Staking Process

All Service Providers must stake ZCN on their infrastructure in order to provide a service on Züs. While the Active Set (Miners and Sharders) and Blobbers both have their service commitment collateralized by ZCN, the process by which the two groups stake collateral has slight differences

Blobber Staking

Prior to starting the storage service, the client and Blobber agree on the payment amount, in addition to other terms, such as size (GB), latency/speed, and geolocation.

The terms of this agreement are written into a smart contract, called a Storage Allocation. To finalize the Storage Allocation, the Blobber and the Client both deposit the ZCN amount of the storage payment into the Allocation, which is then locked and published on the blockchain according to the specified service terms.

To learn more about how blobber staking works, you can reference the Payment Architecture.

Miner and Sharder Staking

Miners and Sharders validate and maintain transactions published on the Züs blockchain. Together they represent a group of 141 network nodes — 111 Miners and 30 Sharders. This group is referred to as the Active Set.

Each member of the Active Set is required to collateralize their node with a minimum of 50,000 ZCN stake for the first year of pre-mainnet (this duration will change in future network upgrades). Each member of the Active Set generates earnings on transaction fees and block rewards.

To learn more about how the active set works, you can reference the tokenomics whitepaper.