Hey everyone,
As a gift to you all, I thought it might be nice to share some thoughts on how you might try to win the stakeoff 
- Make sure your Validator is “down” for as little time as possible. Epoch rewards are based heavily on uptime, so the more you’re down the less rewards you’ll be able to accumulate. Furthermore, slashing for downtime is likely to be deployed in phases 2 or 3 of The Great Celo Stake Off.
- Vote with as much Baklava cGLD as possible for groups whose members have high uptime. Users who vote in Validator elections receive epoch rewards proportional to the uptime of that group’s elected members. The more cGLD you use to vote, the more rewards you will receive.
- Run as many validators as you can. Each additional Validator you get elected earns you additional epoch rewards, so it’s in your best interest to register and elect as many validators as possible. Remember, there is a 10k Locked cGLD requirement to register a Validator, and an additional 10k Locked cGLD requirement for a group to add an additional member. In some cases, collaboration may be mutually beneficial; if you have 10k cGLD, and another participant has 10k cGLD, one of you can run the Validator, the other can run the group, and we can share the epoch rewards. Note that while mutually beneficial collaboration such as this is permitted, the Terms and Conditions do not allow collusion between participants, and anyone caught doing so will be disqualified.
- Use all sources of rewards to further (2) and (3). This includes the Baklava cUSD you receive as a Validator (convertible to cGLD via the exchange), transaction fees that your Validator signer accumulates through successful block proposals, and attestations fees that your Validator accumulates by completing attestations.
If you want to dive further into the subtleties of the protocol (and potentially gain a competitive edge!) I recommend you check out the following blog posts and webinar:
- Consensus and Proof of Stake in the Celo Protocol
- Celo’s Proof of Stake Mechanism
- Mastering the Art of Validating webinar recording
Thanks, and happy staking!
Asa
- IMPORTANT: Teams who chose to collaborate must set their group share to 50%.
- Setting a different group share or attempting any other form of collaboration is considered collusion and will lead to disqualification (see terms & conditions).