As of right now, the reward rate is approaching 10% return. 10% is the return someone gets on a traditional financial investment, not on a highly speculative internal protocol with new code that could break the staking mechanism
For most of us retail traders, a drop to 10% simply isn’t worth it to stake. Speaking on behalf of several large retail stakers, the consensus is in general we would prefer to just undelegate and trade, especially with the token unlocks coming up which will only dilute us further
Now increasing rewards massively may sound like a ponzi but that’s simply not the case. All increasing rewards does is punish traders and reward those who are taking risk to support the network. Which, in a speculative, nascent network, is exactly how it should be. As it stands, there’s no doubt in my mind that leaving rewards this low will result in increasing staking centralization, as only large VC whales will be incentivized to stake
All in all, it’s frustrating that rewards are this low for now and just seems to me like poorly thought out design. I want to stake but starting next epoch is just wont be worth it unless a massive increase in price occurs. Even then the volatility of the asset makes it somewhat absurd thing to do: 10% is how much it fluctuates in minutes
P.S. : An example of a protocol that did it right IMO is fantom: starting with 50% return off the bat for 6 months, guaranteed, for bootstrapping purposes