How It Works

A partner pool is an independent ERC-4626 liquid staking vault. Stakers deposit native XDC and receive the pool's share token; the share price (NAV) grows as the pool's masternodes earn validator rewards. The only economic difference from the flagship PrimeStakedXDC_V3 vault is a 15% protocol fee that is skimmed from rewards before they reach stakers.

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The 15% protocol fee

Parameter	Value
PLATFORM_FEE_BPS	1500 (15%)
PLATFORM_FEE_RECIPIENT	0x1658b14Cb483B96E7e10227fF00f438858089127 (PrimeStaking treasury)

Both are compile-time constants — not constructor arguments. That is deliberate: it means every genuine partner vault compiles to identical runtime bytecode, which is what lets the PartnerVaultRegistry verify a pool by its codehash. Changing the fee or recipient would require a recompile and a fresh allow-list entry, so a partner can't quietly run a 0%-fee fork and still get listed.

The fee applies only to rewards (yield), never to principal:

• Staker deposits and returned masternode principal are not taxed.

• Only the growth of managed assets above the tracked NAV — i.e. validator rewards — is subject to the 15%.

Path-independent fee chokepoint

The fee is not charged on a single "rewards in" function that a partner could route around. Instead, every balance-changing operation reconciles through one internal chokepoint (_syncTrackedAssetsExcludingInflow). Whenever that reconciliation detects that the pool's assets have grown beyond the tracked NAV (excluding deposits and principal returns), it:

1. Computes the surplus (the yield),

2. Skims 15% of it to the PrimeStaking treasury, and

3. Credits the remaining 85% to stakers via NAV appreciation.

validator rewards arrive  ─►  reconcile assets  ─►  surplus detected
                                                        │
                                   ┌────────────────────┴───────────────────┐
                                   ▼                                         ▼
                       15% skimmed to PrimeStaking            85% credited to stakers (NAV ↑)

Because of this design the fee is unavoidable: force-sending XDC (selfdestruct / direct transfer), routing rewards around the receive() path, or delivering yield through a masternode-resignation are all taxed identically on the next reconciliation. The recipient is a protocol-controlled address that always accepts native XDC, so the skim cannot be made to revert to grief stakers.

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Who does what

Responsibility	Owner
Deploy the vault & hold admin keys	Partner
Register & run masternode operators	Partner
Cover masternode hosting / infrastructure cost	Partner
Set buffer, min stake, KYC, governance parameters	Partner
Vault contract design (audited flagship V3 logic)	PrimeStaking
App, UI, directory & verification badge	PrimeStaking
Receives the 15% protocol fee	PrimeStaking

PrimeStaking provides the infrastructure and the storefront; the partner runs the pool. PrimeStaking is non-custodial with respect to partner pools — it never holds a pool's keys or funds and only ever receives the on-chain protocol fee.

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What stakers experience

Identical to flagship psXDC, minus the 15% reward haircut:

• Stake native XDC via stake / depositNative, receive the pool's share token at the current exchange rate.

• NAV growth — no claim button; shares simply become worth more XDC as net (post-fee) rewards accrue.

• Withdraw — instant if the liquidity buffer covers it (withdraw / redeem), otherwise the request enters an automatic FIFO queue (withdrawWithQueue / redeemWithQueue) and is claimed once masternode payouts return. Queued requests can be cancelled before they're processed.

• Same safety rails as flagship V3: time-locked governance changes, per-report and daily validator-loss caps, pausable, reentrancy-guarded, and role-separated operations.

→ Deploy & List a Pool → Registry & Verification → Smart Contract Reference