Introducing Mineral Grade
A novel scoring system for MINE stakers based on loyalty metrics of amount and duration staked
The following article is initially presented in the Mineral Grade documentation, with minimal wording edits for clarity.
The Mineral Grade is a scoring system for MINE governance stakers that has been built in the partnership of Sayve Protocol and Pylonboard.
It aims to be a novel system for ranking the loyalty of MINE governance stakers in the Pylon ecosystem for providing additional IDO benefits.
The overall goal of the Mineral Grade is to:
- Reduce or possibly eliminate the gaming of minimum staking requirements, thereby preventing users from staking pre-launch and immediately unstaking post-launch
- Soften (but don’t punish) the advantage of whale MINE staking wallets
- Give back to the community of the longest and most loyal MINE stakers
The two core metrics that contribute to the Mineral Grade consist of “Time of Stake” and “Size of Stake.”
The Basics
Interactions with the Pylon Governance contracts record an accurate time and amount of MINE either staked or unstaked. Broadly speaking, this is considered a “time-series”.
A very simple form of time-series to consider, is recording temperatures every hour, every day, the entire year. Each time a measurement is taken, it is recorded as the “temperature” and the exact time it was taken.
Plotted out for a single day and location, it looks something like the following:
Another familiar time-series is the bank ledger. Every time one gets or spends money, a transaction is recorded with exact time and amount, for all of your accounts held (wallets). By taking a look at an overview of everyone in the bank, it would be possible to see how much all wallets hold, and how much each wallet has spent and held in the past.
Essentially this is how the Pylon Governance contract works too, and it is possible for anyone with the skills to gather all these transactions and treat it as a time-series. Pylonboard is already doing this to produce the graphs on the staking statistics pages.
The power of time-series is that there is no need for ongoing snapshots, since it’s possible to query the series asking for each <wallet>, <sum>, <stakes> and <unstakes> up until a given time. This allows snapshots for the governance staking history at any given point in time.
A great visualization of this is the cumulative staking graph on Pylonboard. Currently the graph shows the daily total amount of MINE staked for all wallets, but it can easily be updated to show the total amount staked per wallet. The graph shows the actual amount staked on a daily basis.
The Scoring System
The most simple approach to scoring each wallet is to take snapshots by looking at the amount of MINE staked. What this approach overlooks, however, is that it largely favors whale wallets currently staking a ton of MINE to begin with, regardless of staking duration.
If we look at the staking data for MINE it is quite obvious that a few wallets control a rather large amount of MINE, and many wallets control what remains.
Considering Amount Staked
In order to level the playing field we have to get a little more clever than described above. Instead of outright punishing large wallets, there should be a measure to “soften” the advantage of holding large amounts of MINE, compared to the easy relative scaling.
The following quadratic formula was selected for the score function (Sq)
To make it more obvious what this means, take a look at the table below. This shows how the linear “score” in terms of just staking, compares to the output of the score function:
Moving up in each bracket in the table, the linear increase is 10 fold, however with the quadratic score this is reduced to a 3.16 fold increase (per bracket).
Comparing the score of a 1K staker with a 55M staker, it can be seen that the advantage is “reduced” to 234.5 times rather than 55K times.
Considering Time Staked
The second aspect of the scoring system is Time Staked. As Pylon Protocol hinted in an initial tweet regarding the concept of tMINE:
One issue that arises with trying to snapshot every block since July 2nd 2021 (start date of Pylon Governance staking), however, is that it is computationally heavy. To provide more context, new blocks come up every 6 seconds, which amounts to 14,400 blocks per day.
To circumvent this issue, snapshots are taken on an hourly basis. On each snapshot, all wallets amount staked is computed and passed through the scoring function (Sq) and saved into a new time-series. At the end, all scores per wallet are summed up, amounting to the Mineral Grade score.
Let’s consider a short example in the following table. Time will be denoted as (t0), (t1), and so forth:
There are two wallets in the example. Wallets <WA> and <WB> that both have a stake at the first snapshot (t0). In the period up until the next snapshot (t1) wallet <WB> decides to unstake and thus scores 0 for all subsequent snapshots.
Conducting the final summation of scores, grouped by wallet, the end result is as follows:
- wallet <WA> Mineral Grade: 73.04
- wallet <WB> Mineral Grade: 57.74
In this simple example, the smaller wallet <WA> ends up with the best Mineral Grade due to staking time.
Additional Notes on Time Staked
Given that the governance data is stored as a time-series, this enables a few extra tricks.
For example, it is possible to create an average amount of MINE staked per wallet, over the entire series, as well as computing <mean>, <max>, <min>, and other descriptive metrics. From the example above, wallet <WB> would have an average of 2.5K $MINE staked (4 snapshots, only 1 with 10K staked) and a max of 10K.
Considering Governance Participation
A final cog in the Mineral Grade system would be considering active participation in on-chain governance votes on the Pylon WebApp. To note, this idea is not yet implemented nor solidified.
For each participation an amount of “booster points” should be added to the wallet’s score time series. The exact values for the boost are TBD. Community feedback to further sharpen this idea as a metric is welcome.
Conversely, the current Mineral Grade framework may also be implemented for Pylon governance voters to provide extended weights on voting, sorted both by amount and duration of MINE staked in governance.
The Sayve Swap
As part of the first instantiation of the Mineral Grade, the Sayve Protocol team has implemented the formula to guide tier allocations for their IDO swap for MINE governance stakers.
Overall, the following parameters were set up, for being eligible:
- Minimum staking time of 1056 hours (44 days, about 1.5 months)
- A minimum Mineral Grade score, that was determined to be 52424, the top 40% of all wallets
- A total of 5 tiers were sought after, with tier 1 being the “entry level” and tier 5 being the “best group”
For more information on the Sayve Swap and ways to stake MINE and participate in the prefund for SAYVE tokens, you can read up more on the following site: https://prefund.sayve.money/
Extended Applications
Beyond usage for the Sayve Swap, the Mineral Grade scoring system may be implemented in future iterations of gated Pylon Pools, airdrops, governance, and so forth, to give back to long-time MINE stakers.
