How To Mint and Stake Index Pool Tokens
By: Indexed Finance
Tags: Defi, Ethereum

10 days ago we announced the beta for Indexed Finance. Staking for NDX, the governance token of Indexed Finance, will begin tomorrow (Monday, December 28).

This round of staking will include DEFI5 and the LP token for its Uniswap Pair with ETH. Each pool will distribute 125,000 NDX over 10 days.

This is 10% of the 2.5 million NDX which have been reserved for liquidity mining. We are distributing 10% over a short duration so that we can gather feedback and iterate on the user interface before distributing the remaining 2.25 million NDX.

This post will explain how to mint LP tokens for index pools and how to participate in staking. If you’re looking for an in-depth explanation of how the pools work, you can check out the documentation here.

You can see the governance proposal to begin staking here, where you can also execute the proposal once it’s ready.

How To Mint Pool Tokens

Connect Your Wallet

Click the wallet icon on the top right of the page and then select your web3 provider. This should open a prompt with your wallet to connect to the website.

Select Index Pool

On the home page of Indexed Finance there is a list of index pools. If you click on one of them, it will highlight the pool and show some metadata about it as well as a pie-chart showing its composition.

Home page of indexed.finance

If you click on the pool again, you will arrive at its main interface. On the right side of this page there are tabs for each of the primary actions for the pool. Click on “Mint” to open the token minting interface.

There are three ways to mint LP tokens for an index pool. The primary two methods come from Balancer, as these pools are a fork of the Balancer pool. The third uses an experimental contract which routes trades through Uniswap before minting pool tokens.

Mint With All Tokens

You can join an index pool by providing each of the underlying tokens held by the pool in amounts proportional to the number of pool tokens you are minting: e.g. to mint 10 LP tokens when the pool has 100, you would need to provide 10% of the balance for each underlying token in the pool.

To do this, simply type the number of pool tokens you wish to mint in the input at the top of the form, approve the pool to spend each token amount calculated, and click the Mint button.

This method is generally optimal if you wish to mint a large amount of tokens, as it incurs no fees from the pool; however, it will require you to approve the pool for each underlying token, so it will take longer and cost more gas.

Mint With Single Token

You can also join an index pool by providing one of the underlying tokens in the pool. This method essentially prices the input tokens as if you were swapping them for each other token in the pool and then minting with all tokens. As a result, you will be charged swap fees and if you mint a large amount of pool tokens you may receive a poor price.

To use this method, select a single token in the form. You can then input either the number of tokens you wish to provide or the number of pool tokens you wish to receive.

Single-token mint interface

Now approve the pool to mint the tokens and click the Mint button.

Mint With Uniswap

The third option uses an experimental contract based on the Uniswap router. To use this method, select “Mint With Uniswap” at the bottom left of the minting form.

The interface allows you to select an input token (or ETH) which is not one of the pool’s underlying tokens and the amount of pool tokens you wish to mint. The app will determine whether it is cheaper to mint with one of the pool’s underlying tokens or all of them, and then find the best price on Uniswap for trading your input to the pool’s underlying tokens. Once it determines how to execute the mint, it will ask you to approve the minting contract to spend the input token (if you’re not using Ether) and then prompt you to mint the tokens.

Uniswap minter interface

How To Stake Pool Tokens

Once staking begins, you will be able to stake the LP tokens for DEFI5 or the LP tokens for the Uniswap pair DEFI5-ETH.

When you have some DEFI5 or DEFI5-ETH LP tokens, navigate to the “Stake” tab. Once liquidity mining has started, you should see something like this:

Staking page for Rinkeby deployment of Indexed Finance. These do not represent real staking pools or indices.

Select the rewards pool you wish to join to navigate to its staking interface.

Staking interface for a Rinkeby deployment of an index pool. Does not represent a real staking pool.

Here you can input the amount of tokens you wish to stake, approve the rewards pool to spend them and stake your LP tokens. Once you have staked some tokens, the top of the page will display the amount of NDX you’ve earned and the rate at which you’re earning them.

Conclusion

Happy staking!