Sorry this took me a bit to get to!
Here’s what I have: Staking Calcs - Google Sheets [1]
Say we give folks 40k T (which costs $640 at the time of writing) and they Stake. After a year of staking, they get their stable-yield of 15%, which is $96, or $8/mo. Current estimates (reflected in the picture) are that running a full node on Threshold will cost somewhere between $200 to $300 a month if you do it efficiently. So by giving someone the min-stake, and then asking them to pay for a node, they lose about $292 a month.
Rewards scale with investment but the cost of running the node is constant. We break even at $24k in T (the price of T does not matter; but this is 1.5M T at the current price).
Considering the cost of running a node, an operator hits 10% APR when they’ve put in $72k worth of T (4.5M T at current prices) [2].
There’s a couple of things we can do about this in broad strokes.
- We can juice up rewards [3]
- We can subsidize costs
For instance, at 20% yield instead of 15%, the break-even stake goes from 24k to 18k. The 10% APR stake goes from $72k to $36k.
If running a node costs $100/mo instead of $300 (a $200/mo subsidy), then the breakeven-stake goes from $24k to $8k. The 10% APR stake goes from $72k to $24k.
If we do both, then the breakeven-stake goes from $24k to $6k. The 10% APR stake goes from $72k to $12k.
[1]: I started this from a sheet Will linked me that was owned by Derek. Thanks!
[2]: This is strictly considering stable-yield rewards since what happens to the TBTC fees is up to the treasury. My suggestion: use the fees to become a liquidity provider in TBTC:ETH since that helps provide deep liquidity and enables a route for TBTC → ETH → USDC (or whatever stable), but has less impermanent loss (since BTC is correlated with ETH). The TBTC:USDC pair is important for folks looking to use TBTC to lever up on BTC.
[3]: I noticed yesterday that we don’t seem to be using the constant from the original stable yield proposal. The proposed calculation for issuance was issuance = target_yield * supply * max(staking_rate, constant). If constant = 0.5, then at our current stake amount of ~3B, and supply of 10B, we would issue 0.15 * 10B * 0.5 = .75B, which against 3B staked is 25% APR. Let’s encourage some more staking!