How Citadel Can Improve Staking Experience
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Staking, Crypto, Pos, Citadel

About Citadel

Citadel.one is a non-custodial Proof-of-Stake platform for the management and storage of crypto assets. Users can create public addresses for all supported networks with one seed phrase, connect their Ledger or Trezor device, or import an address generated by another wallet. The analytical dashboard provides relevant information on wallets’ balances and networks’ main metrics. One of the main functions of the Citadel.one platform is participation in the PoS consensus — users can stake and delegate their assets, claim rewards, and follow the latest network proposals in the voting tab.

Citadel.one offers its users instant cryptocurrency exchange services that allow fast and secure crypto assets swap, and it is also possible to buy and sell crypto with a credit or debit card. Among PoS platforms Citadel.one supports Cosmos ($ATOM), ICON ($ICX), IOST, Orbs, and Tezos ($XTZ). For our user’s convenience we also support Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Tether ($USDT). Mobile and desktop versions, new networks, including Polkadot and Ontology, are scheduled for the upcoming updates.

1. One seed

Any person holding multiple crypto-assets knows how tiresome and unnecessary complex it is to use multiple wallets for different currencies. They should all be downloaded and updated; each of them has a different password, private key, mnemonic phrase. And it is a user’s responsibility to keep his/her private keys safe, and it could become a hassle to keep track of them. There are different options for safekeeping: writing them down, keeping them on a secure flash drive, using hard wallet or merely keeping all assets on one or multiple exchanges (which generates a whole lot of other problems). Personally, I have an envelope full of mnemonic phrases for different assets’ native wallets, which I consider the most secure way of safekeeping, even though it is quite inconvenient. Such an obvious flaw makes the user experience worse, and it led us to the implementation of One seed. A user only has to remember two passwords and safe keep one mnemonic phrase.

Citadel offers users to create platform-native wallets for all supported networks with one seed phrase. If a user wants to create multiple wallets, they all can be managed with only one password. The hierarchical deterministic key generation is used to derive a theoretically infinite number of cryptographic secrets from a single master seed. In this way, users’ private keys can be determined and intrinsically “stored” in a single master seed. Citadel uses a standard called BIP39 for the generation and interpretation of the master seed.

2. Smoothen out UI/UX across the networks

Most of the cryptocurrencies holders have probably met new terminology when adding an asset to their portfolio, even though they could already have some experience with crypto behind their backs. There are no set standards or rules in the industry about terminology used for describing actions or transaction types, and a lot of projects create new terms to stand out from others. In Citadel, we are trying to standardize the semantics, making interactions with the platform as easy as possible. The same goes for network metrics. By using universal terms, we are making it easier for users to understand and compare networks. When we add new assets to the platform, all their terminology will be aligned to prevent confusion or ambiguity.

3. Dashboard

Citadel offers at users’ disposal a built-in dashboard with features such as portfolio overview, rewards history, transaction history, and status tracking. Users can choose if they want to analyze one of their wallets or all of them. Using the public key, users can add wallets they don’t own to have access to an analytical dashboard without the ability to manage the assets.

On the asset’s overall analytics tab, users get up-to-date information on the essential network metrics: Yield %, Market cap, Circulating supply, Staking rate, Unbonding period (composition of metrics differ a little from network to network).

Rewards charts help users to keep track of exactly how much tokens they claimed and when.

4. Staking interface