How To Maximize GEODNET Staking

How can you make the most of the new GEODNET stak­ing pro­gram? Stak­ing allows any­one to sig­nal that they want a min­er deployed in a cer­tain area. Stak­ing also offers larg­er rewards for both the stak­er and min­ers than a nor­mal deploy­ment. I’ll assume for now you know what GEODNET is; if not, hit this arti­cle first. 

In very broad strokes, there are 3 enti­ties involved: The stak­er, the min­er, and the GEODNET Foun­da­tion. The stak­er puts up a stake (either par­tial or full) sig­nal­ing that they want a min­er deployed into a spe­cif­ic area. Min­ers who deploy into that area earn a mul­ti­ple on their nor­mal rewards. The GEODNET Foun­da­tion (at least for now, August 2023), reviews the pro­posed stakes to make sure a staked area is healthy for the network. 

The GEODNET team has released details of the beta ver­sion of their stak­ing pro­gram, which is the first of its kind as far as using stak­ing to incen­tivize real world deploy­ments as sig­naled by the net­work. Full dis­clo­sure: The orig­i­nal stak­ing pro­pos­al was writ­ten by me and Max Gold over at Gold Hawks & Associates. 

Stakes cov­er a Super­Hex (the set of magen­ta hex­es above), which is 7 res5 hex­es in a rough cir­cle shape. GEODNET uses the Uber H3 hexag­o­nal map­ping sys­tem. Each res5 hex is about 20 km from side to side and cov­ers an area of 250 km². A sin­gle well-placed min­er can ade­quate­ly cov­er a full Super­Hex, but for redun­dan­cy, up to 3 min­ers may be deployed into sep­a­rate res5 hex­es in the Super­Hex and earn enhanced rewards. 

So what do you need to stake? 50,000 GEOD tokens (cur­rent price here). You can earn tokens by min­ing, or you can buy them on any of the DEXs (Decen­tral­ized Exchanges) like 1inch, Uniswap, etc. There is no cen­tral exchange cur­rent­ly list­ing GEODNET, and cur­rent­ly liq­uid­i­ty is pret­ty low, so if your’e going to buy, buy care­ful­ly. As always, this is cryp­to. Cryp­to is ultra volatile, so do your own research and make your own deci­sions on where/how/if you should acquire GEOD tokens.

How does it work? You can Pro­pose a full stake (pro­vide all 50k tokens your­self) or start a par­tial stake in incre­ments of 2,000 GEOD. Par­tial stakes cre­ate an Avail­able Super­Hex and must reach 50k GEOD with­in 30 days or the stake is returned. As of today, August 20th, all Pro­posed Stakes must be sub­mit­ted to the Foun­da­tion man­u­al­ly. In the near future, propos­ing will be allowed once you are logged in with a ver­i­fied GEODNET Con­sole account.

Once a ful­ly fund­ed stake is pro­posed and approved by the Foun­da­tion, it is con­sid­ered Active. There is a 180 day peri­od for Active stakes, dur­ing which up to 3 min­ers can deploy into sep­a­rate res5 hexs with­in the Super­Hex staked region and earn reward mul­ti­ples. If no min­ers have deployed with­in 180 days, the stake is returned with­out any addi­tion­al tokens (no 10% bonus if nobody deploys). 

If at least one min­er is deployed into the staked region with­in 180 days of acti­va­tion, the area is con­sid­ered an Pro­duc­ing Super­hex, and the stak­er will receive a 10% bonus on the staked amount 1 year after the first min­er deploys.

Staking Terms

• Pro­posed Super­Hex — A region pro­posed to the Foun­da­tion as a stake with any amount from 2k-50k.  An accept­ed Pro­posed stake can cre­ate one of two Super­Hex vari­ants, “Avail­able” or “Active”.
• Avail­able Super­Hex / (par­tial stake) — An accept­ed pro­posed stake with any amount from 2–48k. Lasts 30 days from first par­tial stake.
• Active Super­hex / (full stake)  — An accept­ed pro­posed stake with 50k. Lasts 180 days or until a min­er deploys, whichev­er hap­pens first.
• Pro­duc­ing Super­Hex — Super­Hex with at least one deployed min­er earn­ing the reward multiple
• Sat­u­rat­ed Super­Hex — Super­Hex with 3 min­ers, each in their own res5 hex

The dif­fer­ent stakes (Avail­able or Active) will show up on the GEODNET Con­sole map dif­fer­ent­ly. Avail­able is green, and Active is blue. 

Miner Rewards

Ok, that’s cool Nik. What about the min­ers? What do we get? As soon as a stake is Active, the first min­er deployed into any res5 hex in the Super­Hex with­in the first 30 days will earn a 4X mul­ti­ple on their min­ing rewards for one year from the time of the first deploy­ment. Deploy­ment will switch the Super­Hex from Active to Pro­duc­ing. If you have a triple band min­er (and you bloody well should, they’re the high­est earn­ing min­ers in GEODNET), that means as of August 2023 you’ll earn 48 x 4 = 192 GEOD tokens/day.

The sec­ond and third min­ers deployed into an emp­ty res5 hex in the Super­Hex are weight­ed equal­ly for rewards: Each earn half of what the first min­er earns. Once the third min­er is deployed, the Super­hex is con­sid­ered Sat­u­rat­ed. Any fur­ther min­ers deployed will earn the stan­dard reward with­out any multiple.

After the first 30 days, the reward mul­ti­pli­er goes up by 1x and con­tin­ues to go up by 1x every 15 days.

Ok, you have my atten­tion, those rewards can get huge! But wait…where do these tokens come from? All GEODNET tokens come from a max sup­ply of 1 bil­lion tokens that are bro­ken up in the fol­low­ing cir­cle chart. You can see the full break­down over on GEOD­NET’s token page. The min­ing rewards tokens come from the yel­low Min­ing sec­tion (35%). The Stak­ing rewards will be with­drawn from the red Ecosys­tem sec­tion, which is 10% of all tokens.

To put this in per­spec­tive, since the incep­tion of the project used only 9% of the Min­ing tokens have been dis­trib­uted and we’ve recent­ly halved min­ing rewards. The project is in very good shape there as far as total emit­ted rewards vs total avail­able. You can always check cur­rent amounts of tokens in any giv­en wal­let over on Poly­gon­Scan for GEODNET, click­ing on the Hold­ers tab.

Love all the token talk, but this is the real world. Can you give an exam­ple of how and why stak­ing works in GEODNET?

Cur­rent­ly, GNSS sys­tems are com­pli­cat­ed and expen­sive, requir­ing sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment ($5k is a nor­mal start­ing price) to deploy. GEODNET ven­dors like Hyfix pro­vide easy-to-set-up and cost effec­tive (~$700) min­ers that any­one with elec­tri­cal pow­er, an inter­net con­nec­tion, and a clear 360 degree view can deploy. 

Typ­i­cal­ly, a GNSS com­pa­ny will pay high­ly skilled labor to deploy and main­tain a GNSS base sta­tion in a spe­cif­ic area. This is expen­sive, time con­sum­ing, and cen­tral­izes where the prof­its go. As an alter­na­tive, GEODNET is a more decen­tral­ized project that allows any­one, whether they are a cus­tomer, min­er or just an inter­est­ed third par­ty, to sig­nal where cov­er­age is need­ed, pro­vide that cov­er­age, and be reward­ed for pro­vid­ing it. Cool, right?

Where and how would that cov­er­age be used? Let’s take two exam­ples: The Cen­tral Val­ley in Cal­i­for­nia, and the coun­try of France. 

First we’ll do Cal­i­for­nia.  Cal­i­for­nia  is about 3/4s the size of France, and has at least one rel­a­tive­ly small area, the Cen­tral Val­ley, which pro­duces 25% of America’s fruits, nuts, and oth­er food prod­ucts.  The Cen­tral Val­ley is about 20,000 sq miles, which sounds big, but it’s only 1% of all US farmland. 

Agri­cul­ture is a straight­for­ward use case for GNSS.  Mod­ern farm­ers use high accu­ra­cy tech­niques enabled by satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion to max­i­mize crop effi­cien­cy.  Pro­vid­ing cov­er­age to the Cen­tral Val­ley is excep­tion­al­ly use­ful for GEODNET customers.

With stak­ing, the Foun­da­tion or a cus­tomer or the com­mu­ni­ty in gen­er­al can stake areas in the Cen­tral Val­ley that cur­rent­ly have no min­ers.  Stak­ing an area sig­nals to the entire net­work that “this place is impor­tant, you should deploy a min­er here!” This type of stak­ing is an excel­lent demon­stra­tion of lever­ag­ing decen­tral­ized deci­sion mak­ing; we’re not rely­ing on just one enti­ty to decide where to deploy, we’re rely­ing on the net­work itself sig­nal­ing that. 

Ok, so that’s agri­cul­ture. What about anoth­er example?

France is 213,000 sq miles; about ten times as big as the Cen­tral Val­ley.  Each GEODNET min­er can pro­vide cm accu­ra­cy for about 120 square miles.  To pro­vide blan­ket cov­er­age for France you’d need over 1,700 GEODNET min­ers.  However…France doesn’t need per­fect blan­ket cov­er­age, but it does need wide cov­er­age, espe­cial­ly in cer­tain areas. 

France is also noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult to pen­e­trate with DePIN projects. For what­ev­er rea­son, the French are resis­tant to earn­ing cryp­to for deploy­ing hard­ware. Stak­ing rewards should help over­come that resis­tance and encour­age deploy­ment where cov­er­age is needed.

Who might need cov­er­age in France, and why? Per­haps a com­pa­ny who wants to mon­i­tor scoot­er use in a city to help gov­ern­ments under­stand how scoot­ers are being used and whether or not they should be banned or oth­er­wise lim­it­ed.  In this case, the com­pa­ny may not want to go about deploy­ing base sta­tions, and they may not need them per­ma­nent­ly deployed, so stak­ing offers a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to sig­nal demand and get a return on tokens at the end of a year. 

Anoth­er exam­ple is mark­ing very pre­cise­ly where land mines have been found so they can be dis­posed of. This is crit­i­cal work though not always well fund­ed, so a low cost high­ly accu­rate project like GEODNET is an excel­lent fit. 

Ok, I’m ready to go!  What do I need to know about deploy­ing a GEODNET miner?

Every min­er will need pow­er and access to the inter­net.  Min­ers use about 10–15 GB of data a month, though it’s spread out so you don’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly fast inter­net con­nec­tion; it’s more impor­tant that it’s sta­ble. You’ll also need a clear 360 view of the sky all the way to the hori­zon. I’ve writ­ten a blog post on deploy­ing GEODNET min­ers here, go take a look!

That wraps it up for the new GEODNET Stak­ing pro­gram, if you’d like to stay up to date you can join the GEODNET Dis­cord and you can always fol­low me on Twit­ter (X) or YouTube or sign up for email down at the bot­tom of this page so you get noti­fied when­ev­er I pub­lish new content. 

Rock ‘n roll! 

Dis­clo­sures: Author Nik Hawks is a con­sul­tant with Gold Hawks & Asso­ciates, which cur­rent­ly main­tains the GEODNET Foun­da­tion as a client.