Creating an SPL Staking Contract + Understanding Staking

Question

I'm working on a basic SPL staking contract for a token i've created on devnet. Pretty simple goal: lock up tokens for x amount of time, claim, unstake. As this is all relatively ~basic~ functionality, are these functions standardized anywhere? As of now i'm just writing from scratch.

I'm also interested in the entire process, aside from just the program development. I've created the token, that's great. Created an openbook marketID + raydium pool just to understand the process of making it tradeable + getting liquidity

As for staking, where do i send tokens? Do i create a pool, externally, outside of my contract that holds a set amount of the token? Or do i initialize the pool within the contract itself? Would love a general TLDR of how this entire process works to ensure i'm on the right track. Any resources or docs would be helpful, thanks!

Answer 1

The way i would think about staking a token is only via a smart contract that can save the lock time in a PDA, send rewards based on that and have the authority to lock and unlock token in the user wallet.

To do this in a non-custodial way (token in the wallet of the user) i would look into:

• Delegate the ATA of the token to the authority of your smart contract with the Approve function from the spl-token program: https://docs.rs/anchor-spl/latest/anchor_spl/token/struct.Approve.html
• Lock the delegated ATA by using the FreezeAccount function from the spl-token program: https://docs.rs/anchor-spl/latest/anchor_spl/token/struct.FreezeAccount.html

Then once the user want to unlock the token you grab the current time, the time of the lock and you reward it by calculating the time difference between the 2 time frame.

At this point you need to:

• Unlock the ATA using the Thaw Account from the Spl-Token Program: https://docs.rs/anchor-spl/latest/anchor_spl/token/struct.ThawAccount.html
• Revoke the delegation of your authority of the ATA with the revoke function: https://docs.rs/anchor-spl/latest/anchor_spl/token/struct.Revoke.html

NB: all of this can be done in using @solana/spl-token in typescript but you will need to save the time in a off-chain backend and have an authority keypair that can sign the transaction in a serverless way