What are the benefits of becoming a Contentos block producer?

Be a Contentos block producer and earn rewards in more ways than one!

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Let us guide you on how you can be a block producer for Contentos in this article.

Contentos is a content blockchain designed to power various content-type products (ie., decentralized apps or “DApps”) and serve millions of content creators, audiences, and advertisers, globally. To run this decentralized content ecosystem, 21 block producers are required to run the Contentos infrastructure and keep the whole ecosystem operating smoothly. Block producers are also the Contentos Council members who are responsible for making important governance decision. In return, block producers can earn both content ecosystem rewards and the revenue from selling “gifting vote.”

Anyone who meets the criteria can become a block producer candidate and every participant in the Contents ecosystem can elect block producer candidates as long as you have VEST.

1. Terminology

a. COS: the native utility token in Contentos. 10B in total supply. b. VEST: the governance right in Contentos. You can also think VEST is the form of staked COS. COS and VEST is 1:1 ratio, when converting COS to VEST, the conversion will be completed instantly, however, when converting VEST back to COS, it will take a total of 13 weeks and each week in proportional will be converted back to COS. c. 1 VEST equal to 1 vote.

2. Election Process

a. A total of 21 block producers. Each round of election will choose the top 21 candidates to become block producers. b. After the mainnet launch on the 25th of September, the user will be able to vote via the Contentos web wallet. Soon we expect to have the Contentos mobile wallet that is capable of voting mechanisms. c. Every 105 seconds, a new round of election will be conducted to calculate each candidate's votes. During this period (105 seconds), if a user cancels votes, the votes will be deducted from the candidate when the next calculation starts. d. A user can only cast all votes to ONE candidate. Let’s say you have 100 VEST, you cannot split your votes for two block producer candidates. It’s either you vote all the VEST you have for one candidate or you cancel all VEST from the previous candidate and vote for a new candidate.

3. Block Producer Requirements

a. An AWS m5.2xlarge or a machine with equivalent specs. (8 core/32G RAM/1GMb network bandwidth/1T or more SSD), it’s about $3363 a year. b. Linux operation system. c. At least one Dev-Op engineer. d. Must closely work with Contentos core developers. e. 30,000 VEST in your Contentos account.

4. Block Producer Responsibilities

a. To produce blocks in turns to keep the Contentos ecosystem continuously operational. b. Discuss the finalized the system parameters such as. but not limited to, account creation fee, free stamina value, free gifting vote quote, etc. c. Determine system upgrades. d. Voting for potentially malicious behavior and damage-restoration decisions. e. Supervise community governance, for example, copyright infringement disputes.

5. The benefits of being a Block Producer

A. Content ecosystem rewards (35% of total COS, which is 3.5B COS):

A certain amount of new VEST will be produced along with each new block when a new block is produced by the block producer. The first-year total amount will be 44,800,000 VEST in total, so each day will have 122,739.72 new VEST. In the 12th year, a total of 543,200,000 new VEST will be produced, which means every day will have 1,488,219.17 new VEST. These VEST will be put into the content ecosystem reward pool, on hold for distribution to content creators, positive contributors, block producers, and DApp developers. As block producers, an expected fixed earning from this pool will be as follows:

Rewards for Contentos block producers

The expected fixed reward for a block producer will be 640,000 COS per year. Let’s assume 1 COS = $0.02, which means the first year annual revenue will be $12,800. But on the 12th year, it will be 7.76M COS, if 1 COS is still $0.02 (but we believe it will become much much higher!), then the annual revenue could be $155K.

B. DApp Jump-start reward (5% of total COS, which is 0.5B COS):

Since any content creators and audience member must utilize a content product that is built on the Contentos blockchain—and we also know the user conversion from traditional content apps to the Contentos app needs more motivation and incentive in the beginning phase—we designed a five-year DApp jump-start reward to help DApp developers distribute tokens to creators and audiences. Each DApp (and its users) will receive rewards based on their on-chain contribution on Contentos. The key factors will be, but not limited to, on-chain daily active users (DAU), transactions (TX), content quality (Upvotes/GiftingVotes count), user engagement, etc. 70% of the Jump-start reward (which is 0.35B COS) will be used to encourage DApp developers and its users. Meanwhile, the remaining 30% of the Jump-start reward will be granted to block producers because we believe that block producers need to build a solid, reliable infrastructure and cooperate with DApp developers to bring users to the Contentos ecosystem, which will require time and effort. As a block producer, here is another set of rewards you can expect:

Rewards from DApp Jump-start

As you can see, each block producer can collect an additional 2.42M COS from the first year of the DApp Jump-start reward scheme. Once again, let's assume 1 COS = $0.02, which is worth $48,429 of revenue for each block producer. On the fifth year, it will add 935k COS, which will be $18,714 of revenue foreach block producer.

So if you combine both Contentos ecosystem reward and DApp Jump-start reward, you get the following table:

Projected rewards as a block producer + DApp Jump-start participant

While you may think that having two ways to receive rewards is great, here’s where it gets even better. We’re throwing in a third revenue stream from Contentos! It is designed uniquely which you can’t find in most blockchain projects.

C. GiftingVote Revenue

Every 7 days, the Contentos blockchain calculates the content ecosystem rewards that will then be distributed to all participants. Most of the rewards are allocated for content creators (60%) which adheres to the basic idea that as long as your content receives as much as UpVotes and GiftingVotes, you will be able to collect more reward from this pool. The only way you can acquire GiftingVote is by using your COS to buy from the Contentos blockchain with a 1:1 ratio. The revenue from selling GiftingVote will be shared with the 21 block producers every 105 seconds based on each block producer’s producing result. The revenue from selling GiftingVote can be unlimited as long as block producers and DApp developers work closely and bring the best user-experience to the users. With the GiftingVote design, it could be possible to have higher revenue from being a Contentos block producer!

Another good thing we can look forward to about GiftingVote is after 12 years, when both the content ecosystem reward and DApp Jump-start rewards are all mined and in circulation. Selling GiftingVote will be the main revenue stream for block producers. By this time, we expect to see Contentos and COS already achieving high adoption rates, so the revenue from this should be enough to allow the Contentos infrastructure to be continuously operational.

Now you probably want to know, “how can I enjoy the benefit of becoming a part of block producers even if I’m just a regular token holder with limited resources to join the block producer election?” Don’t worry, the Contentos team is working on ideas that will allow individual token holders to join the election and share the revenue, stay tuned!

If you’d like to become an early bird participant of the Contentos block producer election, you can now send your application to the email: BP@contentos.io with the subject <Election> to apply. We look forward to your support and participation.