A Simple Guide to How Wrapping and Delegating Work

[brianwalden]

This is my best attempt at describing Flare/Songbird Time Series Oracle voting from the perspective of an ordinary person who doesn't care about all the details of what's going on at the network level, just what it means for them and their birds. Things still aren't crystal clear yet, so feel free to chime in if I've got something wrong and I'll update the post.

Songbird has basically created a fun game where you can bet on who can provide the best price feeds to the network at no cost to yourself. The game runs on a weekly cycle running from 04:40 UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) on one Saturday to 04:40 UTC on the next Saturday. While it doesn't cost you anything to play, you do have to tell Songbird how many tokens you want to play with. You do that by wrapping your SGB, turning it into WSGB. If there's WSGB in your wallet, that tells Songbird that you want it to count toward your bet. You can always unwrap it to turn it back to SGB at anytime.

So you've told Songbird how many tokens you want to bet with, now you have to tell it who to bet on. This is called delegating. You can bet on one or two data providers. If you choose two you can set how much WSGB you want to bet on each one by percent (50/50, 80/20, etc.). Once set, your delegations will be used for each weekly contest until you change them. Those are the two steps to play. You must have some WSGB in your wallet and you must have told Songbird how you want to bet. Your WSGB never leaves your wallet or gets locked up - it costs you nothing to play.

Before each contest starts, Songbird records everybody's bets for the upcoming week. But here's the catch. If there was just one set time to bet each week, people could keep their tokens on exchanges trading all week and then move them over for the vote and send them back immediately afterwards. That doesn't help the network, so instead Songbird has a 48-hour window where the bets are recorded from 04:40 UTC on Thursday to 04:40 UTC on Saturday (just before the contest starts). The bets will be recorded at some random time in that 2-day window, but no one knows when. Whenever the bets get recorded, that's it, they're locked in for the upcoming week. At that point, any changes you make either to your WSGB balance or your delegations won't have an effect on the game until the next time bets are recorded in about a week.

The game isn't like a horse race where there's one winner and a bunch of losers. Instead all the data providers will win something over the course of the week, the best ones will just win a little more. At the end of the week all the rewards that the data providers win will be divided up among the people who bet on them. You'll be able to claim your winnings once the week ends (they don't go into your wallet automatically), paid in WSGB. If you don't claim your winnings within 30 days, you will forfeit them and they'll go back into the rewards pool for the next contest.

Songbird is set up to inflate the total SGB supply by 10% each year to run this game. If my math is right that means for this first year, they'll be paying out 28 Million WSGB in prizes each week. 20% of that goes to the data providers - if you want to keep the analogy going, you can think of that as the vig. The remaining 80% will go to all of us degenerate gamblers who played in the contest.

[brianwalden]

Oh man, I just realized I could have said all that in three words: It's like staking.

@BillyOckham helpfully added these simple tips:

-  So long as you claim within a month you won’t lose your reward.
-  Any change takes effect in the epoch following the lock-in.  
-  If you claim,  then wrap,  every week you are getting the maximum compounding interest.
-  Weekly on any day Sunday through Wednesday is the optimal claim then wrap days. 
-  You don’t need to repeat delegate once you have set your delegation, newly wrapped rewards will be auto-delegated in the proportions you set.

Edited September 24, 2021 by brianwalden

[Fireballseven]

Nice analogy, I would maybe add in that’s it’s not totally free since you go get the gas fee when you wrap( and unwrap, I think).  Stick gas fee as advising Joe the gambler to keep a buck or 2 aside for his bus home from the casino. 😀

BTW, it’s now 90 days to claim rewards, not 30. 

[RobertHarpool]

This article on Bifrost's webpage was a pretty good explanation of it all. It started off: 

"This article is intended for new users that are unfamiliar with these concepts and explains why you want to wrap and delegate your Songbird to support the network and its participants." 

and stayed an easy/good read throughout. 

The wheel you invented works well too, @brianwalden :-) 

[djdhrubs]

I'm trying to do this via my ledger nano and metamask. It's taking ages to wrap my Songbird tokens. I've updated my ledger, the ethereum app etc. I've enabled contract data on my ledger. Wrapping SGB into WSGB is taking many minutes so far. Is that normal??

[brianwalden]

Just now, djdhrubs said:

I'm trying to do this via my ledger nano and metamask. It's taking ages to wrap my Songbird tokens. I've updated my ledger, the ethereum app etc. I've enabled contract data on my ledger. Wrapping SGB into WSGB is taking many minutes so far. Is that normal??

No, it should be a few seconds.

[djdhrubs]

1 minute ago, brianwalden said:

No, it should be a few seconds.

Thanks. I'm trying another option from the FTSO list. The scandinodes one. Still getting a spinning wheel, transaction is in progress on metamask. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[djdhrubs]

Gonna try again tomorrow. No luck tonight.

[djdhrubs]

Nah. Feel like I'm missing something easy but no luck whatsoever. I connect my ledger to metamask, open ledger live, go to the ethereum app, open it up, it asks me to open device bridge which I do and it connects, on metamask it correctly displays my SGB balance. 

After that I can't do anything. I try to connect to the various FTSO sites. No dice. For example I go to this:-

https://ftso.alexdupre.com/

I click on connect metamask/ dcent etc wallet, metamask asks permission, I click on ok, and then it defaults back to the goddamn same page. It doesn't connect.

I've just updated the eth app on ledger to 1.9.5

[Fireballseven]

6 hours ago, djdhrubs said:

Nah. Feel like I'm missing something easy but no luck whatsoever. I connect my ledger to metamask, open ledger live, go to the ethereum app, open it up, it asks me to open device bridge which I do and it connects, on metamask it correctly displays my SGB balance. 

After that I can't do anything. I try to connect to the various FTSO sites. No dice. For example I go to this:-

https://ftso.alexdupre.com/

I click on connect metamask/ dcent etc wallet, metamask asks permission, I click on ok, and then it defaults back to the goddamn same page. It doesn't connect.

I've just updated the eth app on ledger to 1.9.5

Have you tried with another provider, FTSO AU definitely works for me in chrome after I sign in to MetaMask in a Google chrome tab running alongside. 
 

 alternatively, install Bifrost wallet on your smartphone and just send some SGB to that new address and delegate within that app. 
 

my MetaMask is not using ledger, was setup with an import key. 

[djdhrubs]

3 hours ago, Fireballseven said:

Have you tried with another provider, FTSO AU definitely works for me in chrome after I sign in to MetaMask in a Google chrome tab running alongside. 
 

 alternatively, install Bifrost wallet on your smartphone and just send some SGB to that new address and delegate within that app. 
 

my MetaMask is not using ledger, was setup with an import key. 

That’s part of my problem I think. I can’t even send SGB from MetaMask (connected to ledger) to a bifrost wallet.  I can sign off on the transaction on MetaMask but then I just get a spinning wheel or the transaction never goes through. The ledger doesn’t ask me to verify the transaction. So I think I’m doing something basic and fundamentally wrong or have missed a step. But I can’t figure out what it is. 
 

Can’t see any YouTube videos specifically focused on using the ledger with songbird where it actually takes you though step by step.

ive tried other FTSO providers but can’t connect to any. And even when I can the process hangs at the wrapping SGB stage.

[cryptoxrp]

On 9/24/2021 at 7:54 PM, brianwalden said:

-  You don’t need to repeat delegate once you have set your delegation, newly wrapped rewards will be auto-delegated in the proportions you set.

Do you know how to change the delagation in the Bifrost wallet? Do you go to the name of the delegated FTSO. Then click on it and reduce the delegated % to zero? OR is there another way like clicking on manage and the red X and deleting the delegted name?

There is no help anywhere how to do this?

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by cryptoxrp

[lostInZerp]

How can you claim rewards? From reading above it doesnt happen automatically...

[lostInZerp]

Never mind, saw on FTSO AU site they have a "Rewards" section which looks to be where you claim them (if they exist!)

[PunishmentOfLuxury]