Chainlink’s tweet announced that an upgrade to Chainlink v0.2 was coming soon, which will reimagine Chainlink staking as a 45,000,000 LINK platform.
According to a previous announcement, version 0.2 of Chainlink staking would be released somewhere in the fourth quarter of this year.
The original beta release of Chainlink staking (v0.1) occurred in December of 2017 and featured a 25,000,000 LINK staking pool that backed the cryptoeconomic security of Ethereum’s ETH/USD Data Feed.
A total of 45,000,000 LINK will be available upon the introduction of Staking v0.2, with 40,875,000 LINK going to community members and the remaining 15,000,000 LINK going to Chainlink node operators that are actively servicing Chainlink Data Feeds.
Instead of holding staked LINK hostage until the next staking version is available, users can now use the unbonding method introduced in version 0.2 to remove their holdings.
Stakeholders’ independence is prioritized in version 0.2’s new unbonding process. It also emphasizes stake-slashing, which provides additional security guarantees for Oracle services.
The upgrade is designed to be easily updated in the future, with a modular architecture and a dynamic incentives mechanism in mind.
The release of Staking v0.2 would occur in three stages. The first is priority migration, during which v0.1 stakeholders have the first chance to upgrade to v0.2 and start earning LINK incentives. This phase lasts for one week.
The second type is early access, which allows holders of community tokens who satisfy certain criteria to stake up to 15,000 LINK for two days before the token sale begins. When the pool has not been filled, anyone can stake up to 15,000 LINK during general access.