POLS Power: All you need to know
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With the launch of Polkastarter v2, we also introduced the concept of POLS Power. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about that and prepared this article to help you understand what POLS Power is all about, how you can build up more of it and most importantly — what you need it for in the first place.
Ready to power up? Let’s jump into it…
Polkastarter, powered by the platform-native POLS token, gives you early access to the ideas of tomorrow. This access is exclusively granted to a limited number of community members that continuously accumulate POLS Power.
We decided to create POLS Power in order to make things easier for all our users and provide you with one single number that you can use to determine your chances of participating in an IDO.
POLS Power is essentially an aggregator that counts the eligible POLS balance across several sources, if you like. This includes the amount of tokens you hold in your wallet, the amount of POLS you’re staking and also any LP tokens you might have.
The initial threshold granting Whitelist eligibility is 250 POLS Power. This means that having 250 POLS Power grants you ONE entry ticket for each IDO you apply for. As that number increases, so do your chances of getting whitelisted — having 750 POLS Power would then mean you have 3 tickets and so on, and so on.
Mind you that you can only win every whitelist once. Multiple tickets increase your chances of winning, but not the maximum allocation.
There are also POLS Power levels, designed to incentivize holding and staking more POLS tokens. We’ve broken those down into Tiers. The value of every individual ticket (worth 250 POLS) increases as you level up.
- 250+ POLS Power = Every ticket is worth 1 ticket
- 1,000+ POLS Power = Every ticket is worth 1.1 tickets
- 3,000+ POLS Power = Every ticket is worth 1.15 tickets
- 10,000+ POLS Power = Every ticket is worth 1.20 tickets
- 30,000+ POLS Power = Every ticket is worth 1.25 tickets & No Cooldown
⚠️ NOTE: All POLS, held in your wallet or staked, as well as LP tokens, are combined from both, Ethereum and BSC, into one POLS Power balance.
No Cooldown means you can participate in as many IDOs as you’d like, whenever you’d like.
At the moment, your POLS Power is only determined by your token activity on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks. The Polygon (MATIC) network is not yet integrated into the calculation of your POLS Power.
How to get POLS Power?
As you can probably already guess, there are multiple ways of getting POLS Power. We briefly explained that above, but here is a more concrete breakdown to ensure you’ve got the right information.
✊ Hold POLS
The easiest and cheapest way to get POLS Power is by simply buying and holding POLS in a self-custodial wallet such as MetaMask.
For example, you may choose to buy POLS tokens on Binance or Huobi, but you need to move them to a non-custodial wallet before you can interact with the world of decentralized finance, which includes Polkastarter.
Mind you that only POLS on non-custodial wallets, on either Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, are eligible to turn into POLS Power that you can then use to apply for IDO whitelists.
⚠️ Important: POLS held in your wallet will only turn into POLS Power after 7 days without moving or selling them. If you require instant access to whitelists, please use the staking feature instead. Here is more on that.
🔒 Stake POLS
Another way to increase your POLS Power is to stake POLS tokens instead of just holding them in your wallet. This is a great option if you can’t or don’t want to wait for 7 days. Staking POLS makes you instantly eligible for all currently open and future whitelists.
However, staking tokens also comes with smart contract risks as well as network fees. Particularly when it comes to Ethereum, where staking can cost somewhere between $50–100, it is significantly cheaper to stake on Binance Smart Chain, but still bearing in mind that smart contract risks are the same on both.
⚠️ Important: The main difference between holding and staking POLS is that your staked POLS tokens will immediately turn into POLS Power, but will also be locked for the next 7 days (instead of waiting for 7 days).
💧 Provide POLS liquidity
And last but not least, you can also increase your POLS Power by providing decentralized liquidity. We have official trading pairs on two decentralized exchanges (DEXs), namely Uniswap (ETH/POLS) and PancakeSwap (BNB/POLS). Uniswap is the premier Ethereum DEX, while PancakeSwap is the one of Binance Smart Chain.
Be mindful that while Uniswap and PancakeSwap pay out fees to liquidity providers, your capital is also at risk of Impermanent Loss. We highly recommend understanding the risks of being exposed to two assets at the same time before choosing this option.
And that’s it! Simple, right? If there is still something you don’t quite understand about POLS Power, don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly and we’ll get that fixed for you right away!
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Originally published at https://blog.polkastarter.com on October 7, 2021.
