How Partner Staking Works

A partner pool is an independent ERC-4626 liquid staking vault. Stakers deposit native XDC and receive the pool's share token; the share price (NAV) grows as the pool's masternodes earn validator rewards. The economic difference from the flagship PrimeStakedXDC_V3_1 vault is a 15% protocol fee — plus, on current-generation (V3.2) pools, an optional partner fee set by the pool operator — skimmed from rewards before they reach stakers.

The 15% protocol fee

Both are compile-time constants, not constructor arguments. That is deliberate: it means every genuine partner vault compiles to identical runtime bytecode, which is what lets the PartnerVaultRegistry verify a pool by its codehash. Changing the fee or recipient would require a recompile and a fresh allow-list entry, so a partner can't quietly run a 0%-fee fork and still get listed.

The fee applies only to rewards (yield), never to principal:

• Staker deposits and returned masternode principal are not taxed.
• Only the growth of managed assets above the tracked NAV (i.e. validator rewards) is subject to the 15%.

Path-independent fee chokepoint

The fee is not charged on a single "rewards in" function that a partner could route around. Instead, every balance-changing operation reconciles through one internal chokepoint (_syncTrackedAssetsExcludingInflow). Whenever that reconciliation detects that the pool's assets have grown beyond the tracked NAV (excluding deposits and principal returns), it:

1. Computes the surplus (the yield),
2. Skims 15% of it to the StakeXDC treasury, and
3. Credits the remaining 85% to stakers via NAV appreciation.

validator rewards arrive  ─►  reconcile assets  ─►  surplus detected
                                                        │
                                   ┌────────────────────┴───────────────────┐
                                   ▼                                         ▼
                       15% skimmed to StakeXDC            85% credited to stakers (NAV ↑)

Because of this design the fee is unavoidable: force-sending XDC (selfdestruct / direct transfer), routing rewards around the receive() path, or delivering yield through a masternode-resignation are all taxed identically on the next reconciliation. The recipient is a protocol-controlled address that always accepts native XDC, so the skim cannot be made to revert to grief stakers.

The partner fee (V3.2 pools)

Pools deployed on the current PartnerStakedXDC_V3_2 template additionally support an on-chain partner fee: the operator's own revenue share, taken from the same gross yield at the same chokepoint as the protocol fee.

Key properties:

• No surprise fees. Every change — increase or decrease — waits out the timelock and is publicly visible first. The timelock is the staker's exit window: anyone who disagrees with a scheduled fee can withdraw before it activates.
• Storage, not bytecode. Unlike the protocol fee, the partner fee lives in storage, so every V3.2 pool still shares one canonical codehash and the registry's authenticity check keeps working regardless of each pool's fee.
• Cannot brick the pool. The partner fee is pushed with a bounded gas stipend; if the recipient rejects the transfer, the fee is parked in the vault's claimable lane (claimQueuedAssets) instead of reverting — a broken recipient can never block staking, withdrawals, or the protocol fee.
• Settled at the old rate. Executing a fee change first reconciles any yield accrued so far at the previous rate, so a change never retroactively re-prices earlier rewards.

Legacy V3 pools (deployed before the V3.2 template) have no partner fee and keep their original immutable behavior.

Who does what

StakeXDC provides the infrastructure and the storefront; the partner runs the pool. StakeXDC is non-custodial with respect to partner pools: it never holds a pool's keys or funds and only ever receives the on-chain protocol fee.

What stakers experience

Identical to flagship psXDC, minus the reward haircut (15% protocol fee plus the pool's partner fee, both shown as one total fee in the app):

• Stake native XDC via stake / depositNative, receive the pool's share token at the current exchange rate.
• NAV growth. No claim button; shares simply become worth more XDC as net (post-fee) rewards accrue.
• Withdraw. Instant if the liquidity buffer covers it (withdraw / redeem), otherwise the request enters an automatic FIFO queue (withdrawWithQueue / redeemWithQueue) and is claimed once masternode payouts return. Queued requests can be cancelled before they're processed.
• Same safety rails as flagship V3: time-locked governance changes, per-report and daily validator-loss caps, pausable, reentrancy-guarded, and role-separated operations.

→ Deploy & List a Pool → Registry & Verification → Smart Contract Reference