Stake & Earn TEA

Staking on the tea protocol allows you to earn TEA tokens while contributing to the security and growth of the ecosystem. By staking your TEA, you also receive stTEA and become an active participant in the governance of the protocol. stTEA are used to measure your voting power and give you an the opportunity to influence the protocol's decision-making.

Why stake on the tea Protocol?

Staking TEA on the projects you support and are passionate about improves their reputation and maintainability while earning you rewards. Staking also provides incentives for contributors and maintainers to do their best work, and holds them accountable for the project's maintenance. Staking is not a risk-free activity. Tokens staked on a project can be slashed if the project has a reported vulnerability that remains unacknowledged or unresolved after a governance-defined period.

By staking, you also receive staked TEA, or stTEA, which give you the opportunity to participate in the governance of the tea protocol. Using your stTEA, you can propose and vote on non-financial critical parameter changes to the tea protocol. Protocol parameters can include the priority to support specific package managers or introduce new protocol features or functions, as well as the impact of external factors on user and package reputation. This functionality allows critical parameters to evolve and be optimized over time by active members of the tea community.

If you are not yet ready to stake on any project but would like to know the potential future yield of your TEA, you can utilize the estimation widget available on the tea web app's staking screen.

How to begin staking?

Follow these steps to stake TEA on an OSS project when the tea Incentivized Testnet launches:

1. Navigate to the OSS Staking page in your tea dashboard.

   
2. Search for the OSS project you would like to stake your TEA on and select it.

3. Read through the project’s staking page analyzing things like its staking history, and project details. You can also visit the project's repository to inspect its code, dependencies and other critical factors to gain confidence in the project's security and maintenance status.

   
4. Input the amount of TEA you would like to stake and hit the “Stake TEA” button.

FAQs

What determines a project's staking rewards?

A project's staking rewards is determined by the amount of TEA tokens staked on the project relative the total amount of TEA tokens staked across all projects.

The result of

sum of all TEA tokens staked on the project ------------------------------------------------------- sum of all TEA tokens staked across all projects

determines the portion of the daily staking rewards received by the project.

To prevent a small number of packages from attracting most of the staking rewards, the tea protocol limits the amount of staking rewards that a single package can receive to 1% of the daily distribution.

Can I stake on my own project?

Yes, you can. Search for your project in the OSS Staking page and start staking.

Is there a delay when unstaking?

Yes, unstaking a project takes 28 days.

Can I lose some of my stake?

Yes. Staked tokens can be partially forfeited ("slashed") if the OSS project is not well maintained and does not acknowledge or address a reported vulnerability within the governance-defined timeframe.

What are teaRank rewards?

teaRank rewards are distributed to registered projects based on their teaRank value, as determined by Proof of Contribution.

These rewards are emitted from a dedicated rewards pool distinct from staking rewards.

What is the Optimum Staking Ratio (OSR)

The OSR sets a maximum limit of staking rewards that any individual OSS project may receive. This limit is currently set to 1%⁠.

If the staking allocation of a specific project exceeds the OSR, the excess staking rewards (i.e. any rewards over the 1% limit) are redistributed to other projects.

This mechanism incentivizes stakeholders to distribute their stakes instead of focusing on the most popular projects.

What is a project's Bug Bounty Pool

A project's Bug Bounty Pool is a reserve of staked tokens set aside to reward community members who submit valid vulnerability or bug reports. Rewards can be distributed either by the project's maintainers or, alternatively, as a portion of the amount slashed by the protocol when the bug report is not addressed on time.

What is a project's reward-to-bounty ratio

The reward-to-bounty ratio refers to the proportion of teaRank rewards a project has received and staked to itself to grow its bounty pool⁠.

A project must maintain a minimum reward-to-bounty ratio of 25% to continue earning teaRank rewards⁠⁠. If the ratio falls below this threshold, the project will no longer receive teaRank rewards until the minimum 25% reward-to-bounty ratio is restored with the project staking more onto itself.

For example, if project FOO's treasury receives 100 TEA as teaRank rewards on day 1, FOO must stake a minimum of 25 TEA to itself to continue receiving teaRank rewards when the the teaRank rewards are claimed.