Tonstakers FAQ

Key Takeaways

Liquid staking is the most stable way to earn rewards on TON, allowing users to participate in staking without needing 300,000 TON.
LSTs provide liquidity and additional DeFi opportunities, enabling users to maximize their earnings through liquidity pools and farming incentives.
Tonstakers offers a secure staking experience, protecting users from slashing and ensuring consistent rewards in the most liquid asset on TON.

Tonstakers enables users to stake their TON safely while avoiding slashing risks and earning stable rewards. While additional DeFi strategies can enhance returns, users should always evaluate potential risks before participating.

Staking is the main DeFi solution on any Proof-of-Stake blockchain network. Today we have 550 million Toncoin worth of $3 billion staked in TON ecosystem.

Staking has such high TVL because it is important to the network security and is rewarded by the protocol itself. In this article, we will cover everything you need to know about TON staking: how it works, what is liquid staking, and the most interesting — how to earn maximum rewards by using DeFi on TON along with liquid staking.

What is Crypto Staking?

Blockchain networks are decentralized systems, meaning there is no central server to store and process all transactions. Instead of it, blockchain networks have validators — independent participants who run their own servers to validate transactions, create blocks, and store transaction data. Currently there are over 370 validators in TON.

To become a validator, one has to stake at least 300,000 TON: lock them in the staking contract to get assigned with the validator rights.

Where the Staking Rewards Come From?

For their work validators receive staking rewards of 1.7 TON per block created and also collect transaction fees from those blocks. All active validators currently earn 50,000 TON at daily average.

It is worth noting that validators’ stake amount impacts their “value” in the network: the larger their stake is, the more tasks they are assigned to do and earn more staking rewards.

What is Liquid Staking?

Most users don’t have 300,000 TON to start staking but would like to earn staking rewards. Liquid staking protocols address this by allowing regular users to delegate even a minimum amount of TON to validators and receive a corresponding share of their staking rewards.

Here’s how liquid staking works:

Users deposit their TON into a liquid staking pool.
The liquid staking pool provides the deposited TON to validators.
Validators stake the additional TON, earn more rewards, and return the provided TON along with a share of the earned rewards to the liquid staking pool.

Liquid staking is a win-win for everyone: users earn staking rewards without dealing with 300,000 TON minimum stake and node maintenance, while validators increase their stakes, earn more too, and improve TON security. E.g. Tonstakers provides validators with 34M TON, which is 5% of the total staked amount of 593M TON at the time of writing.

Why is it Called “Liquid” Staking?

For staking TON, liquid staking users receive Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs). These tokens represent their shares in the liquid staking pool and work like staking receipts or LP tokens from decentralized exchanges.

To unstake and withdraw TON from the liquid staking pool, users exchange their LSTs for TON in a liquid staking pool. This receipt mechanism gives LSTs clear value: 1 LST = 1 TON + accumulated staking rewards. Also, it enables users to use LSTs in other DeFi applications to earn additional rewards (read about it below).

What Liquid Staking Pools are on TON?

Here’s a quick intro to TON liquid staking protocols and their LSTs:

Sources:

TVL and Market Share: data obtained from tonstat.com on Sep 1, 2024;
Community: X (Twitter), Telegram channels and communities of mentioned liquid staking services;
APY, security audits, and integrations: data obtained from mentioned liquid staking services official websites and apps.

How to Maximize Liquid Staking Rewards

Recently TON Foundation has started an initiative to increase utility and liquidity of liquid staking tokens by providing incentives to the biggest LST pools on STON.fi and DeDust. For providing tsTON and stTON tokens to these pools users will earn additional rewards.

For example, users can swap a half of Tonstakers tsTON to USDT and put both tokens into STON.fi tsTON/USDT liquidity pool to earn trading fees from that pool and put LP into farm to earn LP rewards.

We support such initiatives and want to introduce more TON users to liquid staking as well as using liquid staking to get maximum rewards in TON ecosystem.

Why Should Users Consider Staking

Liquid staking is the safest way to earn stable rewards in DeFi:

Stakers receive protocol-issued rewards in TON — the most liquid asset in the ecosystem with $13B market cap.
Staking is free from risks of other DeFi protocols like impermanent losses on DEXes or liquidations on lending protocols. Some protocols like Tonstakers even protect their users from slashing, which is the only considerable staking risk.
Stakers help to improve overall TON security by increasing honest validators’ stakes.
With liquid staking users can earn additional rewards by providing their liquid staking tokens to other DeFi protocols.

These are the reasons why liquid staking is considered safe and stable way to earn on-chain, achieving billions of dollars in total value locked.

All You Need to Know About TON Liquid Staking