IoTeX Mainnet v1.8: Staking on MetaMask & Web3 Wallets

IoTeX Team -

With the release of IoTeX Mainnet v1.8.0, you will now be able to stake your IOTX tokens with MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or any other Web3 compliant wallet. This release represents a "hard-fork" of the current protocol; it activated at block 17,662,681 (approximately, 05/30/2022 11pm UTC) and all block producers should upgrade the node software as instructed here. Check out the official Release Announcement here.

This significant advancement required months of development and accurate testing by core developers. But it was absolutely necessary to complete Ethereum compatibility by enabling IoTeX custom staking transactions to Ethereum clients.

Visit stake.iotex.io, connect your wallet, and start staking!

New to staking or need a refresher? Watch the IoTeX Staking Tutorial:

What’s going on behind the scenes when you stake your IOTX?

A number of transactions that would normally be part of a smart contract take place elsewhere. These transactions include:

  • Creating a stake
  • Choosing a delegate
  • Transferring a deposit

If you thought about it at all, you might think that each of these actions was being executed by a smart contract. But in fact, these transactions are implemented  as custom transactions that are part of the native protocol of the blockchain. The result is that IoTeX staking is more scalable, making handling of hundreds of thousands of transactions possible at much lower cost. Each staking action does not involve the execution of expensive smart contract calls, but just sending a native transaction, which only costs 0.01 IOTX, exactly like a simple IOTX token transfer transaction.

It’s worth noting, these particular types of "staking transactions" are not part of the Ethereum protocol, they are not known to Ethereum clients. Until now it was not possible to directly initiate an IoTeX staking using an Ethereum wallet like Metamask, or Trust Wallet, but only through ioPay, the native wallet of the IoTeX blockchain.

Bug Fixes and more

Besides the above important update, code refactors and improvements, release 1.8 also fixes a minor problem where, in some cases, a full-node could not join the Mainnet network. For all the details you can refer to the official repository on GitHub.