Locking down the VET

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This post actually has nothing to do with veterinarians or dogs, but since I don't have a photo of an actual Stargate, this is the direction I had to go. Sorry for the bait and switch...

A short time ago the VeChain project decided to change the way that you can earn rewards in the form of the VTHO token. It used to be that you simply had to hold the VET token and each day it would mint you some of the VTHO token which is the gas token for the chain.

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. You had to be holding your VET in an approved wallet for the VTHO drop to work. I had been buying VET for a while and keeping it on Coinbase, only to find out that if you held it on Coinbase you didn't earn the VTHO drop. After I figured that out, I started moving my tokens into Atomic Wallet on my phone and then I was able to earn the small drip of VTHO.

Then, VET decided to make a change. It was no longer enough to simply hold your VET and earn that VTHO, you now had to lock up your VET in a project they call Stargate. It's kind of funny, because I felt I was holding a pretty decent amount of VET and VTHO in my wallet. I had been doing regular buys of it for quite some time using the dollar cost average method and I felt like I had a pretty "big bag".

Turns out, I wasn't even close

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The VET Stargate (love the name by the way) program has a collection of tiers in which you can lock up your VET tokens. Ten of them to be exact. Since there are a number of large businesses (including Walmart) actually using the VeChain system right now, the original tiers had a pretty hefty buy in with a minimum of something like one million VET tokens being required. Eventually, they started to realize that not everyone held that many tokens and they opened up some smaller ones. I'm going to include a chart from their documentation that shows the current tiers.

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As you probably saw from the earlier photo, I am locked into the lowest tier. Since I only hold about 20,000 VET tokens, it was my only option. Either that or buy a bunch more to hit that 50,000 mark. I'm not sure it would have made much sense for a paltry .26% interest rate increase. Each tier earns you an NFT that you can delegate out for further rewards. I last made a claim four days ago and as you can see from the photo since that time I have earned 15.63 VTHO tokens. After the seven day delegation lock period is up, I will also earn delegation rewards and my NFT will automatically be delegated again for another seven days. If you want to understand all the reasoning for that, I encourage you to follow one of those links above and read the whitepaper.

Trust me, I get it, 2.2% is pretty lousy. Especially when you are talking about something crypto related, but like I said, VeChain is being used in the real world as we speak. I think that actual use case is part of the reason for the low interest rates. It just wouldn't be sustainable if they made it something crazy like you see in DeFi. VeChain has been rolling this out meticulously over a relatively long time in the crypto world. Slow and steady wins the race right?

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Getting my tokens locked up in the Stargate was a pretty easy process. I was talking to @cryptoandcoffee about this the other day and he suggested I make a post about it, so here we are. The biggest issue I had was figuring out what network my tokens were on. I thought the VET tokens I had purchased from Coinbase were on the ERC20 network, but it turns out they were already on the native VET network. After losing about $10 in tokens that I accidentally sent to my ETH wallet address, I figured it out.

One of the things I love about Stargate is the fact that I don't have to use a VPN to access it. Even in the US, it is fully accessible. I opted to go with the VeWorld wallet which is the official wallet of Vechain. It is fairly easy to use and has a look and feel similar to Metamask if you are familiar with that.

The VeWorld wallet also has a feature where you can claim a easier to recognize wallet name and tie it to your public key for easier transfers. For example, I claimed bozz.veworld.vet on my wallet. People should be able to send tokens to that versus the long string of letters and numbers. I might have to test it out with @cryptoandcoffee once he gets set up.

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Once you have a new wallet set up, you simply deposit your VET and VTHO from wherever they currently are to the address of your new VeWorld wallet. Both VET and VTHO get sent to the same address. I suggest you send over the VTHO first as that is the gas token of the VET chain. It just makes sense to have as much of that handy as possible.

Of course, do some test transactions with small amounts to make sure everything comes over correctly before you move your whole bag.

Transactions are quite fast on the network and as long as things go well, you should see your tokens in a matter of seconds.

Once you have your tokens at home on your VeWorld wallet, locking them up in the Stargate is actually quite easy. It's also easy to get out as well. If you look at the photo above, just below the "+ Add a manager" button, there are two more buttons allowing you to "exit delegation" and "unstake".

It looks like it was back on July 24th that I originally entered the Stargate. That means if you look at the History in the photo above, in about 10 days I earned 42 VTHO in delegation rewards, and 44 VTHO in Base rewards for locking up my VET.

Again, I know it isn't life changing wealth right now, but perhaps one day when more businesses starting using VeChain and millions of VTHO are being burned each day as they track their carbon emissions or whatever it is, this could be small source of passive income for me.

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My Sports Account - @bozz.sports

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced