🚦Staking and Unstaking with Kintsu

How to Stake, Un-stake, and earn yield with Kintsu

Staking with Kintsu

When a user stakes tokens with the Kintsu protocol, the experience is as follows:

1. User initiates a stake transaction with the Vault contract, in which they submit Gas Tokens to the Vault.

2. User receives sTokens from the Vault. The amount received depends on the current Redemption Ratio, which can be seen on the Kintsu website beforehand.

For example, if the current Redemption Ratio is 1.1 Gas Tokens for every sToken, then a user who stakes 11 Gas Tokens will receive 10 sTokens from the Vault.

sTokens are fungible, and can be traded on DEXes or used as a proxy for Gas Tokens in other activities on the blockchain, such as DeFi applications, Gaming, NFTs, and more.

When Gas Tokens are staked with Kintsu, they are transferred to the Vault contract. The Vault handles the rest of the process behind the scenes, including:

1. generating the new sTokens and transferring them to the user, and

2. making sure the user's Gas Tokens make it downstream to Validators for staking on the network.

For more technical information on how staking works behind the scenes, see Kintsu's docs on the Staking Mechanism.

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Unstaking with Kintsu

Users can redeem Gas Tokens from the Vault in exchange for submitting sTokens to the Vault. The number of Gas Tokens received depends on the Redemption Ratio at that time, with respect to the number of sTokens they submit for redemption.

For example, if the current Redemption Ratio is 1.1 Gas Tokens for every sToken, then a user who submits 10 sTokens will receive 11 Gas Tokens from the Vault.

It's important to note that when using Liquid Staking, there will be a delay between the time that a user requests to unstake Gas Tokens and when they actually receive the Gas Tokens. There are a few reasons for this, including native unstaking delays built into, and enforced by, the blockchain itself. The user experience is as follows:

1. Initiation: User executes an unstaking request by making a requestUnlock call to the Vault. When they call this function, they specify either how many sTokens they'd like to submit, or how many Gas Tokens they'd like to receive. The sTokens are transferred to the Vault and held in escrow for the duration of the Batching Period.

2. Batching Period: The user's sTokens are held in escrow by the Vault as the Vault aggregates all of the unstaking requests from users made during this period. The user is free to cancel their unstaking request and receive their sTokens back until the end of this period.

3. Cooldown Period: Once the batched unbonding request is sent to the Validators, the users must wait for the Cooldown Period. This is enforced by the blockchain itself, and there is no way around it.

4. Redemption: Once the Cooldown Period is over, the user can redeem their Gas Tokens to their wallet.

Note: Exact Cooldown Periods and Batching Periods vary by network. You can find more specific details about each network's Batching Period and Cooldown Period in the Networks section of these docs.

For more detailed technical information on how this process works, see Kintsu's docs on the Unstaking Mechanism.