How to Best Play Your XEN Strategy Game

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XEN Crypto’s launch was on October 8, and people are now able to connect their wallets to the official xen.network website and mint XEN tokens for themselves. This is amazing because they can now do with XEN what Satoshi Nakamoto did 13 years ago when he first started mining Bitcoin. We collect here some of the strategies provided by the well-known Xenians, and we feature Jack Levin‘s XEN minting strategy.

Mikael Salo's XEN Strategy

XEN Crypto community member Mikael Salo, @xencryptonews on Twitter, shared his XEN strategy, which is conservative and cautious. He writes: “This guide suggests a balanced approach to minting XEN; it is not a guide to getting the absolute max out of the program, but more to get a stable and easy-to-manage minting experience.”

The assumptions he makes are that time is the biggest amplifier of yield, and with this premise, your mint term should always be of maximum length.

The second assumption is that managing too many wallets is too cumbersome for an average user because there’s a need to keep track of the mint term end dates as well as the stakes, and this can get out of hand if not tracked properly.

Mikael Salo says that the best way to make things less confusing is to set up a system where claims are timed to happen at the same time and can be tracked with simple Excel sheets and a calendar.

Ethereum gas fees are highly time-sensitive because they depend in large part on user network activity. That’s why gas prices spike during certain hours of the day and why they’re low during the weekend. According to the graph below, gas prices are high during the week, but activity drops dramatically on weekends.

ETH gas price
Average Ethereum gas fee lowest during the weekends

By minting and staking XEN in a conservative way, we can set our claims to happen on the weekends and set the mint term to happen on a day when gas prices are expected to be low.

Salo’s XEN Crypto strategy is to use multiple addresses and Sunday as the day for claim activity. His weekly budget is $50 to be used to fund 10 wallets. You should check the average cost of one claim transaction on that day. This is necessary if you want to avoid not having enough ETH at a given address so that you can’t send the transaction. Keep in mind that claimRank costs 175,000 gwei on Ethereum. You need to know the base fee at that moment, and you can find it on etherscan.io. You can calculate the cost of your transaction by following these instructions here. If you don’t know how to use the Metamask wallet, we have a guide for you.

It’s likely that you won’t fit into the first 5000 addresses that claim XEN. If this occurs, your mint term will be extended to approximately 250 days. XEN’s launch is on October 8, and claimRank transactions will be sent on that day. The mint term is set at 245 days, which means that when we go to mint tokens on June 11, 2023, it will be on a Sunday. You use the “Claim + Share” function and send all your newly minted XEN to a new address to be staked for 1000 days. The APY will be 17%, so it will still be a high yield. He does this every week, so he mints progressively according to his mint term.

Here’s how it’s done, and you can also make your own spreadsheet and set an alarm in your calendar for your mint term end dates.

XEN strategy spreadsheet
XEN claims and mints on a spreadsheet

Goonin's XEN strategy

Goonin is also a frequent XEN Crypto Telegram group user and admin, and he says he will continue to mint on Ethereum rather than go to mint on other chains where transaction fees are much lower.

“I definitely plan to at least mint under those max days to get a good stake rate,” he says.

He doesn’t want to have too many wallets and not be able to manage his time, so he plans to organize his wallets via spreadsheets.

“It’s almost like this game is about gas,” he reflects. He’s going to start staking around 30 days after XEN Crypto’s launch. He’s not going to consolidate all the newly minted XEN into one huge stake, but he’ll mix them up into some individual stakes, and the rest he’ll unite into one big stake. He thinks it’s affordable to mint, but he saved enough to carry on all the transactions. He doesn’t want to end up in a situation where, when the time to mint arrives, he doesn’t have enough money to finish the process.

Goonin’s intention is to take lots of XEN so he can share them with friends and family. He’s already onboarded some people from his circle of influence.

Divienb's XEN strategy

Divienb is an admin in the official XEN Crypto Telegram group, and he came up with his own strategy when it comes to minting and saving up on gas fees. Divienb thought about different scenarios people may experience while participating in the XEN protocol. He looked into the most common behaviors of moving ETH around different accounts to fund them in order to be able to pay for the gas fees when claiming the rank, minting, and staking.

In the first scenario, the user sends too little ETH; he doesn’t have enough to pay for the transaction, and he needs to send some more ETH. This is a double cost in terms of ETH and time, and it is undoubtedly inefficient. This can happen if you prefunded your addresses a few days before and the price of gas suddenly rises due to high network activity.

In the second scenario, you’ve sent a little bit more ETH to your account to pay for the transaction. After you claim your XEN, you will be left with a small amount of ETH sitting there, and it will be too little to move it to another wallet, so it’s kind of wasted.

In his third scenario, the user sends a lot more ETH than the gas fee needed for the transaction. The ETH left in this account after you finish the claim is enough to move to another account, but it will cost you another gas fee to do so.

To mitigate the issue of ETH wasted on gas, Divienb came up with his method of “linear setup,” where he sends all the funds from his main wallet to his first account, then claims XEN, and then sends all the ETH from this account to the next one. He claims XEN again and repeats the process until he has funded multiple accounts. When he returns to mint XEN at the end of his mint term, he employs the same method. He calls it the “Claim + Share” function. In the empty address field, he inserts an address he wants to send his transactions to. You need to put the same address in all the wallets if you want to consolidate XEN tokens from all the accounts into that one address. When you’ve done that, you stake your XEN to get the APY.

Jack Levin's XEN strategy

During the latest Twitter space hosted by Coach Platypus and MisChiefNZ, Jack Levin talked briefly about what he believes is the best strategy to take with regards to participating in the XEN protocol:

“In terms of getting the most out of the protocol, do specify 100 days because that’s what the protocol allows in the beginning before 5000 wallets connect. After that, make sure to mint your XEN on time if you don’t want to be penalized. If you claim on time and you get 100% of the rewards through the proof of participation protocol, then I would say to stake it for as long as you want, but it’s advisable to lock in 1000 days because the APY after 100 days is going to be 19%. It’s a good APY. That’s basically XEN working for you for three years, and you’ll get another 56–57% bonus on top of your initially minted XEN.

Some people believe that laddering the stakes is beneficial, but I disagree, because if you ladder the stakes and then restake or unstake, you will have a lower APY to play with. So you really want to lock in the 1,000 days, which is the maximum. And you can always mint more, come back to the XEN dApp, and continue to mint.

I’d probably mint from several wallets and be mindful of gas. I’d probably be minting every weekend to save money on gas and just keep staking to get those fantastic APYs. It’s going to be 19% until 6 months from the Genesis date. So that’s my plan and my recommendation. This is what I will do, and you can do whatever you want. That’s my path: the path of XEN. 

This thing is free. You’re just putting in your gas and your attention. Get a wallet for your mom and dad, and get a wallet for all of your relatives, for your cat, and for your dog. You don’t have to give them access just yet. Just set the wallet for them and put the password somewhere in a jar and hide it somewhere, and down the road, there’s really value to it, then you just tell them, “Hey, here’s the wallet and the password for you and if you want to learn about crypto there’s money for you there.” So that would be a really good way to give away minted XEN or even staked XEN. So get your wallet, get your addresses, claim cRank, mint XEN, stake it for three years, and just save some XEN for your friends and family. That would be an amazing gift for the future. Giving somebody a wallet full of XEN is the next level.”

In the video below with Crypto Kindness, Jack Levin talks one more time about his XEN minting and staking strategy.