Steemit Crypto Academy Contest / S8W6 - STEEM Staking

Greetings dear friends,
It's another week in the steemit engagement challenge for season 8 and I'm delighted to write my entry in this contest today. This week we are looking at a very important part of the steem ecosystem called staking.

Most steemian are very familiar with these words or may not be aware of them but often get encouraged to build their own SP. Now building their SP is a way of staking that the steemit platform offers to its users. I will be discussing more via the questions below.

Cryptocurrency staking is a process of locking your cryptocurrency asset for a given period to earn a passive income. Staking works similarly to the savings account that offers high returns such that when you deposit your funds, you earn interest because the bank uses your locked funds for other transactions and then gives you a little profit at the end. This is similar in the crypto world. When you stake, you are providing liquidity, and that earns you some interest.

Staking allows the owners of an asset in a network to validate transactions within the blockchain. It is important to note that not all cryptocurrency does staking so if you want to stake an asset you have to look for an asset that does staking then you buy and stake it.

The staking works in this manner; firstly you will have to buy a crypto asset ideally the one that supports staking, and transfer the asset you have bought to a blockchain wallet example is the steemit wallet we all have today. Finally, you will have to join the staking pool in the blockchain, in the case of steemit you will need to power up the steem token to join the pool.

Yes, the steemit ecosystem offer to stake for its steem token. As I said earlier, you will have to buy the token and then transfer it to the blockchain wallet and then transfer it to the pool. In the case of the steemit platform, it is designed in such a way that when you earn a reward from blogging, by default half of it goes to your staking.

For those who don't blog, all they need to do is to purchase the steem token form and exchange it like Binance, and then transfer it to the steem wallet and then power it up as seen in the screenshot below.

From the screenshot above, I have transferred my liquid steem to SP by powering up the available steem token. The reward I will be getting as seen from the screenshot is an APR of 2.48% which is subject to blockchain variation.

I choose to stake my steem token on the steemit platform than on any other exchange platform. The reason for this choice is not far-fetched. Staking my steem on the Steemit platform to me makes it much safer because it is the platform that owns the coins hence it is much safer as there are few risks involved in staking as well.

Aside from that, you can still earn more SP or Steem tokens when you have your asset staked in the steemit platform because you will be using it to vote on other users' content and earn curation rewards.

In my opinion, if you will have the chance to always sort out articles to vote for and earn a curation reward then I will advise you to stake your asset in the steemit platform but if you won't have the time to do that, then you can stake it in an exchange because they tend to offer a higher APR.

From the screenshot above, we can see that the finance platform offers an APR of 4.22% which is higher when compared to the APR in the steemit platform of about 2.48%. So for those who just want to stake without performing any function then they can go with exchanges like binance but if you can vote then I recommend the steemit platform as it is more profitable.

Yes, I'm working tirelessly to build my SP. I know the importance of SP in the steemit platform hence I'm always working hard to build mine. To show my dedication to this I have always set my post-payouts to 100% power-up so that I don't have to transfer out any steem tokens.

At the moment, I don't have much SP but I guess I'm growing. With the little I have, I still add value to worthy posts and comments most especially the post that add more knowledge to me and the post of the newbies I recruited to the platform. As of the time of writing this article, I have a total of about 33,450 SP which gives a vote of about $0.25.

This is not much compared to what I want. I want to have SP that will allow me to add meaningful votes to the post of those I have visited. I intend to continue building my SP until I get to whales. I will do so when I have a job of my own as I will always buy steem and power it up.

The engagement challenge as I have said earlier is one of the best initiatives and as a moderator in one of the communities, I have also read a lot of articles from different users which also give me more ideas on how to write a few things.

Engaging with others helps us to read the article of the writer and see the points he/she is trying to pass across. I'm grateful to the steemit team for bringing in this initiative and I hope it will continue alongside other beautiful initiatives to keep the platform moving forward.

Crypto staking is a process of buying and locking our crypto asset for the main purpose of earning a passive income just like the bank does when we put our money in a highly profitable bank. The asset is locked up and we earn a reward of a certain APR depending on the blockchain variation as you have seen in my article above. I want to invite a few friends to also share their knowledge of crypto staking with us today. I call on @nahela, @suboohi, @afrizalbinalka and @fantvwiki.