Introduction

• In this analysis, You will read about Staking on Flow blockchain. Flow is becoming more permissionless! Flow’s long-term vision is to optimize for security and scalability and move toward decentralization over time. With the release of permissionless contract deployment and new nodes for staking, build an analysis around the state of staking on Flow.

• I went through Flow and analyzed these parameters:

  • Stakes/Unstakes activity
  • Circulating Supply
  • Nodes
  • Users Breakdown
  • Top users/Nodes

  
  Analyzed by Hess - Reading Time Almost 10 min

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Transactions and Users

:key: Key Insights:

• More than 65% of weekly transactions were at Stake.
• Overall, 75% of transactions were stake, 5.5% of transactions were unstake and 18.8% of transactions were Rewards.
• Also, The total number of unique stakers is 23.7K, 7K unstakers, and 7.7K unique users that claimed their rewards.

:bar_chart: Charts:

• It is interesting that each month, The total number of weekly users decreased for a week. Overall, I can not see any trends because almost since January 2022, The total number of stakers or unstakers didn’t decrease or increased. The total number of unique stakers has a huge difference from unstakers. Flow has nearly 23.K unique stakers and 7K unique unstakers since January 2022.
• The weekly share of transactions sow that almost 65-80% of transactions were stake. The weekly share of unstake transactions were 11-25%. During some bearish events, the total unstake and stake transactions decreased and claim rewards increased. Like May 2-9 when LUNA and UST crashed.

Method

• Fortunately, We have a Staking table in Flow tables. There are 6 key actions in this table.
  • ('TokensCommitted', 'DelegatorTokensCommitted') = 'Stake'
  • ('DelegatorUnstakedTokensWithdrawn', 'UnstakedTokensWithdrawn') = 'Unstake'
  • ('RewardTokensWithdrawn', 'DelegatorRewardTokensWithdrawn') = Reward
• Also, I extracted Flow Prices from flow.core.fact_prices and calculated Flow amount in USD.

Breakdowns

:key: Key Insights:

• based on Staked Flow, The large volume belong to the group that staked +100K Flow.
• Also, The highest number of transactions belong to the group that staked up to 1 Flow.
• The large group of users staked up to 1 Flow and had only one transaction.
• The Top User based on transactions had more than 3K transactions and based on volume staked +30M Flow.

:bar_chart: Charts:

I divided breakdowns based on two parameters. One based on the Staked amount and one based on users.

• Based on Staked and unstaked amount, The highest Volume was for +100K stake and unstake Flow. The highest number of unstake transactions was for unstaked 100-1K Flow. but the highest number of stakes was for Up to 1 Flow amount.
• The large group of users staked and unstaked one times and the amount of was up to 1 Flow.

Staker’s Activities

• As you know, Flow is an NFT blockchain. Not only NFT but is based on NFT. I analyzed the Stakers activity in Flow blockchain. Also, I looked for NFT collections that stakers are coming from.
• Tokens Withdrawn and TokensDeposited are two popular activities by Stakers.
• About 88 Unique stakers have NFTs from the Raribble collection. The second top collection is FlovotarComponent.

Nodes

:key: Key Insights

• Based on transactions, Users staked their flow into only one Node.
• Based on volume, There are three nodes with above 20% of the total staked amount.
• The highest staked Flow in one Node is 163M US dollars.

:bar_chart: Charts

• Based on total staked Flow in USD, There are three Nodes with the highest amount of Flow in USD.
• One with 163M Dollars, One with 134M, and the other one with 83M US dollars. Two of these top 3 nodes had the highest amount of Unstake too but One of them had no unstake. So we can call this node with 83M Stake as a Top node.

Stake/Unstake Volume in FLow and USD

:key: Key Insights

• Users staked 168M Flow which is worth 663M US dollars. Also, Users claimed 11M Flows which is worth 44M US dollars.
• Also, Users unstaked 159M Flow which is worth 584M US dollars.
• The average weekly staked Flow is 339 and the average weekly unstaked Flow is 7.5K. The highest amount of staked Flow was 6.6M and the highest amount of unstaked Flow is 9.6M.

:bar_chart: Charts:

• Because of Flow Price, More Volume in USD staked between January and May but more Flow Staked between July and November. There were some ups and downs based on Staked and unstaked Flow but based on Volume in USD total weekly staked and unstaked Flow decreased. For Almost 2 weeks, The cumulative unstake volume was higher than the Stake but after that again, The cumulative Stake was higher than unstake. The Share of staked Flow was 50% and the share of unstaked Flow was 46.6.
• Almost all weeks, The average unstake amount was higher than the average stake amount both in Flow and USD.

What is Flow blockchain?

• Flow is a blockchain platform that originally was designed for gaming purposes, but has expanded since its launch in 2020. The flow blockchain enables fast, low-cost transactions and supports smart contracts. It powers blockchain applications including NBA Top Shot, a non-fungible token (NFT) offering

What is Flow Token?

• FLOW is the currency required for the network and all the applications on top of it to function. FLOW is designed as a payment method as well as a long-term reserve asset for the entire Flow economy. The token is used by validators, developers, and users to participate in the FLOW network and earn rewards

How Does Staking Work on Flow?

• The Flow protocol maintains a list of node operators. The list contains important information about each node, like their public keys, node address, and what kind of node they are running. (Collection, Consensus, Execution, Verification, or Access)

  A node operator registers a node by submitting a transaction containing their node information and the FLOW they wish to stake. If they meet the requirements to run a node, then will be accepted to join the network!

  Once a node is staking and operating properly, it will receive periodic reward payments, assuming it stays online and actively participates in the protocol without committing any actions that would harm the network, which we call slashable offenses. Once nodes have registered, they are required to operate for a protocol-specified timeframe. This timeframe is otherwise known as an Epoch.

• Delegation

  Any account in the network may also participate in staking by delegating their tokens to a node operator. Every node operator in the network is eligible to receive delegations, there is no opting out.

  To delegate to a node, a user simply specifies the ID of the node they want to delegate to and the number of tokens they want to delegate. The tokens are committed and managed in the exact same way that normal staked tokens are managed.

  Rewards for delegators are also calculated in the exact same way that rewards for node operators are calculated, with one difference in that 8% of the calculated amount is given to the delegatee (the node being delegated to). The remaining 92% is awarded to the delegator.

• Rewards Distribution

Rewards Distribution

The rewards distribution schedule has been designed to ensure there is enough liquid supply of FLOW available in the ecosystem to empower a wide variety of use cases and promote fair and diverse participation in the Flow ecosystem.

The numbers in this table represent the total amount of tokens that are paid as staking rewards at each epoch to the entire pool of participants in the Flow network as a whole. While total staking reward per epoch is known and fixed, individual rewards are variable depending on many factors.

The total rewards for each epoch are fixed for that epoch, but where those rewards come from can change. When the protocol pays rewards, it first pulls from the central pool all the transaction fees that have been paid by every user in the network since the last rewards payment. Once that pool has been depleted, the protocol mints new tokens that are used as rewards

Full Analysis

Flow Staking Overview

Overview All Time

THE END

THANK YOU FOR READING!

ALL CODES AND CONTENTS WERE WRITTEN BY HESS.

:bird: Twitter: @hessaminanloo

:t-rex: Discord_id: hess#0890

:calendar: Analyze Date: 2022/NOV/

• The highest amount of Flow in USD was unstaked at the beginning of the year while the highest amount of Flow in USD staked after March 2022. The minimum unstaked Flow is 302 Flow while the minimum staked Flow is 0.012 Flow.

Conclusion

• The Circulating Supply of Flow is around 1B Flow. Following the 699M net stakes, The Ratio of Stakes is 67% of the circulating Supply. This is a huge number for Flow. Unfortunately, The huge amount of stake is distributed into three nodes. It means Flow is less decentralized in comparison to other chains. These three nodes have enough power to manipulate the network.

Overview Since January 2022