Token review and everything you need to know about staking NOW
Staking by definition means to expose your capital to certain risk and earn rewards for doing so. We are glad to see many projects outside of the Proof of Stake realm to catch up on this narrative and use staking as a tool to reward active network participants.
With this article, we will look at the NOW Token, which is the utility token of the ChangeNOW cryptocurrency exchange service. We will dive into the utility, distribution, token economics, community to understand the attractiveness of its unique staking mechanism.
What is NOW Token?
NOW Token is the native cryptocurrency of the ChangeNOW instant exchange service. The platform was founded back in 2017 and since then, has gained much trust in the community — both from customers and the partners, which include such industry leaders as Binance, Ledger, and many others.
ChangeNOW allows for fast, convenient, and secure crypto swaps. The service is registration-free and doesn’t collect any of your data, which makes the platform fully anonymous. As a non-custodial service, ChangeNOW doesn’t store your funds which leaves you in full control over your assets.
NOW Token was introduced in 2018, being the first crypto issued by a cryptocurrency exchange service. It was launched on the Ethereum blockchain, later being also added to Binance Chain with the support of its founder, CZ.
NOW has made quite a long way ever since, presenting many different activities to its community. The latest and the largest one — NOW Staking — has been introduced in August this year and allows all NOW holders to earn passive income from their crypto. Staking NOW means freezing some tokens into the network to help it run and getting rewarded for that in return. We’ll cover the details of staking NOW later in this article.
What is the utility of the NOW Token?
NOW Token serves as the internal currency of NOW products. The major use case of the token today is community voting in ChangeNOW’s Asset Listing Campaign. If you want to see a new crypto asset listed on ChangeNOW, follow the platform’s official Twitter and vote for the assets you like best in the regular polls. Those that get the most votes will enter the Asset Listing race — they will have to get 15,000 NOW in donations to join the list of the cryptos supported by ChangeNOW. Cosmos (ATOM), Pundi X (NPXS), and many other coins have been listed on the platform this way.
The team is also working on new use cases that will bring more benefits to the NOW holders. They are special rates for all crypto swaps no matter the exchange amount, higher revenue shares and lower payout limitations for the affiliate partners, and accelerated support.
What is the initial token distribution of NOW?
60 million NOW were distributed among the exchange users and affiliate partners during the Gradual airdrop after the token was issued in 2018. This is 30% of all NOW supply. The rest went to the private investors, advisors and evangelists, and the reserve fund.
How to acquire NOW?
Today, there are quite many ways how you can get some NOW. These are described in this detailed guide here and include:
- Purchasing NOW on Binance DEX or IDEX decentralized exchanges.
- Participating in ChangeNOW’s bounties, raffles, and giveaways. These include social media marketing activities frequently announced on their Twitter and Telegram like recent NOW rains in local community chats. These activities are easy to participate, and the change to win some tokens is quite high.
- Becoming ChangeNOW’s ambassador to get rewarded in NOW Tokens. Here’s the guide!
What is NOW Token Staking?
NOW Staking has been introduced to give a new incentive to the holders and to allow them to get new profits from their tokens. The yearly ROI from staking NOW goes up to 25%. Once having started staking, you will get your rewards in NOW every Wednesday after 12 UTC. These are the tokens distributed from the Reserve.
The token exists on Ethereum and Binance blockchains, and you can stake only NOW listed on Binance Chain (NOW-E68). This means NOW staking is implemented through a specific mechanism not typical for most of the Proof-of-Stake coins.
If you have some NOW-ERC20 that you would like to stake, don’t worry — you can swap them at a 1:1 rate at the official website.
Why did ChangeNOW go with a Staking model for the NOW Token?
“Staking is a way for the community to participate in the life of the project and make some passive income off of it. We are extremely happy about this step and believe it will play a huge role in the development of the token economy and ChangeNOW itself”, said ChangeNOW’s CMO Pauline Shangett.
NOW Token Economics
In this paragraph, we will cover how the NOW staking reward rates are calculated, how the token’s scarcity is maintained, and how the team is fighting with the typical staking risks.
Reward Rate based on Staking Duration. Your ROI depends on how long you stake for — it grows with time. A progressive scale of rewards is implemented:
The time span is flexible: you can stake for a week or more than a year. And it’s possible to raise your staking amount at any time to increase your ROI. Count your future gains in the convenient NOW Staking Calculator.
Halving every 1.5m distributed — a Limited Inflation model. The supply of NOW is limited, which makes it impossible to distribute the staking rewards forever. Here’s the decision: with every 1.5 million NOW granted to the stakers, the reward will be cut by 50%. This move will reduce inflation, thus increasing the demand and letting the NOW price appreciate.
Whale Protection. To avoid the centralization and the common staking risk of “the rich getting richer”, ChangeNOW’s team has implemented the so-called Whale Protection. It allows a single user to stake no more than 100k NOW, which allows for the equitable and fair distribution of the rewards.
How to stake NOW?
Staking Rewards website marks NOW staking complexity rating as easy — you can start getting profits with the token in just a few clicks. Here are the basic steps:
- Head on to the NOW Token website.
- Click the “Stake it NOW” button. You will be offered two options — today, it’s Token Freezer by BEPTOOLS and Guarda Wallet.
- Follow the provided instructions for each staking method.
Staking NOW implies freezing some of your tokes into the network to bring you profits. The minimum amount of NOW that you can freeze to stake is 10, and the maximum is 100,000.
You can unfreeze your tokens at any moment, but make sure it’s optimal in terms of weekly rewards. They are granted every Wednesday after 12 UTC when a network snapshot is made. If you unfreeze your NOW before this time, we’ll be unable to send you the rewards for the past week.
Community Support
As of September 24th, there are 115 NOW stakers who are currently staking over 2.7 million tokens! Their rewards are already over 2.6k NOW considering the program is yet less than 2 months old. The stats are regularly published on the team’s Twitter. The community thanks the team for this opportunity and expects new token rains and the price growth for NOW.
Summary & Conclusion
Staking NOW Token is a new activity recently introduced by the ChangeNOW crypto exchange service. The token that exists on Binance Chain (NOW-E68) is eligible for staking. It allows yearly ROI of up to 25%, a progressive profit scale, and weekly rewards distribution. It’s easy to calculate the potential profits and to start staking in a convenient interface.
NOW is a utility token launched on Binance Chain in the E68 format, so we can’t call it a true Proof-of-Stake coin. But although staking is not intrinsic for a crypto asset of this kind, it seems to be an interesting mechanic to fuel interest in a specific project. The users get profits, and the platform finds new customers and makes the existing one’s content. This makes staking a nice way to go not only for the PoS coins, so we might see the rise of staking for non-PoS tokens in the recent future.
Disclaimer: Staking Rewards has received compensation from the ChangeNOW team for writing this review.