Lava is a permissionless marketplace for blockchain infrastructure

Every blockchain requires a set of essential infrastructure, including basics such as RPC and indexing. Lava is a permissionless marketplace that lets chains quickly attract and aggregate Providers for these services. There are 4 key actors on Lava:

• Data Providers e.g RPC node runners, join the Lava Network to offer infrastructure
• Data Consumers e.g. dapps and wallets, use the Lava Network for infrastructure
• Blockchains and rollups reward the contributors on the Lava Network for providing infrastructure
• Restakers secure the Lava blockchain and boost top Providers by delegating to them

Lava Network earns revenue from blockchains and rollups. These chains pay the network for supporting their chain with RPC, by hosting incentive pools on Lava consisting of their native token. Network revenue is distributed onchain, on the 17th of each month.

‍

Restakers and Providers can see all pools at pools.lavanet.xyz.

What are Bundled Restaking Rewards?

LAVA Restakers help the network by securing the Lava blockchain and by increasing delegations to top Providers, therefore boosting them in the pairing mechanism. Boosting top Providers means users and developers benefit from better service.

‍

Bundled Restaking Rewards mean that now restakers can delegate their tokens to a Provider and earn bundles of tokens every month. If a Provider is serving NEAR, Evmos and Stargaze RPC, earning NEAR, EVMOS and STARS tokens - the restaker will too.

Lava uniquely rewards network participants in the token of supported blockchains.

‍

This aligns incentives between blockchains and their supporters:

• Blockchains create incentive pools on Lava to pay for infrastructure
• Providers and restakers combine to offer high quality RPC to those chains
• Providers and restakers earn from the incentive pools - usually in the native token of those chains

Provide fast and reliable infrastructure for your favourite chain; earn tokens from your favourite chain.

Stake and Restake LAVA

Bonus: Ruslan, one of our community contributors, has created this video on how to restake LAVA.

LAVA token holders can restake their tokens, helping secure the network and boost top Providers. In return, they earn a share of the network revenue and Bundled Restaking Rewards.

‍

Steps to get involved as a restaker:

• Check live pools: https://pools.lavanet.xyz
• Research which Provider you want to restake to:  https://info-mainnet.lavanet.xyz/chains. Providers with many delegations are selected more often to serve RPC requests
  • You can consider which chain the Provider is supporting and whether that chain currently has an incentive pool live
  • Providers with high Quality of Service scores (speed/uptime/accuracy) serve more RPC requests and earn more rewards
• Consider restaking to multiple Providers, increasing security and decentralization across the network
• Restake via one of the partner dashboards: https://www.lavanet.xyz/stakers

How to get involved as an RPC Provider

The simplified restaking flow has several benefits for Providers:

• Providers can now use the delegated stake and decide how to distribute it across chains
• Minimum stake can now use delegated stake, allowing Providers to support more chains

Lava is constantly looking for ways to improve the Provider experience. The updated flow allows Providers to more efficiently route their traffic across chains, managing resources to improve quality of service.

‍

How to manage your restaking delegations

To manage delegations as a Provider, Providers should adjust their own stake.

This will automatically adjust their delegations pro-rata. I.e. If a Provider staked 60% to chain 1 and 40% to chain 2, their delegations will move to 60% on chain 1 and 40% on chain 2.

‍

Two ways to do this:

• Use the new tx "move-provider-stake" to move stake from one chain to another https://github.com/lavanet/lava/tree/main/x/pairing#transactions
• Use the new CLI command to redistribute stake between multiple chains:

lavad tx pairing distribute-provider-stake Error: accepts 1 arg(s), received 0 Usage: lavad tx pairing distribute-provider-stake chain,%,chain,% [flags]

Examples: lavad tx pairing distribute-provider-stake chain0,33,chain1,33,chain2,34"

‍

To get started as a Provider, read our docs: https://docs.lavanet.xyz/provider-setup/

Upcoming Incentive Pools

Every month, more incentive pools are being added to Lava Mainnet:

Ended:

• Axelar - was on Lava Testnet, coming to Lava Mainnet - AXL
• Evmos - was on Lava Testnet, now migrated to Lava Mainnet - EVMOS

Currently live:

• Evmos - was on Lava Testnet, now migrated to Lava Mainnet - EVMOS
• NEAR - live on Lava Testnet - NEAR
• Cosmos Hub - live on Lava Mainnet - ATOM
• Stargaze - live on Lava Mainnet - STARS
• Axelar - live on Lava Mainnet - AXL
• Filecoin - live on Lava Mainnet - USDC
• Starknet - live onLava Mainnet - STRK (first month/s in LAVA/)

Coming up:

• Coti - coming to Lava Mainnet - COTI/USDC
• Fuse - coming to Lava Mainnet - FUSE/USDC
• Union - coming to Lava Mainnet - Union Token/USDC
• Movement - coming to Lava Mainnet- MOVE/USDC

Relevant Links:

Lava Network is the underlying protocol that makes dapps and wallets faster and more reliable, on any blockchain. NEAR Protocol, Starknet, and 40+ chains are already supported, with Lava’s RPC services handling more than 90 billion data requests across over 3 million monthly users. Contributors can run validators, provide data or restake to improve service performance.

‍

Lava aims to power access to the onchain world.

‍

• Explore live and upcoming incentive pools: pools.lavanet.xyz
• What are specs: docs.lavanet.xyz/spec
• Lava Network 101: lavafoundation.notion.site
• Existing specs: GitHub link
• Twitter: x.com/lavanetxyz
• Discord: Join us on Discord
• Whitepaper: Lava Whitepaper
• Documentation: docs.lavanet.xyz
• How to stake LAVA: Staking Guide