for offline. Another is the network will slash validators that act maliciously, any validator found to have broken these rules will be slashed and ejected from the network. Slashing means that a significant part of the validator’s stake is removed: up to the whole stake of 32 ETH in the worst case. Validator software and staking providers will have built-in protection against getting slashed accidentally. Slashing should only affect validators who misbehave deliberately.

XHash has the world’s leading Ethereum security infrastructure, which can guarantee you the greatest degree of avoid from punishment.