ITN staking rewards, reserves and the future
How long can Cardano ITN staking rewards be retrieved?
Since the launch of Proof of Stake Mainnet, we have regularly reported on Twitter and Telegram on the progress of the redemption of ITN rewards.
We have tracked all 22673 addresses that have received rewards from the ITN and recorded the redemption in the mainnet.
You can see that the initially strong progress has increasingly flattened out and has almost stopped at almost 90% of the 593 mill ADA total ITN rewards.
Update: 2020-22-14
In October there was another surge and a further 5% was called up. The current status is thus 95% of the ITN-Rewards
Therefore often the question arose
how long the remaining 5% still have time to redeem their ITN staking rewards?
For an answer, we must first look at the figures of the Cardano ADA ecosystem. After the start of the Mainnet all participants of the incentivised Testnet (ITN) could retrieve their earnings. The orange line in the first graph shows the course of these redemption payments.
This has increased the total supply (green) by the orange area in the following graph. And most of it was immediately delegated to a StakePool, so it became also part of the active Stake (red)
All rewards – those from the testnet, as well as those that are now acquired by staking in the mainnet – are taken from the reserve (the difference from green to blue)
This means that the remaining ITN Rewards can be retrieved as long as there is a reserve. So a new question arises:
How long will the reserves probably last?
Here we show a graphic that SkyPool has published in the Cardano Forum. It shows how a certain percentage of the remaining reserves is used up.
There will be a constant slowdown and therefore a non-linear progression. The income from staking will also decrease continuously.
Note: This simplified, theoretical graph does not yet include income from transactions that will increase in the future when Cardano adoption happens.
So it will be possible to retrieve Cardano ITN staking rewards for years to come.
By the way:
you can also see that a lot of total ADA supply has not yet been delegated to stake pools: The difference from red to green, corresponding to currently 47%)
