On February 3rd, the Loopring team staked 34.8 million LRC in the Loopring staking pool contract, with this transaction: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1359666c9e064b0c143a7f022655e5b081f8308b824316322d6918c7e6d145b5

With this, ~10% of circulating LRC supply is now staked therein. You can always check the state of the staking contract at this address:

This marks the end of the ‘Golden Staking Window’ announced in early December. What does this mean?

Each staker of LRC in Loopring’s staking pool accrues points by the equation:

amount of LRC staked * average staking period

The points are a claim on the Loopring protocol fees — which accumulates LRC from a small percent (~0.06%) of every trade that goes through the protocol, as well as the LRC staked (and slashed) by DEXes built atop.

The Loopring team has never sold any of its tokens since inception, even when it started vesting 1/24th per month in September 2019. We knew we would stake to remain aligned once they started to vest. But first, to give community members an opportunity to accrue more points, we said in early December (with the launch of Loopring v3) that we would delay our staking to after the end of January 2020.

We referred to this period as the ‘Golden Staking Window’, where LRC holders could jump ahead of us to start their point accumulation. Basically, it allowed them to get their Time component to have a heavier weight than ours in the Amount * Time equation.

Now the window has shut, and the team is locking its tokens to participate in LRC staking.

The good news: We are re-locking LRC that has vested from our initial allocation, aka the icebox, so we remain aligned to the Loopring protocol & LRC.

The less good news: By staking, we are entering the pool to accrue LRC rewards, and thus ‘crowding out’ other stakers. i.e., the rewards will be spread out over a larger staking base.

Of course, we feel the former — remaining tightly committed to the protocol and LRC — is most important.

Please keep in mind, the team has never sold any of its LRC allocation, ever, and still isn’t. Now, our team members can participate in staking like all LRC holders. Indeed, after the 34.8m LRC was staked, other LRC for Loopring developer funds was also staked, totalling ~24.5m LRC more.

There are now more than 108 million LRC in the Loopring staking pool, valued at over $3.6m currently.

We think this is an incredible start. As the Loopring protocol grows & the staking pool accrues protocol fees, the team can benefit alongside the whole network and community. The main driver of the staking pool rewards will be the volume flowing through Loopring exchanges. This will really kick off in March, as explained in our recent monthly update.

Cheers to the future of scalable & secure orderbook exchanges on Ethereum!