📄ether.fan Litepaper

The NFT that pays you

ether.fan - the NFT that pays you

Summary

ether.fan is a fun way to stake your ETH and mint a fan NFT that you can use to earn membership points and get boosted staking rewards. In addition, your fan NFT lets you participate in exclusive events and show off your commitment to Ethereum decentralization.

When you stake ETH via ether.fan you mint a fan NFT. The fan attributes consist of:

• Traits: provably rare and randomly assigned at time of minting

• Flair: deterministic and proportional to the amount of ETH staked

• Membership tier: starting at Bronze, increasing over time resulting in boosted staking rewards

The fan NFT represents your staked ETH and accrues staking rewards automatically. You can add to your stake or withdraw your ETH at any time.

All ETH staked via ether.fan is allocated to solo node operators who are using DVT and running physical nodes in diverse geographic regions.

The fan NFT participates in a membership loyalty rewards program that boosts your share of staking rewards and protocol revenue the longer you stake.

Staking is done via the ether.fi non-custodial staking protocol and all revenue from the protocol goes back to stakers and solo node operators to subsidize the cost of staking hardware, with a small share to feed the ether.fi interns.

Minting a Fan

When you deposit ETH (minimum 0.1 ETH) via ether.fan the ETH is staked using ether.fi and allocated to solo node operators in diverse geographic regions. As part of your deposit you mint a fan NFT that represents your staked ETH. The fan continues to accrue staking rewards automatically over time.

Every new deposit mints a new fan, and you can hold as many fans as you like in your wallet. Think of them like trading cards, and eventually you will be able to participate in a variety of games and activities with your fan set.

You can use your fan NFT as a PFP to show your support for Ethereum and decentralization.

The fan NFT attributes consist of 3 components: traits, flair, and membership tier. See below for a brief explanation of how these work.

Traits

Traits are the unique properties of your fan character such as eyes, hair, and skin as well as intangible traits like charisma, strength and agility. Each trait has different levels of rarity and together they give your character its unique personality. Traits are determined randomly at minting time. Each fan has an overall rarity score that takes into account the rarity of the individual traits.

For more detail please see the traits section below.

Flair

The flair of your character depends deterministically on the amount of ETH that it contains. As you stake more your flair updates dynamically to represents the total amount of ETH staked.

For more detail please see the flair section below.

Membership tier

The membership tier of your fan depends mostly on how long you've been staking. The longer you stake the higher your membership tier and the greater your share of staking rewards and protocol revenue. Every fan initially starts at the Bronze membership tier and over time progresses up to Platinum.

For more detail please see the membership section below.

Upgrading a Fan

You can deposit more ETH (minimum 0.1 ETH) to upgrade a fan NFT at any time. Every time you upgrade you will get updated flair and a random boost to your intangible attributes (for example +1 charisma.)

There are some restrictions when it comes to upgrading. You can only increase the ETH staked in your fan by a maximum of 20% per month without impacting your membership tier. If you increase the ETH staked by more than 20% it will decrease your membership tier.

Why is this restriction in place? Because otherwise someone would be able to deposit 0.1 ETH, wait until the fan gets to the Platinum membership tier and then deposit 100,000 ETH - this would effectively allow them to monopolize boosted staking rewards in the membership program.

The mechanism for upgrading fans is shown below:

// - topUpAmount: the amount of ETH for the top-up to the fan
// - currentDepositAmount: the amount of ETH deposit currently in the fan
let maxTopUpAmount = 20% * currentDepositAmount;
let topUpBeyoundLimit = topUpAmount - maxTopUpAmount;
if (topUpBeyoundLimit > 0) {
  // If a fan top-ups more than 20%, 
  // the tier points get diluted proportional to the excess top-up amount.
  let newTierPoints = (topUpAmount * tierPoints[user]) / (currentDepositAmount + topUpBeyoundLimit);
  updateTier(newTierPoints);
}

If you want to significantly boost your ETH staked via ether.fan the best approach is to simply mint a new fan. Over time as new ether.fan features are released it will be valuable to have multiple fan NFTs to participate in a variety of games and activities.

Burning a Fan

You can withdraw some or all of the ETH in your fan at any time, but when you withdraw ETH you will be bumped down at least one membership tier.

If you want to withdraw more than 50% of the max amount of ETH this fan has ever contained, you will need to burn the fan NFT and get all your ETH back.

The withdrawal mechanism is shown below:

// - currentTier: the current tier of the fan
// - curTierPoints: the current tier points of the fan
// - withdrawalAmount: the amount of ETH for the withdrawal from the fan
// - currentDepositAmount: the amount of ETH deposit currently in the fan

// 1. point deduction if we kick back to start of previous tier
let prevTier = (currentTier > 0) ? currentTier - 1 : 0;
let degradeTierPenalty = curTierPoints - requiredTierPoints[prevTier];

// 2. point deduction if scaled proportional to withdrawal amount
let ratio = withdrawalAmount / currentDepositAmount;
let scaledTierPointsPenalty = ratio * curTierPoints;

// 3. apply the penalty as the max of them
let penalty = max(degradeTierPenalty, scaledTierPointsPenalty);
let newTierPoints = tierPoints[user] - penalty;
updateTier(newTierPoints);

Traits

Traits are determined randomly at the time of minting and give your fan a unique personality and rarity.

Gender (2 variants)

Skin (5 variants)

Eyes (10 variants)

Hair (10 variants)

Shirt (10 variants)

Staff (10 variants)

Charisma (0-10)

Strength (0-10)

Agility (0-10)

Table of traits, rarity levels

Flair

Flair is deterministic based on the amount of ETH staked

0.1 ETH

0.5 ETH

1 ETH

3 ETH

10 ETH

30 ETH

100 ETH

300 ETH

1000 ETH

For example: if someone has 135 ETH => 100 ETH flair, 30 ETH flair, 5 ETH flair

Membership

Membership program is a loyalty rewards system. The longer you stake, the higher a share of rewards you get. The longer the fan has been around the higher its membership tier. Each fan earns 1 tier point every hour. The accrued tier points of the NFT determines its membership tier (See the below table).

Membership tiers, time to upgrade, relative rewards allocation. Table

Bronze

Silver

Gold

Platinum

Tier	Required Tier Points
Bronze	0
Silver	28 * 24 = 672
Gold	3 * 28 * 24 = 2016
Platinum	7 * 28 * 24 = 4704

Formula for rewards for a given membership tier for a period.

Operation Solo Staker

Ethereum nodes are too centralized and concentrated

All ETH deployed via ether.fan goes to solo stakers

The goal of OSS is to help decentralize Ethereum

First Ethereum node in Guatamala

Link to OSS page

Wen Token

No token, only ETH.

Wen Utility

There are many perks of being an ether.fan.

Access to exclusive events at all major Ethereum conferences.

Governance role in ether.fi DAO in the future.

Fees

Free to mint for Early Adopter Pool depositors, then 0.05 ETH to mint

Staking more is free, but upgrading costs 0.05 ETH

Burning costs 0.05 ETH

All fees go back to stakers and node operators and to buy ramen for ether.fi interns.

Why charge fees? to keep program sustainable, and return more revenue to solo stakers so they can afford to run distributed nodes.