Revuto Staking Center: Upgrade Update and Relaunch Announcement

12 min readJul 11, 2023

As many active members of the Revuto community know, back in May, we announced that the Revuto Staking Center would be going through a period of maintenance. This was due to the fact that interest in the Staking Center essentially grew beyond our expectations since we first announced it in January 2022.

Revuto has offered investors the opportunity to invest in a number of different staking pools in which $REVU, $ADA, or $iUSD can be staked to earn $REVU, $ADA, @iUSD, and other Cardano Native Tokens. In summer-spring 2022, there was great interest in our series of 8 Rstronaut Staking Planets. Eligible Rstronauts earned not only a special Rstronaut NFT for participating in all 8 staking planets but also a Rstronaut t-shirt.

With all of these offerings and the growing interest that they have brought to our project along with organically growing our community, the initial setup we had for the Staking Center has proved to no longer be suitable for the high number of payouts that we were processing every day.

Scheduled Maintenance

In a commitment to our investors and the future of the project and its continued success, we decided to fix the payout process in the Revuto app in order to make it not only faster and more reliable but also add support for integration with third-party services.

Furthermore, to clarify the pause, Revuto decided to stop processing all payouts in the production environment to stop clogging the setup. Beginning in April, there were numerous complaints from our users who staked their assets but couldn’t see them in the app. At the same time, the inefficient process of checking, calculating, and approving staking payouts caused delays in processing payouts which altogether resulted in inconsistent data in tracking staking and unstaking within our Staking Center. To prevent a bigger mess and fix the issue on both ends of staking/unstaking, and also to upgrade the system to be faster, more reliable, and flexible (adding new staking options and allowing integration with external service providers), we decided to pause all Staking Center activities until we upgraded it.

Quick upgrade of the infrastructure

The initial plan was to pause Staking Center activities for two and a half weeks but, as things often and unfortunately happen when it comes to the product development, the pause will end after two and a half months…which is way more than we anticipated. Although the plan was to make the upgrade quickly, what we have learned so far is that there are no quick updates or shortcuts when it comes to product development. Still, there are a couple of reasons why the delays happened…

The Revuto team is constrained with resources regarding in-house development. To keep Revuto service development under our own control, the team decided that all backend development will be done in-house, which may cause holdbacks when it comes to additional work. There are regular tasks we need to do (app bug reports and quick fixes, responses to support team inquiries, new service provider integrations like the ones for issuing VDCs, for custodial services, and KYC…). And then there are activities that were not planned like the Staking Center upgrade. The downside of such a setup is that Revuto can’t hire new devs on demand (fast and effectively) to cover these activities. The hiring process is time-consuming. Once you hire, you need to educate new people about what we do, and lastly, in the long run, it’s a costly (atm, unacceptable) setup as new devs request a longer commitment to the project (full-time employment).
We decided not to work on the testnet environment because of the testnet node upgrade from Cardano. Revuto updated the testnet environment, which was painful because Cardano decided not to support old node versions. In that situation, just minting REVU on the testnet caused us problems because all services providing token minting on the Cardano testnet went off and could not provide service. Looking at the problem, we knew that if our partner needed to do the same and upgrade all nodes to the new version, it would cause even bigger delays, so we decided to avoid further delays and work on the production-testing environment. Besides clogging the database with inconsistent stakings/un-stakings, this was another reason to pause the staking center in general.
The Revuto team underestimated the scope of work that needed to be done to refactor the Staking Center. In our defense, it’s a common thing that may happen because it’s hard to predict in which way the development will go and what we’ll do in general once we start the process. Revuto is a startup in which many ideas and decisions come ad-hoc. With startups, the process of delegating things and brainstorming about what and how to do things is always a bit chaotic. That chaos allows us to be innovative and different and change things on the fly to bring out more competitive and up-to-date products. The environment in which we operate is very dynamic, so sticking on a strict path is not always the best way to do things.
Revuto’s in-house devs work with external partners to bring the final product to the market, meaning there’s a front-end (iOS and Android app) development team and a separate company dedicated to developing the Revuto Staking Center. In short, we are working with two external agencies to finalize the product. Besides losing time in communication because of this remote (decentralized) setup, those agencies don’t work extra hours if needed (weekends, nights, holidays…) like our team does. In Croatia, in June alone, we had 3 national holidays in which people across the country decided to take advantage of the situation and connect those days off (national holidays) with weekends and make them “long weekends”, resulting in lost working hours. Basically, in those 3 weeks, people worked 6 days out of 15 working days. Our fault was that we didn’t anticipate we’d still be working on the update in June.
Integration with the external service and testing the setup with it. When you integrate with a partner, you depend on their development pace and requirements. That’s not always the most efficient way to do things, especially if you work with people that haven’t had a lot of experience with Web3 in the past. Once you integrate, you have an obligation to focus on testing, launching, and, more importantly, working constantly to make everything better once it’s available. Also, the partnering service always has expectations with deals, so we’re obligated to secure resources to promote and improve the service, meaning there are constant small but new requirements for our development team to work on.

The first integration of this kind with sports betting site Altwin was announced in June. Now users outside of the EU, US, and Canada can participate in decentralized betting using $REVU tokens. It’s a unique setup and is pretty appealing, as even if you lose, you win since you get 10% of what you lose back to the Revuto Staking Center.

Announcing the “un-pause”

Although we initially gave a date of June 1st for the resumption of processing unstaking, as mentioned above, there have been several technical issues that have arisen. As such, we’ve been working around the clock with our development team to fix these specifics and get the updated Staking Center out and running as soon as possible.

While unstakes still show as “pending,” it is possible to make new staking events. What’s more, we have explained that those who have unstaked will continue to earn APR until such time as the unstaking events are processed. We know how frustrating it can be to wait for something that usually was processed smoothly, but we also know that the improved functionality of the Staking Center will knock everyone’s socks off.

To secure enough time to finish everything and prevent further delays, we decided to resume Staking Center operations on August 1st. On the day, all unprocessed and delayed payouts will be processed, and the Staking Center will resume with its normal activities, but now, with the new setup. The old one required human intervention while the new one is already being tested (with Altwin on a much smaller scale) to process all unstakings in an hour (on average). Although we’ll still promote the process of unstaking as up to 24h process, the new setup is a big step forward towards making the whole staking/un-staking process faster and more reliable (automated).

Effect on Stakers

Revuto maintains an active social media presence and regularly updates the community on what is happening with the project. We have a support team and admins across social media that answer questions pretty much around the clock. We know that perhaps the number one question for the past couple of weeks has been about when an unstaking event will be processed. What’s more, it has been addressed in both our latest Live YouTube AMA event as well as our June: Monthly Update.

About the numbers — more than half a million USD paid out in staking rewards

To put perspective on the numbers and the users that the pause is affecting, let’s look at some facts and figures. Since we paused processing until August 1st when we’ll process all the delayed payouts, users with R Fund staking addresses will get back 178 958 ADA locked (according to the today’s ADA price, that’s around $50K) plus APR in ADA and REVU (max $5k in ADA and $2.5K in REVU).

Also, take a look at what the Revuto Staking Center will process beyond August 1st up until the end of the year regarding unlocking ADA and REVU from the R FUND staking pools:

August 13,591 ADA unlock + APR in ADA & REVU

September 62,087 ADA unlock + APR in ADA & REVU

October 50,547 ADA unlock + APR in ADA & REVU

November 20,687 ADA unlock + APR in ADA & REVU

December 12,056 ADA unlock + APR in ADA & REVU

As you can see, the number of tokens to unlock + APR are far from crazy and something that could drastically reflect REVU token price action or the Revuto business in general. Moreover, the sustainability of the setup is not in jeopardy because, in addition to GENS and GENS-X tokens, in just the Profila project the R Fund invested almost $250K under preferred terms (ZEKE token price). More importantly, investing in REVU tokens and Revuto is never risk-free. We emphasize that there’s no such thing as a 100% risk-free and 100% profitable setup, but to avoid any misconception about the sustainability of the setups in the Revuto Staking Center, all pools are always hard-capped and staking rewards are pre-secured.

Revuto SC numbers: there are 376 pending claims out of 23398 processed claims in total, with 9876 unique users that have staked with the Revuto Staking Center.

ADA pools in numbers:

Rstronaut R Fund Staking Pool — 107,754.0 ADA

EBT1 R Fund Staking Pool — 95,243.0 ADA

R Fund — 81,406.0 ADA

REVU pools in numbers:

Total in stakings: 44,377,927.331648014 REVU

Total in stakings without claim2stake: 34,097,410.19150358 REVU

It was not possible to directly calculate free staking rewards Revuto has paid out to its users via the Staking Center, but according to the total APR paid out in REVU, ADA and other CNTs, and the token prices at the time of the reward payout (staking unlock), so far, Revuto paid more than half a million dollars in staking rewards. Those rewards are nothing more than free money and incentive for our users to stay with the Revuto ecosystem while we build and until we release our core product(s).

Launching the Altwin Staking Pool

So far, the Revuto Staking Center has offered 27 staking pools, while on August 1st, we’ll launch the 28th staking pool. The Altwin Staking Pool will use the newest setup, where all Altwin users will be getting monthly cashback on their monthly P&L from betting on sports with Altwin.com in REVU tokens.

The setup with Altwin and the Altwin Staking Pool in the Revuto Staking Center is introducing a novelty in sports betting by allowing people not only to acquire new REVU tokens through winning tickets but to invest in crypto by betting on sports because, even if they don’t win the ticket, they’ll get 10% back in REVU staked in the Altwin Staking Pool with a lock-up period of 12 months, which will give them an opportunity to offset losses and possibly profit if the REVU token price rises during the lockup period.

You can learn more about this integration in our blog post and about the most recent incentives where Altwin gives you 400 REVU for free when you make your first deposit to Altwin.

The process of using Revuto and Altwin is described at https://bit.ly/altwin_how_to

Also, join Altwin’s Telegram groups to learn more about the setup.

https://t.me/altwin_bet

https://t.me/altwin.chat

Keeping Everyone Happy

As mentioned earlier, people who unstaked their tokens and have been seeing the “Unstake pending” message will be earning APR for the time they’ve been waiting.

Besides adding the APR to cover “the pause”, we decided to offer more to those affected. All R Fund stakes whose unlocking period is between May 15th and July 30th will get a free Card NFT or, if they already have a Card NFT, a free upgrade to the metal card for the Revuto PDC (Physical Debit card). Those who already have an NFT for the metal card will get an additional one so they can sell/trade them once we mint Card NFTs. Also, those who are not eligible for Revuto Debit Cards (all non-EU users) will be able to either sell/trade those NFTs or keep them until we unlock their region. It’s a small gift that may not seem huge, but still, as the initial series of Revuto PDCs (and NFTs) are limited, the (earned) gift may result in being a good value for a bit of waiting.

Conclusion

In the past, Revuto had similar situations in which we had to change the launch dates for our major releases (the Revuto app launch, REVU token release after the TGE and ICO, REVU token listings, prolonged REVU-MILK staking lock-up period (delayed payout) for 2x, delayed REVU token on-ramp from FIAT, and so on..) but in general we have never missed on our promises.

Again, we apologize for the situation, and we thank everyone for their patience, understanding, and support as we work to bring Revuto to reach its full potential one step at a time.

Your Revuto Team

Download the Revuto app from the App Store, Google Play, or Huawei AppGallery and start earning today.

In case you missed:

📣Revuto Monthly Recap: June 2023 — Read now
💼 Office Day — Watch some highlights
🚀 REVU listing: Trading is live on KuCoin and Gate.io 🚀
📲 Download the Revuto app now! — Available for iOS, Android, Huawei
🎥 Revuto Deep Dive — Watch the video
📻 UK Radio campaign — Listen to our slot
💫 Unique Revuto NFTs — See all NFTs
🎥 Our co-founder Jos on Cardano360 — Tune in at 38:20
🎂 Our Token Generation Event (TGE) aka REVU Token birthday — See the event
🎙 Cardano live podcast with our co-founder Jos — Listen to the podcast