Stake & earn

Staking farm contract allows for validators to distribute other tokens to the delegators.

This allows to attract more capital to the validator while ensuring more robust token distribution of the new tokens.

Authorized users

Because of storage and computational limitations, the contract can only store a fixed number of farms. To avoid farm spam, only authorized users can deposit tokens. Owner of the contract can manage authorized users or can deposit farms itself.

Create new farm

Use ft_transfer_call of the token to the staking farm by an authorized user to create new farm.

Farm contains next fields:

• name: String,
• token_id: AccountId,
• amount: Balance,
• start_date: Timestamp,
• end_date: Timestamp,
• last_distribution: RewardDistribution,

Upgradability

Staking Farm contract supports upgradability from the specific factory contract. This is done to ensure that both contract owner and general community agree on the contract upgrade before it happens.

The procedure for upgrades is as follows:

• Staking contract has the factory_id specified. This factory_id should be governed by the users or Foundation that users trust.
• Factory contract contains whitelisted set of contracts, addressed by hash.
• Contract owner calls upgrade(contract_hash) method, which loads contract bytecode from factory_id and upgrade itself in-place.

To avoid potential issues with state serialization failures due to upgrades, the owner information is stored outside of the STATE storage. This ensures that if new contracts has similar upgrade method that doesn't use state, even if contract got into wrong state after upgrade it is resolvable.

Burning rewards

The staking reward contract has a feature to burn part of the rewards. NEAR doesn't have currently a integrated burning logic, so instead a ZERO_ADDRESS is used. This is an implicit address of 0 and that doesn't have any access keys: https://explorer.mainnet.near.org/accounts/0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The burning itself is done in a 3 steps:

• When epoch ends and ping is called, the amount of rewawrds allocated to burn will be transferred to ZERO_ADDRESS address via shares. This shares are still staked.
• Anyone can call unstake_burn, which will unstake all the currently staked shares on ZERO_ADDRESS.
• After 36 hours of unstaking, anyone can call burn to actually transfer funds to ZERO_ADDRESS.

This is done because transferring immediately rewards to ZERO_ADDRESS is impossible as they are already staked when allocated. Anyone can call unstake_burn and burn, similarly how anyone can call ping on the staking pool to kick the calculations.

TODO: the imporvement to this method, would be to unstake that amount direclty on ping and just let it be burnt via the subsequent burn call.