Steaking

Context

Steaking.io is a web3 application project I cofounded and designed that allows users to stake their Solana directly using any Solana wallet. Version 1.0 was launched in Q3 2021 on July 15th. Users from all over the world come to use Steaking.io for Solana staking and has become a well known project within the early Solana ecosystem and community.

The Rise of Proof of Stake

Proof of Stake became popular with 9 out of the top 20 coins by coin marketcap (with Ethereum the 2nd largest coin working switching to POS in September of 2022) being POS as of January 2022. Under POS, users can stake their coins and the protocols select a validator who adds the new block of transactions and earns the user/validator owner rewards.

What is staking: Staking is when owners of an asset, offer their assets to be used to ensure the functionality and security of the blockchain. In return, the owners of the asset are rewarded by the blockchain.

The Problem: How might we make staking Solana easier and more rewarding.

The Main Competitor

At the time there were only two products available that allowed users to stake Solana with a non-custodial wallet called SolFlare. There were also custodial wallets (exchanges) that did allow staking Solana within their product (such as Binance), but their annual percentage yield of rewards were much lower since they took a percentage of the users rewards. Custodial wallet solutions make centralization occur as well, thus giving more power to exchanges the opposite effect of cryptocurrency. Therefore a non-custodial wallet solution with better onramps benefits the ecosystem and more importantly, the user more.

Since there was only SolFlare that offered a non-custodial solution, a large amount of the research was a competitive audit on SolFlare and Exodus. Finding what the user pain points to both of these products are, how we can make improvements, and what are the users saying about these platforms.

Information architecture of the Steaking.io site and web dashboard

Insights From the Users

Based on what users were saying on public forums, common issues were identified.

Users had to create a new wallet with Solflare before they could stake Solana where they create a stake account to delegate. Removing this portion and allowing users to stake directly with their browser wallet of choice would create a better user experience keeping all their funds connected to one source.
The most important information for users, APY, was unavailable when they were choosing validators. Many users on Solflare were left clueless on which validator to stake with or not knowing how much rewards they would receive once delegated.
Many users didn’t understand how often they would receive rewards. Staking rewards are rewarded once every epoch ends, usually a 3-4 day period. There was also feedback that there was no clear indication in the account of how much Solana rewards they accrued while staking.
Lastly there wasn’t any onboarding for new users. No official sources for users to read about on how to stake on their platform.

Addressing all 4 of these issues would make a better experience for the user.

Staking Solana userflow

Hi-Fidelity Userflow Maps

Time to Stake

With the Steaking.io app, it addresses the 4 common issues during the research phase.

Users can now connect their browser wallet of their choice with Steaking.io and make transactions directly with their wallet. Now users can use their already set up wallet and keep track of their funds with their preferred wallet.
An epoch counter was added to the dashboard, so users can keep track of their next reward. Clear information and history of rewards were added to each stake account so users knew exactly how much they have accrued and when.
Now when users choose their validators, information like APY is clearly laid out for users to make the best decision to where they stake their Solana.
Steaking.io provided official docs with steps on how to stake on our application on the website. There was also a discord community set up for users to help each other and to answer questions. Modal windows to guide users through each process.

Steaking.io logo displayed at Solana Breakpoint Lison (Nov. 7-10 2021) in front of Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal

Reflection

As the design moved on to engineering, not everything was implemented exactly to the designs. Learned how to work with engineering in prioritizing aspects to make sure the product still aligned to the solution even when edges were cut. I also learned that releasing a product is the easiest part. If I had to add to the project afterwards, I would have made an "easy-stake" button (with clear indication of the APY when easy staking) which would've made it an even simpler userflow with automatic delegation to Steaking.io's validator which still provided a higher APY than custodial solutions.

Steaking.io Web3 Dashboard