Introducing Adopt-a-Relay & Loyalty Rewards!

It’s been a few months, fellow deluded Arkies. We’ve been busy as always, and we’ve got some exciting updates for you. We’ve been hard at work, and we’re finally ready to announce the Adopt-a-Relay program and a full revamp of our Loyalty system!

The New Loyalty Score System

In the wake of other delegates lowering their payouts significantly, we’ve had to consider long and hard the impact it may have on our voters if we decided to do the same. While we agree and share the sentiment by other delegates that Ark’s price drop has significantly reduced the sustainability in running the network and providing services to the point where many delegates are barely breaking even or even working for free, we had a difficult choice to make.

As the largest delegate with the highest number of small supporters (our average voter has 580 Ark!), we could not fall back on whales to keep us in the Top 51 if we scorned our voters with a sharp payout drop like some other delegates have done. Instead, we’ve decided to go the opposite route — we will give every voter the freedom to voluntarily choose to stand by us and vote with their wallets by donating a percentage of their share to us.

Where will your donated percentage go?

With the launch of the new loyalty system, the leaderboard will show the voters who contribute the most of their share to support our work. We’re also introducing new reward programs to voters who contribute the most, but more on that later.

Loyalty Score

The formula for calculating your loyalty score is roughly the below:

(90%_earnings * (81 - payout_percentage)) * 4000 = loyalty_score

Anyone setting their payouts below 81% and a wallet balance above zero will have a loyalty score above 0, and will be eligible to earn rewards from our new Loyalty system.

Here are some examples of how much loyalty score you can expect as a 1000 ARK and 2500 ARK voter:

• A 1000 ARK voter setting their payouts to 60% (donating 21% below 81) roughly earns 0.2 ARK a day at 90%. Using the formula above, their loyalty score would be 0.2 * 21 * 4000, or 16800.
• A 2500 ARK voter setting their payouts to 75% (donating 6% below 81) roughly earns 0.48 ARK a day at 90%. Using the formula above, their loyalty score would be 0.5 * 6 * 4000, or 12000.

We chose this particular formula because it allows smaller wallets to join in and maximize their score by lowering their payouts which will let them contribute equally or more than larger wallets that decide to stay at a higher payout! Likewise, we didn’t want to pressure larger wallets into a drastic drop, so they have the option to instead add more ARK to their stack instead.

With that out of the way, on to the big launch of our first loyalty reward.

A Relay Big Problem

The Ark network currently only has about 150 nodes. That’s kinda small which means a few bad nodes can cause network issues and outages, as we’ve already seen. A few weeks ago, there were several major Ark network outages. Discussions were had, and our team had to launch good relay nodes to ensure that the network was able to maintain consensus and continue to run smoothly. Since then, we’ve developed tools to monitor and help restore the network when needed. Part of that effort is launching additional relays, and as of this blog post we have already launched 20 extra relays, with 30 more to come soon. On top of that, we’re allowing you, our voters, to name them!

Adopt-a-Relay

Want to help the Ark network and run your own relay node? Don’t have the technical skills? Can’t afford the server? Or do you just want to help us out and reward us for the work we’ve done? We’ve got you covered. Starting Monday, November 12th, as part of our new loyalty rewards system, we are allowing voters to “Adopt a Relay,” and our new system will allow our most loyal voters to adopt and name their own relay node and have their name shown on ArkStats and on our Leaderboards!

Scaling Relays

We’ve worked really hard to create a scaling solution for spinning up Ark relay nodes. Part of that work was originally done to save and restore mainnet during outages. Now, we’ve perfected our system and can quickly spin and sync up an Ark relay node and horizontally scale as needed in mere seconds. We’re starting off with 20 sponsored relays but can easily scale to up 50, 100, or even 200+ if more voters donate a percentage of their forging rewards to us.

The more nodes there are on the network, the healthier and more resilient the network will be. And now you can be a part of making that happen.

Dashboard Updates

For these new features, we’ve added some changes to the dashboard, including custom payout percentages and the option to choose your Display Name — which will be shown on the leaderboards, on ArkStats, and the Ark API itself under your sponsored relay’s IP if you are in the Top 20–50 in the leaderboard!

Additionally, starting Monday, all users without accounts will be defaulted to 80% payouts, and users with accounts will have their payouts set to 80%. Until then, the new settings in the dashboard have no effect.

Don’t Panic. If you are not interested in biz_classic’s contributions to Ark and only wish to receive the maximum payout, nothing is changing for you. Simply log in to your account on our website, go to your dashboard, and set your Payout Percentage to Max. This setting enables you to continue to receive your maximum payout as you always have, and nothing changes.

We are giving our users the option to help us and the Ark network out, and if that doesn’t sound like you, then there is no harm in opting out. We will continue to provide a minimum of 90% to anyone choosing the Max option, with payouts still scaling as high as 99% if we drop in delegate ranking.