Staking — priority, scaled to your stake

Provisional: all token parameters on this page — cooldown length, discount curves, thresholds, commitment terms — are provisional and will be finalized before launch.

The core of $RELAY is staking for landing priority. You lock $RELAY and, based on the amount staked, your transactions route through AllenHark's relay with greater priority — landing ahead of unstaked users, and ahead of users who staked less.

The relationship is direct: more stake → higher landing priority → your transactions land first, more often. For the traders, searchers, and bots who use the relay, that priority is the product — landing first is the difference between winning a fill and missing it. Unstaked users still get served; stakers get served first.

Locking, not spending

Tokens are locked, not spent: unstaking returns 100% of the staked amount, subject to a cooldown period (provisional: 7–14 days) that keeps priority meaningful and prevents gaming access for a single event. See Unstake Cooldown for the full flow.

There is no slashing and nothing is ever confiscated — staking is an access deposit, not a bond.

Illustrative instruction flow

Illustrative only — not runnable today. The staking program ships at TGE. The program id, account layout, and instruction names below are a sketch of the intended flow, not a deployed interface, and will change before launch.

Staking is expected to be a single instruction that moves $RELAY from your wallet into a program-owned vault, tracked by a per-staker account (an Anchor-style sketch):

// ILLUSTRATIVE ONLY — pseudocode, not a live program.
// Stake: lock `amount` of RELAY into your stake account.
await program.methods
  .stake(new BN(amount))
  .accounts({
    staker: wallet.publicKey,
    stakeAccount,          // PDA derived from the staker's pubkey
    relayMint,
    stakerTokenAccount,    // your RELAY token account (source)
    vault,                 // program-owned escrow holding locked RELAY
    tokenProgram: TOKEN_PROGRAM_ID,
  })
  .rpc();

Reading your stake account tells you how much counts toward priority right now versus how much is mid-unstake:

// ILLUSTRATIVE ONLY — account shape is provisional.
const stake = await program.account.stakeAccount.fetch(stakeAccount);
console.log({
  amountLocked: stake.amountLocked.toString(),      // qualifying stake → priority
  cooldownAmount: stake.cooldownAmount.toString(),  // mid-unstake, no priority
  cooldownEndsAt: stake.cooldownEndsAt.toNumber(),  // unix seconds; 0 if none
});

The unstake flow covers request_unstake and withdraw.

Priority, not payment

Staking is a standing position, not a per-use fee. While staked, your priority applies across your relay activity continuously — you don't spend the tokens, you hold them to hold the edge.

What counts as qualifying stake

Only actively locked tokens count toward your priority. Cooldown tokens (mid-unstake) do not count toward priority — the moment you request an unstake, those tokens stop contributing.

No yield — the reward is priority

Staking pays no yield, emissions, or staking rewards. The reward is access and priority — your transactions land first — plus cheaper tips. People stake because landing first is worth it.

Tip discounts for stakers

Beyond priority, staking reduces what you pay to use the relay: stakers tip at a discount, and the discount scales with stake. Combined with paying tips in $RELAY (itself discounted to the SOL tip — see Tips in $RELAY), staking makes using the relay meaningfully cheaper for committed users. Exact discount curves and thresholds are finalized against real usage data before launch.

Flexible or fixed-term (provisional)

Staking is flexible by default: stake and unstake whenever you like, subject to the standard cooldown. Stakers may also opt into a fixed-term commitment (e.g. 3, 6, or 12 months) in exchange for enhanced benefits — a deeper fee discount or a fixed-term priority multiplier. Longer commitment gets better terms; nothing is ever confiscated. Final commitment terms are provisional and tunable.

Broader access (secondary)

AllenHark runs a wider stack — RPC, gRPC, ShredStream, Slipstream, Soltrace, Solmask, Flare. Stakers may receive preferential terms across these services as the model matures, but landing priority on the relay is the primary and defining utility of $RELAY. Co-location (VPS and bare-metal hosting) carries real hardware cost and remains separately billed.