A few months ago we dropped out of the top 100 validators and have since not managed to get back in.
We recommend everyone who hasn’t done so yet to unstake from us and stake to somebody else near the bottom of the validator list.
Perhaps we will come back when Xi’an hits. Until then, we will shut down our servers. This page will follow soon after.
Thanks to everyone who staked with us and who supported us throughout our Radix validator journey.
~Markus
A recent article on the RadixDLT website explains the upcoming staking features on the Radix network, which will be available in the Babylon version. Staking is a way to secure the network and also earn rewards. The new staking system makes it easier for investors to participate.
To stake Radix (XRD), investors will visit a web page specifically designed for staking. They can also use third-party staking sites. Staking is as simple as sending XRD to a validator, like RadixRadar.de. In return, investors receive tokens called Liquid Stake Units (LSU) that represent their stake. These tokens can be freely transferred or used as desired.
If investors want to retrieve their staked XRD, they can unstake by sending their LSU back to the validator. The validator calculates the amount of XRD to be returned and moves it to a separate pool. A special NFT token called a claim token is given to the investor, specifying when and how much XRD they can claim. Once the waiting period is over, investors can exchange the claim token for their XRD.
The value of the stake and the rewards earned by stakers depend on the overall staked amount and the network’s performance. The Radix Wallet will provide information on the value of stakes and when rewards can be claimed.
Overall, the new staking system makes it simpler and more accessible for investors to stake their Radix tokens and participate in securing the network while earning potential rewards.
Since the number of LSU tokens does not change during the staking period, and you don’t have immediate access to the staked XRD, one could argue that the reward emmissions in each epoch may not be considered taxable income. Only unstaking would be taxable, since only then is the gain or loss realized. However, both the IRS (US) and the HMRC (UK) don’t provide clear guidance on how liquid staking will be taxed.
For information see this blog post.
We are working on a tool that will provide stakers on RadixRadar exports of the staking rewards per epoch, in case these will be needed for tax purposes.
This article is for discussion purposes only and does not constitute tax or legal advice.
When it comes to staking your cryptocurrency, diversification is key. Instead of putting all your stake into a single validator node, consider spreading it across multiple validator nodes to enhance network security. Distributing your stake among several validators helps to safeguard against potential downtime, attacks, or other technical issues that may affect individual nodes. By supporting multiple validators, you contribute to a more resilient and decentralized network, increasing its overall security and stability.
By diversifying your stake, you reduce the risk of relying on a single validator, as any issues or vulnerabilities specific to that validator could potentially impact your investment. If a validator performs badly, it can be affected by “slashing”: The validator will lose some staked XRD (the tokens are burned as penalty). This means when unstaking, you could get back less XRD than you put into the validator. This is another good reason to spread your stake over multiple validators – don’t put all of your eggs into one basket!
RadixRadar.de is a long-running Radix validator node that has been around since the betanet launched in April 2021. So please consider staking with us! Our validator address is rv1qw6m5nrwnjx2estgkv8zsvp77es6yea0p99zkregud6dqad8q5wg7yvr4na. See our article Learn how to stake for more information.
Update from 08.05.2023: We updated the part about lock-up periods according to the latest BMF letter. See section 2 – staking.
Dear Radixradar Community,
the sharp rise in cryptocurrencies is increasingly leading to rapidly increasing profits and growing wallets. However, the tax aspects must always be considered, otherwise the profits would have to be quickly transferred to the state in large proportions.
In the following I will give you essential information about the taxation of crypto currencies briefly and concisely (! No tax advice here and not conclusive). Always send requests and comments to me. Greetings Robert
Cryptocurrencies are in accordance with Section 23 of the Income Tax Act (EstG) to be classified as private sales transactions (OVG). It is therefore another economic good. In contrast to the so-called investment income (interest, shares, ETF, etc.), the personal tax rate (marginal tax rate) is relevant for cryptocurrencies and not the normal 25% of the investment income tax.
Calculation of the personal tax rate and marginal tax rate: Link to the calculator
For example, starting from 57.919 Euro p.a. (Update 2023 62.810 Euro) brutto income each additional Euro is taxed with 42 percent marginal tax rate.
Profits are generally tax-free after a 1 year holding period. (Example 1)
Profits of up to 600 euros per year are also tax-free 1 as with gold. (Example 2)
If the exemption limit is exceeded, the total profit is taxed at the personal marginal tax rate. This means that from 601 euros, 601 euros are taxed. (Example 3)
Tip: Document times. When was the cryptocurrency purchased and when it was sold (for inquiries from the tax office).
1 Attention: do not confuse this with the tax exemption for investment income (e.g. shares) of 801 euros per person – everything from 802 euros is taxed at 25 percent .
| eRDX | Purchase date | Purchase price (€) | Date of sale | Selling Price (€) | Gross profit (€) | Taxes (€) | |
| 1) | 10.000 | 01.04.2021 | 0,10 | 02.04.2022 | 0,20 | 1000 | 0 |
| 2) | 10.000 | 01.04.2021 | 0,10 | 31.12.2021 | 0,16 | 600 | 0 |
| 3) | 10.000 | 01.04.2021 | 0,10 | 31.12.2021 | 0,20 | 1000 | 420 |
In June 2021, the German Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) published a draft letter on the taxation of cryptocurrencies. This has brought a bit more clarity to the taxation at proof-of-stake.
Important: This is only a draft and has not yet become law. However, it is expected to be adopted similar to the draft.
Update: There is acc. the BMF a view that a Staking/Lending does not lead to the “infection” of the existing Stake.
“For individuals, the sale of purchased Bitcoin and Ether is tax-free after one year. The time limit does not extend to ten years even if, for example, Bitcoin was previously used for Lending or the taxpayers provided, for example, Ether to another for their block creation as a Stake.”
Gem. According to the BMF letter, the receipt of cryptocurrencies by way of proof of stake leads to taxable income from other services. according to § 22 No. 3 EStG, provided there is no commercial activity. This concerns both the staker who validates himself and the staker who puts his coin into a lock.
Thus, the entries in Lending or Staken are treated as other income and not as income from capital gains. I.e. not 25% on profit, but the personal tax rate is to be applied (see above at 1st holding),
The BMF goes one step further in the case of mining/lending or staking, which means that the units of a virtual currency acquired are considered to be “acquired” (exchange-like transaction). A subsequent sale of the Staking Reward within the speculation period of Sec. 23 EStG would therefore in principle be taxable.
Note: All rewards are taxable over 256 Euro/year
Basically, the following applies: The increase of the holding period of the cryptocurrency results from Section 23 I No. 2 Sentence 4 EStG. Accordingly, the divestment period is extended from one year to 10 years if income is generated from the source of income in at least one calendar year.
This applies to private individuals in accordance with the letter of the BMF dated 11.05.2022 no longer. After this, the holding period is no longer increased (no “infection by staking”)
Note: Increase the holding period of Crypto from 1 to 10 years (even if one year has already passed).
Update: This applies acc. BMF not for private individuals
Tip: Document when which coin was acquired so that proof can be provided later to the tax office and tax-free partial sales can be made if necessary.
Depending on how the rewards are handled, the holding period increases again to 10 years if they are used again in staking. Otherwise, this is then to be treated as for “holding” and thus 1 year holding period.
Update: This does not apply to private individuals (see above).
Gem. the above-mentioned draft, profits from lending/staking are to be treated as other income for tax purposes. This means that they are entered in the tax return in the SO annex and are taxed like income at the personal tax rate.
The upgrade of the public Radix network from Olympia to Babylon is coming soon, promising to enable the transition of global Web3 and DeFi from “tech demo” to mainstream-capable user and developer experience. The upgrade will take place around July 31st, 2023. The date is tentative, as it is subject to the approval of the Olympia validator set to activate the protocol update. The decision to extend the deadline was made after the team assessed the state of development following the RCnet network release and realized that everything had to go according to plan to make the June deadline.
A follow-up test network release, RCnet 2, will accompany the Babylon upgrade, with updates to the developer preview mobile wallets, Radix Dashboard, Gateway, and other developer tools planned for mid-June. Radix Off-Ledger Authentication (ROLA), which enables developers to access the tools needed to let users prove their ownership of an account or identity without submitting a transaction, will be released with RCnet 2. Additionally, a blog post outlining the Babylon Wallet’s feature set will be released so that developers can anticipate their customers’ user experience.
Although there has been a month’s delay in the Babylon upgrade, Radix’s sentiment has never been better, with team morale still pegged at 11 since the RCnet release. The project’s sticky appeal is a constant, as it offers a better user experience, Scrypto, scalability without breaking composability, RadFi, and more. The project’s momentum is building, with exciting ecosystem partnership announcements on the horizon.
See this announcement post for more details.
Starting today, July 21st, at 19 UTC, https://ociswap.com is holding an airdrop which will will run for exactly two days until July 23rd 19 UTC. Don’t miss out! To participate and get a load of free $OCI all you need to do is register your Radix wallet with @ocicatbot on Telegram (/wallet rdx...) and then stake some of your Radix with our RadixRadar validator (address: rv1qw6m5nrwnjx2estgkv8zsvp77es6yea0p99zkregud6dqad8q5wg7yvr4na).
For more details see https://airdrop.ociswap.com
There’s a total of 300,000 $OCI to be had. The sum is proportionally distributed. So the more you stake, the more you’ll get!
On 15th February 2022 at 9pm (UTC) our validator went down and effectively suspended validation for 11 hours until 8am of the following day.
We were notified to the validator going down straight away.
Shortly afterwards we de-registered the validator so that no further proposals were missed which would have further decreased the recent uptime percentage (which is at 99.3% right now) until the issue could be resolved. The validator was re-registered the next morning with a lower fee of 0.1% (instead of 1.99%). The fee will return to normal in about 2 weeks.
Here we go through the details of what went wrong and how we aim to prevent this kind of situation in the future.
All times given are in UTC (London time).
The currently active validator node was shutdown and put into maintenance mode by our hosting provider. The maintenance started at 9pm and went on until 7am the next morning.
The maintenance of 3 of our servers (on 3 separate days) was actually announced ahead of time so all of this was entirely preventable. This was a human (my) error. I mixed up the server names and had thought this was only going to occur the following day. That’s my bad and I apologise to our stakers for the unnecessary downtime.
Now even with this human error this should have been not a big deal.
Just switch over to the failover and the downtime should be only a couple of minutes long.
After all I was alerted and able to react immediately.
However, due to unexpected complications with the failover node it wasn’t ready to jump in immediately.
While it did have a snapshot of the ledger and associated DB files they seemed to be corrupt and so the failover started synchronizing from the start again.
A full sync from zero takes at least 12 hours. That is a big problem.
So as one does I went to moan about this in the #node-runners channel on the RadixDLT discord server.
The Radix community being as awesome as it is people heard me right away.
Faraz from radstakes.com immediately offered his help. Rigel (Marco) from StakingCoins also answered right away and offered me a link to a backup of the database from his validator to speed up re-synchronisation. The backup was a bit older but would still save a lot of time.
Faraz then went on to point out that Stuart from RadixPool still shared a relatively recent backup with the community on the RadixPool website. As Faraz said in discord, we definitely all owe Stuart more than a few beers for his continuing service to the Radix community.
With Stuart’s backup I was able to re-synchronize the failover node by around 11pm.
Thanks to Faraz and Rigel for being so kind and helpful! And thanks to Stuart for providing these snapshots.
At this point I had re-activated the validator but still left it unregistered. The problem was again an unexpected one for me1. The original validator server could not actually be controlled by me in any way. The hosting provider doesn’t allow deactivating or removing the server, removing its internet access, closing ports or anything of the sort. So after maintenance was done it would then restart automatically and try to keep on validating.
This is a problem because there must never be 2 nodes active with the same key which both try to validate. This will cause missed proposals as they fight over the spot among the validators.
Now usually, in my experience with other hosting providers, this wouldn’t have been a problem. I would just deactivate the inactive node so that it does not automatically start again.
Unfortunately, and I didn’t expect this, I had no such control over the server with our current provider.
I should of course have realised this before this situation came up. My mistake.
This means I could not prevent it from coming back up online automatically eventually and ruin things.
This is why, with a heavy heart, I made the decision to keep the validator de-registered until the next morning when the maintenance window was going to end.
With the maintenance window finally over the original validator came back online as expected.
Now at this point it was of course not in sync again as it hadn’t been online for 11 or so hours.
If had known for sure that the old validator would only came back online at a specific time, I wouldn’t have had to de-register the validator. I would’ve had all the time in the world to turn of the old server while it was catching up as soon as it came back up online.
Unfortunately it could’ve come back up online at any time within an 8 hour time window in the middle of the night. We observed this during the maintenance of another server.
Now I had control over the server again and deactivated the Radix node on it.
Then I promoted the still synchronized failover to validator and re-registered the validator so that it would again participate in the network.
As mentioned above when re-registering the validator I did this with a much lower fee of 0.1% as opposed to our normal fee 1.99%. I had originally intended to lower the fee to make up for the missed rewards. I then changed my mind after some discussion in our discord.
Full disclosure: It’s only as low as it is now because during re-registration I didn’t consider that the fee parameter in the transaction was actually expected not in percent (1.99) but in per 10,000 (199). On the plus side now our stakers do get more rewards as I originally intended for a while.
Still, this change will be reverted back to 1.99% in about 2 weeks.
Summary
To summarize: The issue was caused by human error (1), that is me, to begin with. The failover then was only available with a delay (2). And even with the failover ready we were unable to re-register the validator due to double validation (3) concerns.
I can only pledge to not let my mistakes happen again. I’ve learned from them and will take extra care from now on.
As for technical issues, these shall be mitigated in the future.
1 Which is of course not the provider’s fault. The issue was just me being to used to cloud hosting providers such as AWS or Hetzner where you can easily do this sort of thing. But for our node we chose to use closer-to-the-metal root servers which are of course not nearly as flexible.
The most critical problem here was the double validation issue (3). Without this the validator would have been back up and running within 2 hours after it went down despite issue number 2 (the corrupted database on the failover server). Still not ideal but a whole lot better than 11 hours.
To prevent this from happening in the future we will adjust our docker setup.
Currently before starting the docker services on a server the configuration is adjusted on the server once (validator vs full node configuration). From then onwards the server will always start in that configured role, i.e. either as a validator or only as a full node.
If a server becomes completely unavailable so that not even in the configuration can be adjusted on its disk (as it happened in this case) we cannot safely switch over the other to the validator role.
This step should have happened just before the maintenance window. It’s a problem that this requires a manual step before the server goes down because with this provider we can’t make sure that it stays down.
To mitigate this we will make the configuration source for the switch between validator and full node external. That is there will be a configuration file, say on a public S3 bucket, which will simply contain the IP of the server mapped to a role.
We will customize the docker container so that it checks this external source to decide whether it will start as a validator or full node. This means that even if the original validator server comes back online it will check this file and once it sees that it doesn’t have the validator role anymore, it will simply start as a full node only, preventing the double validation issue.
Should the external configuration source be unavailable for some reason we could still fallback to the manual configuration on the server. But by default the node container wouldn’t start at all.
Issue number 2 was the corrupt database on the failover node. This, of course, shouldn’t happen to begin with and we will fix that issue too. We believe this happened due to a restart of the server during the local snapshot process. Overriding the last snapshot then corrupted it. We will adapt this such that we will keep multiple snapshots so that we can fallback onto a previous one in that case.
Moreover we will take a leaf out of Stuart’s book and store additional external snapshots of the database which we can then download as a last resort.
This long downtime of 11 hours was caused by multiple separate issues that all came together but in the end were triggered due to my mistakes. We recognize that our setup was not ideal and we could’ve prevented an issue to this extent even in the face of human error on my side.
We have learned from this and will improve our infrastructure accordingly so that we can offer a more reliable service in the future.
A big thank you to all our stakers who stay with us despite these temporary issues, and especially to those who expressed their support in our Telegram channel.
Yesterday we did a short recap of the recent developments regarding Radix and its price development. If you speak German you can watch the video below to get up-to-date in less than 5 minutes!
This week our very own Robert was invited for a live interview for questions about crypto currencies and taxes. You can still watch the interview on twitch.tv: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1177446301
There were several questions from the live audience and from the Telegram groups. For more infos join our new Telegram group “Radix Radar“.
Instabridge.io is now online and can be used to exchange Ethereum-based eXRD tokens for native XRD tokens. The service promises inexpensive and fast swaps and should also support other tokens such as Bitcoin, Litecoin or Doge in the future.
Tokens can be exchanged 1: 1 and in both directions. All details can be found in the Instabridge User Guide from Radix. To use the service you need a valid Instapass ID.
The first epoch starts on August 11th – from this point on, staking rewards can be earned. In order not to miss any rewards, you should stake before August 11th. Read ours Instructions for staking Radix to learn how. RadixRadar is of course already available as a validator node: You can also find us in RadixExplorer at the address rv1qw6m5nrwnjx2estgkv8zsvp77es6yea0p99zkregud6dqad8q5wg7yvr4na .
Congratulations to everyone in the Radix team for the launch of the mainnet!
We are still soaking up all the new information available in the docs. Our nodes are already synced and online. We are just waiting to be able to register as a validator which is not yet possible.
Until then make sure to go to https://wallet.radixdlt.com/ and create your mainnet wallet address!
Once we’re registered we’ll post an update. Our validator’s address will be:
rv1qw6m5nrwnjx2estgkv8zsvp77es6yea0p99zkregud6dqad8q5wg7yvr4na
Update (11pm): Our validator is now live!