Grabber is officially eligible for dApp staking on Astar Network!

We are thrilled to announce that your favorite community building and token distribution platform, Grabber, has been approved by the Astar community to join Astar’s Builder’s Program on March 30th! To boost our development efforts in the Astar ecosystem, we have been whitelisted into Astar’s dApp staking program.

This is a great step in our journey, and a perfect way for you to support us and benefit from this collaboration.

What is Astar Network?

Astar Network is the TVL Smart Contract Hub for WASM + EVM on Polkadot.

Since winning its Parachain auction in January 2022, Astar Network has become the top Parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem in Total Value Locked and most Ethereum assets transferred over. Astar Network is the leading smart contract hub that connects the Polkadot ecosystem to Ethereum, Cosmos, and all major layer 1 blockchains. Astar Network supports dApps using multiple virtual machines — namely WASM and EVM — and offers the best technology solutions and financial incentives via its #Build2Earn and Astar Incubation Program for Web3 developers to build on top of a secure, scalable, and interoperable blockchain.

What is dApp staking?

For great dApps to be built, developers need to build them. For developers to build great dApps, they need financial incentives. That’s where dApp staking comes in.

On the Astar/Shiden Network, dApp staking is how developers who build dApps can get compensated. By having an income, developers can keep building and improving their dApps.

At its core, dApp staking is similar to staking on validators. The difference is that dApp stakers — also known as nominators — can nominate their Astar tokens on dApps they want to support.

At every block, a portion of the rewards goes to dApp staking. This reward is then divided between operators (developers) and nominators. Overall, this creates a powerful incentive for developers to build dApps on Astar and for nominators to support developers via dApp staking.

When building on other blockchains, dApp developers need to apply for grant programs, issue tokens and fundraise to earn money. Not only that, they often need to pay steep gas fees.

On Astar, as long as a dApp has been nominated, developers can receive a basic income. As a dApp grows in popularity, more members of the community nominate the dApp, and this, in turn, enables the developers who built the dApp to receive a greater percentage of the block reward.

We need our community

The amount we receive with the #Build2Earn protocol depends on the number of nominators on the dApp store page. The more nominators we have, the more rewards we will receive to support our development efforts. At the same time, you will receive up to 10% staking rewards by staking ASTR in our dApp.

Our you already using dApp staking and want to support our project as well? Astar released the nomination transfer. Nomination Transfer allows stakers to move the entirety or portions of their nominations to other projects while skipping the unbonding period. This way, stakers don’t have to sacrifice staking rewards in the unbonding period to support a project you are interested in. Read more here.

How to use dApp staking

Step 1: Buy ASTR Tokens

Get your hands on some $ASTR. You can buy them on Binance, BKEX, and OKX. The full list of markets can be found here.

Step 2: Create a Substrate-based Wallet

To learn how to create a Substrate-based wallet please click the link below: https://polkadot.js.org/extension/

Step 3: Go to Astar Portal and Connect Your Wallet

When you have the ASTR tokens go to the portal: https://portal.astar.network/ and connect your wallet to Astar Network. Then, click on ‘Store’ and look for our project: Grabber.

Step 4: Add Your Staking Amount

You can click on our project to know more about the smart contract we used for dApp staking. To add your staking amount, just click on ‘Stake’ in the box and sign with your wallet on Polkadot.js extension.

Step 5: Add, Unstake, or Claim

Once you have staked your tokens you can do three things: add, unstake, or claim.

1. Add: to stake more, you can add more ASTR in dApp staking.
2. Unstake: to unstake, you can claim your ASTR back.
3. Claim: (top of page): claim your rewards from all dApps you staked on. Every ERA you can claim for your rewards, but we recommend doing this once every week.

Summary

DApp staking is a unique differentiator that only Astar and Shiden have in the Polkadot ecosystem. As developers we have chosen to build on Astar because this gives us the opportunity to earn tokens while continuing to build out Grabber. The beauty of this token economics model is that the more dApps are created, the more tokens will be staked. The more tokens are staked, the fewer tokens there are in circulation. Then, there is positive feedback loop on the valuation which in turn provides more value to developers and to stakers.