[Video Guide]-TEA Project Mining Contest

Video Transcript (edited for clarity)
We created this video to show how to use the TEA browser wallet to take part in our mining competition. You should already have installed the polkadot browser extension and created a wallet account (the instructions are available below).

The Mining Competition

The main criteria that you’ll be judged on for the mining competition can be seen on our leaderboard.

1. The first major component is the projected seven-day mining income.
2. The second component is the balance of total assets you have in your wallet account.
3. And finally subtracted away from the first two totals will be the debt that you have taken out.

The net value of all of the above is used to come up with your total account value.

Your Wallet Account

At the top of your wallet browser asset page you’ll see your total TEA balance. This is the TEA token, the major utility token on the TEA network. The second line is locked TEA and that is how much of your balance is locked into staking or if you’ve participated in marketplace auctions that will lock up a bit of your TEA balance to act as a deposit.

Now the next row is called COFFEE this is new and the idea with COFFEE is that it’s kind of the the yin and yang to TEA. A legitimate strategy is to dump everything you harvest and exchange your TEA mining rewards for COFFEE. You can do that using this button right at the bottom of your browser wallet. Now remember that the winner is whoever has the most assets in their wallet measured in US dollars at the end of the contest. So someone can simply take whatever harvested rewards they have and exchange them into COFFEE. This then earns them 0.5 percent interest every 100 blocks.

Instead of a wallet that’s already been mining and staking, let’s see what the wallet would look like when you first start. You won’t have any assets in your wallet, only the seed coupons.

If we go back over to the landing page you would sign up in the Google form with your email, your polkadot wallet address and your Ethereum address for the reward. Now this is what a wallet would look like if you just got the email that the contest was starting and you jumped over to your wallet. You would see no assets and only coupons, so what you want to do is redeem these Camellia seed coupons and they will show up in your Camellia tab.

Camellia (CML) are NFTs necessary to unlock a mining machine. They must be planted into them. They’re called seeds because at the beginning of their lives you plant them into a mining machine and they grow. And as they grow they become more productive during their lifetime just like a seed grows into a tree and it bears fruit for a while. And then after a certain amount of time it dies away and that’s the idea behind the Camellia nft. CML has a set lifetime and it has a productivity curve so let’s see how this looks when we redeem them.

You’ll have to sign in to your wallet and these coupons will get to turn into Camellia and you see how the coupon tab just disappeared and you can now see your array of seeds. I want to explain a few things here. These are the types of seeds. A seeds give the best mining rewards followed by b and then c. The c seeds are more the most abundant in the system and the A seeds are the rarest. Now each seed has a defrost day and you see all of these have already defrosted so they’re available. And if they’re available you’ll see an icon that shows you can plant them into a mining machine.

Now for all seeds including frozen seeds and defrosted seeds, you can still deposit these for a loan just as you can deposit for a loan of 500 TEA. And that will go directly to your TEA balance.

Let’s look at planting and how that affects the locked tea because each time you start mining you plant a CML camellia seed into a mining machine. When you mine, it will simultaneously stake 1000 TEA. At this early stage, the Genesis bank is giving out loans for 1000 TEA automatically. When you have less than 1000 TEA because there’s not enough TEA in the system, all TEA comes from mining and at the very beginning there is no TEA mined yet. So the Genesis bank must give out loans now let’s actually plant one of our defrosted CML seeds into a mining machine (simulated). We’ll see how that works out so right now let’s plant our best seed:

- Plant an A seed by clicking stake.
- When it asks for the miner id it can be anything. I’ll just name it after my user name, tester1.
- The IP can be anything.

Then click generate scripts. Now if this were a real mining machine you would copy the output here and paste it into wherever your your mining machine is. For instance if you’re running on AWS then you would just paste it into your AWS console. For right now, this is just a simulation so we’ll just click plant here at the bottom and sign the transaction.

Notice that we now have mining one occupied slot with the miner id here. We also have something new: staking debt. It’s because we didn’t have enough TEA so automatically we’re given a loan for a thousand TEA. As we harvest TEA from our mining machine, this staking debt will be reduced. Another thing we can see is that if we go to my staking on Camellia, you’ll notice that we can’t unstake this. Whenever you’re staking on a mining machine, there’s a potentially infinite number of slots. But the first slot is slot zero and that always belongs to the miner. That zero slot is also the most rewarding slot.

Mining Camellia

If we look at what everyone’s mining, you can see that the A seeds are up (lots of stakers) and they’re quite popular. Also notice how the first miner gets the zero-slot but then anyone else can also stake to that mining machines.

- This is the miner at the zero index and they now have 44%.
- The second person that staked gets 18% of the mining rewards.
- All the way down to the fourth index which is actually the fifth person.

Also notice here that someone staked with a Camellia CML. During the early stages, we’re allowing Camellia to be used for staking slots in lieu of the 1000 TEA tokens. We can take a look at a different machine and you’ll notice the weight is different: the miner here enjoys 70% while the second staker gets 29%. As more stakers join the mining machine, the more diluted the rewards get.

Taking Out a CML-backed Loan

If we go back to our assets we can take a look at how we actually would take out loans. This is a seed that’s not going to defrost for four days and you can’t really do much with it. You could put it in the marketplace and sell it at auction, but right now I think the most rewarding would be to just take out a loan on it and use it as collateral.

I can do that by clicking agree to the terms and conditions. They’re asking if I’m sure you want to deposit the CML as collateral for a Genesis loan and that will give me a 500T loan and if I don’t pay it back I will lose my CML seed, the collateral seed. Anytime you want to pay it off you can click here, right now i would need 500T so i think you need a little bit of interest. If i were to pay it off right now, the interest is 0.4. It’ll grow the longer you wait to pay it off. You can see there’s three days before I must pay it back.

I can take out another loan, for example a loan on a C seed and I’m going to do that to show you that when you have 1000T balance, then you’re no longer given an automatic loan. Right now you see the balance has gone up to over a 1000T. We want to mine with this Camellia seed, and we want to plant that to a machine. So again I’ll name it tester2. and I’ll use any IP address and press generate.

If we go back to our assets, you’ll see it went from a 1000.9879 TEA down to 0.9879 and our staking debt stayed the same. So it’s really up to you what you want to do. There’s different ways to play this mining game. Let me show you one other thing. We can either take two loans but if you’re gonna use these for staking into other people’s machines, you might as well directly use these Camellia because we can stake Camellia into other people’s mining machines.

Staking to Other Mining Machines

To see how that looks, let’s go to mining Camellia and you see everyone’s mining machines. I label my mining machines like right here tester3, tester2, and tester1. I don’t wanna stake to my own mining machines because I’ll just be diluting my own rewards, so it’s not really worth it. It’s more worthwhile to find the higher quality seeds for one and of course i want there to be enough staking slots so that it’s not already too diluted.

I notice that there are some good B seeds here and I’ll just choose this one here it has two slots. You can stake to this one and you can just select one of your Camellia seeds. And so instead of taking out two different loans using both the seeds, you can use them to stake. They’re worth a thousand TEA each. But you no longer have to stake with a 1000T. You can use a Camellia seed for a staking slot so it’s actually a really good deal.

There’s different strategies you can use and part of the fun of this competition is learning different strategies that work. Because we’re gonna have multiple epochs and each epoch will have their own set of rewards. As you participate in more epochs, you’ll get a chance to refine your techniques.