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My Defi adventure 6: Troubleshoot FTM undelegation on Fantom

Why stake on Fantom?

The incentive of staking FTM by delegating to a validator on the network is for both staking reward (about 13%) and the usage of minted sFTM (the proof token for staking) as collateral to borrow fUSD. We can subsequently swap it for other synths eg. wFTM.
[Do note that fUSD is NOT pegged to USD, so it is often valued less than USD1 when you try swapping it for other stablecoins like fUSDT on Fantom.]

What is crypto staking? [External link]

https://pwawallet.fantom.network/#/dashboard [External link]

I find that the entire interface of PWA wallet is not intuitive at all. I was kind lost after connecting my wallet, and had to read a walkthrough before I managed to stake and finally get some fUSD. The reward for borrowing fUSD was pathetic, by the way.

For sFTM minted, you will be able to find it under Collateral Positions below and fUSD you will find it under Synths Positions on the fMint page.


The real hassle came when I wanted to reverse everything and undelegate my share of FTM tokens. I have wasted about 7 FTM in fees while trying to do so.

Speaking of thinking backwards, I have ruefully failed because I had assumed that a task reversal should be no-brainer. How wrong!


fUSD minting fee

The main culprit was my minting cost of 0.5 fUSD, which has a trailing decimal figures that was hidden on the interface. Minting cost (0.5%) will be added to the total sum of fUSD borrowed.

The biggest implication for undelegation is - if I do not repay fUSD in FULL amount, I cannot unlock the FULL amount of sFTM. 

When I don't have the FULL amount of unlocked sFTM, I will just keep seeing this darn alert "Can't repay sFTM, not enough unlocked sFTM". As such, the repay sFTM button will not appear. (Annoyingly, there is no such rule for partial repayment in the system.)

Initially I didn't know what went wrong. I have swapped some FTM for an exact 0.5 fUSD to make up the correct amount of fUSD for repayment (or so I thought) and proceeded to repay. Thereafter, I unlocked my sFTM which showed up on the Fantom wallet interface as a nice round figure of 500 sFTM. I went to the staking page and got slapped with the alerts above. I couldn't repay any sFTM to undelegate.

Terrible user interface

Perplexed, I went back a step at the sFTM collateral page, thinking that I might have skipped doing something (yeah, stupidly I locked it up again). At that point I suddenly found something's amiss because my Synths Positions of fUSD was still there. So I clicked in and saw that the C-ratio was strange, not reflecting the "clean" >5000% (which should have been the case when a full repayment has been made).

I manually added all these tokens into my Metamask for them to show up. That was when I noticed that sFTM was showing 499.9xxx instead of 500 (my actual owed amount).

So I proceeded to swap some FTM to wFTM in order to use the fUNI pool to swap for a bit more fUSD.

Now I can repay the balance of 0.0xxxx fUSD to... finally... unlock my FULL amount of sFTM. AFter repayment of all the fUSD, it will no longer appear under my Synths Positions tab. As in the screenshot above, it will show Synths Position as 0.

If you are still with me to this part of the story, good job...

In a nutshell, I have completely forgotten that crypto counts up to 18 decimal places!

The Undelegation

As though by magic, the "Repay sFTM" button now appeared.

And so did the "Undelegate" button thereafter - in glorious bright orange as though to celebrate my overcoming.

After panicking and perspiring through the whole repay-unlock-repay-undelegate episode, I have ended up wasting more FTM than earning from the staking. This is because each of these repayment and unlocking steps has 3 confirmation sub steps requiring gas fee.

Ugh. Oh wait. 

There's still one last blast of nasty surprise for me - the unstaked FTM can only be withdrawn after a 7 days period. 

Wtf. Really.


I shall take this as a lesson learnt and an experiment done on native FTM staking. Hopefully stakers who are facing the same issues can find resolution through my grousing here.


TLTR; Finding Nemo

  • You need to repay ALL minted fUSD (up to all its decimal places) in order to unlock sFTM collateral.
  • Minting fee is part of the borrowed fUSD sum. Ensure you have excess fUSD in wallet when you make the repayment to avoid leftover trailing decimal figures not repaid.
  • Unlock all your sFTM collateral under fMint page. Ensure the figure corresponds to your initial minted amount on your staking page.
  • Go to the staking page, repay total sFTM minted, claim your rewards.
  • The "Undelegate" orange button shows up. Click on it and wait for 7 days to unlock your staked FTM. 
  • Do note that any reward during the locked period will get burnt as penalty.

My takeaways

Bits of fUSD, a couple of wFTM and of course less FTM in my wallet to spend on game.  =.=

Earning interests on Geist or SCREAM would be of so much less stress and hassle. No more official staking for me.


🤗
Thanks for reading!
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