Staking Collectives

The purpose of the staking token collective is to enable multiple individual users or users with a specific governance role/s to lock & combine together their staking derivative tokens in order to jointly claim the staking rewards and redistribute them to another (distinct) set of users. In simple words, we are allowing a set of people to own/control the staking tokens and yet another distinct set/s of people to earn the rewards from those tokens being staked.

Staking Collectives can be used by self-governed and self-organized active community members whose goal is to build their own incentivization structures to execute various off-chain community goals and missions. The Staking Collectives will be distributing rewards through Spending Pools, which will be modified to support the distribution of multiple tokens.

Create a registrar in which ANY user/account (without the need to have a dedicated role or permission) can create a Staking Collective. For the collective to become activated a minimum bond amount of staking tokens or derivative V<ID>_tokens will have to be committed to the collective pool, the default min_collective_bond should be equivalent to 100’000 KEX and configurable in the Network Properties (or the equivalent of any other staking token/s as per Token Rates Registrar). If within min_collective_bonding_time (seconds, default 24h - 86400) the min_collective_bond locked is not reached then the collective should be removed from the registrar and the funds returned to the people/person creating the collective.

In order to send a collective creation tx users should commit in the same transaction a minimum of 10% of the min_collective_bond in the form of one or MANY staking tokens. ONLY the staking and their derivative tokens should be allowed to be bonded and the ONLY people who SHOULD be allowed to bond more staking/derivative tokens in the collective creation process should either be an original creator or a person designed by the collective creator in the contributors deposit-whitelist (unless any flag is set to true allowing anyone to contribute their staking rewards to the collective even if they are NOT explicitly whitelisted).

It must be possible to distribute a share of all cumulative rewards to one or MANY spending pools. In the Network Properties max_collective_outputs (default 10) should be defined to limit the maximum number of spending pools. The sum of all share values should be equal to the exact value 1 at all times.

It might happen that the initial bond of the individual sending the create tx is insufficient to initialize the collective, for that purpose any account in the deposit-whitelist should be allowed to bond additional tokens to assist the creation of the collective before its initiation time expires (min_collective_bonding_time) and the collective gets removed from the registry without ever becoming active.

After the collective has been created, all whitelisted contributors should be allowed to voluntarily “lock” their staking derivatives for a defined time period by providing the date (UNIX timestamp) at which ALL deposited tokens can be withdrawn. Once the date is set it should NOT be possible to “unlock” the tokens until that specific date passes. The maximum time period should be NO greater than 1 year from the latest block time OR the latest time the locking & donation transaction was sent. Depositors can always extend the unlock date (indefinitely) but never decrease it. The locking tx can be sent multiple times to increase the locking period (1 year at a time for safety purposes).

In addition to the locking period, whitelisted contributors should be able to configure their individual intended donation to the collective, that is a percentage of rewards (value between 0 and 1) that should be deposited and controlled by the collective. All donations should be subtracted from the amounts being sent to the spending pools. Depositors should also have the ability to “lock” the donation amount using a dedicated donation-lock field until the “locking” period passes. If the locking period is extended the “donation lock” should also persist and remain not changeable.

Collectives should have two types of status, either active, paused or inactive. In the active status, the collective should periodically claim the staking rewards and distribute them to the specified spending pool. In the paused and inactive state, the staking rewards should NOT be claiming or distributing any rewards. After the collective is successfully created its status should be automatically set to inactive and await the collective to delegate the tokens to one or many validators. The status should change to active ONLY when a sufficient amount of tokens are delegated and can be used to claim the rewards (e.g. claim-start elapsed).

Claiming of the rewards MUST also start NO earlier than at claim-start date (default - time of collective creation) and occur NOT more often than as defined by a claim-period property. The reward claiming MUST NOT continue once the claim-end date (default 0 - no time limit) is reached. The claim-period (default 86400 - 24h) is defined in seconds and should periodically trigger reward claims to distribute 100% of all rewarded tokens to the spending pool designated by the spending-pool property. Every time rewards are claimed by the staking collective the last-distro property should be updated to mark the time at which the last claim took place. In the Network Properties a reward claim period min_collective_claim_period should be defined (in seconds, default 14400 - 4 hours) which will define the smallest value to which the claim-period can be set.

Staking Collectives MUST be associated with at least ONE or many owners - governance-defined roles or individual KIRA accounts controlling the distribution to the specific spending pools. Collectives should be controlled using custom collective proposals that can be raised & voted on only by the collective owners. Any KIRA account should be able to create a collective and seed it with derivatives, thus becoming the first account in the list of owners.

There should be NO permissions necessary to vote on the collective proposal other than being part of the collective.

The final consideration of the Collective management should be the removal of the collective from the registry, that is managing a situation in which owners decide to mutually delete it or the amount/value of staking derivatives deposited falls below the minimum as defined by min_collective_bond. Removal of the collective as a result of owner's proposal to initiate it MUST be possible regardless of whether or not some of the depositors’ derivate tokens in the Collective were locked by them. As a result of the successful Collective Removal proposal, all tokens deposited should be returned back to the depositors at the time of the proposal enactment while all other remaining tokens, such as donations and staking rewards should be claimed for a final time and sent to the spending pools.

In the case where depositors decide to remove their derivatives from the collective (assuming their coins are not in the locking state) and min_collective_bond would no longer be reached, the Collective should change its status to inactive and the automatic removal process must be initiated in the same manner as if removal proposal was raised and automatically passed. The main reason to raise a proposal is to the cleanup registry to prevent spam while retaining information for the owners in regard to the reason why the collective was removed. Unless depositors are also one of the owners they should NOT have the ability to raise or vote on any proposals, only in the case where they intend to remove their stake a Collective Removal proposal should be initiated.

Original Spending Pools were limited to a single token that can be distributed at a single rate. Since Staking Collectives require multiple tokens (staking rewards) to be distributed to the single spending pool we need to modify them to facilitate new functionality. Instead of a single token and a single rate we need to create an array of multiple tokens and corresponding distribution rates.

Since the amount of staking rewards deposited from the Staking Collective to the Spending Pool changes unpredictably every claim-period (staking rewards vary from block to block) we need to create a mechanism of dynamic token rates to ensure that all staking rewards are spent within some specific time period.

A new boolean field dynamic-rate should be included in the spending pool structure to define whether or not dynamically adjusted token rates should be enforced. Once dynamic-rate is set to value “true” another field dynamic-rate-period should define every what period of time all the “token-rates” should change. If dynamic-rate is set to false, then the spending pool should operate in the same way as it would originally in KIP-71 (with the exception that it can support claiming multiple tokens and not just one).

In order to calculate new dynamic token rates we will utilize a "token-deposits” table in which all deposits will be collected for the time period equal to dynamic-rate-period. We will also need to calculate the total number of beneficiaries (users assigned by account and role) and divide their number by the total distribution rate we want to achieve. As the result, we would allow the fair distribution of all tokens deposited within dynamic-rate-period to a set of beneficiaries so that no tokens would be left at the end of the period. There is no need to take into account that the number of beneficiaries might be changing, the only thing that is important is the recalculation of token rates every dynamic-rate-period. To get the “total_beneficiaries_count” we will only take into account users in the claims table that registered their intent to withdraw tokens.

In essence, for each token x in token-deposits table, the new_token_rate(x) = ( token_deposits(x) / dynamic_rate_period ) / total_beneficiaries_count.

It might happen that the pool will run out of tokens because the number of beneficiaries suddenly increased. To mitigate that issue we should NOT allow for withdraws of tokens unless the beneficiary is eligible and registered to claim the tokens BEFORE the current dynamic-rate-period started. This means that new beneficiaries must await after registration for a new claim period before they can start receiving tokens from the pool. If dynamic-rate is set to true, then claim-expire should be ignored or set to value the same as dynamic-rate-period so that the maximum time period for which the user should be able to claim tokens is equal to dynamic-rate-period.

One of the new modifications to the Spending Pool should also be weights that define individual rates of token distribution. For example, if a person's weight is 2 they should receive tokens at 2x the token-rate, if the rate is 0.5, they should be able to claim the tokens but only at 1/2 the token-rate. By default, all token rates should be set to 1.

If any of the weights is changed to value different then 1, then token rates should be recalculated accordingly, that is for each token x in token-deposits table, the new_token_rate(x) = ( ( token_deposits(x) / dynamic_rate_period ) / total_beneficiaries_count ) * (weights_sum / total_beneficiaries_count)

Create a Spending Pool Registry with associated identifiers mapping to a list of properties defining how the pool operates: