CAT in your wallet works as CATnip.

All you have to do is keep hodling!

Ever since the introduction of CATnip, it has been the core utility-feature of the Cat Appreciation Token, CAT.

CATnip attracts the kitten-bots to come visit you for cuddles, it increases your chance of getting @catnet backup cuddles on the PAW-TRAILS and it will be required to unlock additional features to interact with your favourite kitten-bots in the future.

Up to this point, every CAT in your wallet immediately counted as CATnip.

This was very convenient and easy to grasp for everyone, but it also created some vulnerabilities. For example: By cycling CAT through multiple accounts quickly you could essentially multiply your chances of receiving cuddles by the number of accounts involved.

This was just a minor issue so far, and it hasn't actually been exploited by anyone in reality. But, moving forward, as the value of the kitten-cuddles and the PAW-TRAILS support continues to grow, as additional feature will become available, it is increasingly important to connect the CATnip functionality with a STAKING mechanism.

About two weeks ago, it became pretty clear that unlocking the native staking feature on steem-engine wouldn't be possible any time soon. I decided to go ahead with my own implementation of a pseudo-staking mechanism for the token.

Auto-Staking of CAT happens automatically!

You don't have to do anything, just hodl your CAT and it will start working as CATnip, eventually.

The usual staking mechanisms for tokens involve actively locking up your funds, "staking" them, to immediately receive the token's intrinsic benefits while in turn giving up access to your liquidity. We're on STEEM here, so I think you probably have a pretty good idea of how that works.

The auto-staking of CAT works by approaching the issue "in reverse".

Instead of a delay to power-down, your CAT tokens power-up on a delay. This delay creates a similar protection against token-cycling and also disincentivizes quick pump'n'dumping and margin-trading of the tokens almost as well.

Auto-staking, as the name suggests, will not require any action from you, the token holder. The delays are always applied automatically while you also retain full control of the liquidity of all your tokens.

Of course there's a little drawback, too. When you get new CAT it will take a while before you get to enjoy it's full benefits. Every CAT in your wallet will take 7 days before it starts spreading the sweet scent of CATnip on the blockchain. At first the scent will be weak, but after hodling your CAT for at least 30 days, it will have unfolded its full CATnip potential.

How much CATnip do YOU have?

Not using the native steem-engine feature unfortunately also means we don't currently have any frontend that would display staked CATnip balances for CAT.

I'm considering to set-up a discord-bot that you could ask for your CATnip balance and as I'll start working on the CALL-A-KITTEN implementation soon, I'll probably also include an on-chain comment service for balance checks, too. But until that's ready and tested, you'll probably have to guesstimate?!

Some examples:

• Let's say, you received your first 200 CAT two weeks ago. After 7 days they started auto-staking as CATnip, but not 1:1 immediately, that will take another 23 days. The staking happens linearly on a daily basis, so those 200 CAT after staking for 7 days will count as 7:23 - that's a bit over 30% - resulting in 61 CATnip.
• Or maybe you've held 1000 CAT for over a month and it's all CATnip now, but you just decided to put half of it on the market. No idea why you would do that, but the un-staking of CATnip happened immediately. You're down to 500 right away.
• To make things a bit more complicated, let's say you had those 1000 CATnip three weeks ago, but sold half of your CAT back then, and then you bought back 200 CAT a week later. The un-staking happened immediately, you were left with 500 CATnip right then and there, your 200 new CAT are only two weeks old, so they only count as 61 CATnip right now. That makes your active total CATnip 561.

activeStake = oldStake + ( newStake * ( ( newStakeAge - 7 ) / 23 ) )

It might sound a bit complicated, and that's ok, all you have to remember is to keep hodling those CAT and your wallet garden will soon be lush and overgrown with deliciously smelling CATnip.

I'll try to be quick with implementing a way for you to conveniently check your CATnip balance without having to keep track of transaction dates and do the math yourself.

now go and cuddle some kittens!

meow!