If you’re a token holder, you likely want to actively participate in securing the protocols you support. But running nodes that participate in blockchain networks is very difficult to do yourself.
Bison Trails enables you to run your own Participation Cluster—a dedicated validator node and the supporting infrastructure for staked participation in multiple Proof of Stake networks—without technical knowledge or an in-house team of engineers. In exchange for helping secure the network, you can earn participatory rewards on the tokens staked to your node cluster.
If you run your own Participation Cluster, you can earn participatory rewards in two ways: directly from self-bonded tokens staked to your node cluster and indirectly from your community’s stake delegated to your node cluster.
All rewards earned by your node cluster—self-bonded and delegated—will be determined by your protocol’s reward rate and once calculated, reduced by the Bison Trails Participatory Fee. Your reward earnings from delegated stake is based on the Validator Fee, the fee you charge delegators for delegating to your node cluster (see “Setting a Validator Fee for your delegators” below for more information).
For most protocols, reward calculations and distributions are hardcoded into the blockchain, so Bison Trails cannot control or guarantee reward earnings.
Here’s how this works:
If you have a strong community of crypto enthusiasts, you don’t need to be technical to run your own staking-as-a-service business. Invite your community to delegate their tokens to your node cluster. The Bison Trails enterprise-grade platform will manage and monitor your cluster for you, so you can be confident in its reliability on behalf of your delegators. They can participate in securing the network, and earn rewards, without running their own Participation Cluster. In return, you, the node operator, also earn rewards on delegated tokens via your Node Operator Fee.
Once you’re a Bison Trails customer, you’ll want to attract delegators to your node cluster by setting the Validator Fee competitively with other validators in the network.
When using Bison Trails to manage your cluster, the total rewards earned will be reduced by the Validator Fee applied to rewards earned by your delegators. Your Validator Fee equals your Node Operator Fee plus a small Bison Trails Participatory Fee applied to all rewards earned by your delegators.
The Validator Fee is visible to your delegators in the network validator list; your Node Operator Fee is not. Here’s a guide to help you set an attractive Validator Fee for your delegators and calculate your Node Operator Fee:
If you do not have sufficient tokens to run your own Participation Cluster, you can delegate your stake to Bison Trails’ enterprise-grade non-custodial public validators by following our delegation guides.
A Bison Trails Service Fee is applied to all rewards earned on the validator. Here’s how this works:
1/ Blockchains (crypto networks) are really complicated technology, economic and political systems.🤯
— Joe Lallouz 🏍💨 (@JoeLallouz) August 5, 2020
We've been erroneously bucketed in the past alongside staking-as-a-service companies by a number of #crypto investors and media outlets. That's👌, the diff is really important.
Bison Trails is a blockchain infrastructure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company based in New York City. We built a platform for anyone who wants to participate in 20 new chains effortlessly.
We also make it easy for anyone building Web 3.0 applications to connect to blockchain data from 30 protocols with QT. Our goal is for the entire blockchain ecosystem to flourish by providing robust infrastructure for the pioneers of tomorrow.
In January, 2021, we announced Bison Trails will be joining Coinbase to accelerate our mission to provide easy-to-use blockchain infrastructure, now as a standalone product line as part of Coinbase. The Bison Trails platform will continue to support our customers. With Coinbase’s backing, we will enhance our infrastructure platform and make it even easier to participate in decentralized networks and build applications that connect to blockchain data. Read more.
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