Ever Surf is the most popular wallet among Everscale users. It has had over 10,000 installations from Google Play. The most popular type of staking via Ever Surf is Surf Stake. When using it, all you need to do is enter an amount from 100 EVER and the app will automatically choose a depool from its list and send coins there. Easy and fast!

Today, there are more than 2,000 participants and 30+ million EVER in staking.

On the one hand, it is convenient for beginners who have yet to learn about depools, but on the other, because users cannot choose a depool independently, Surf Stake is often criticized. The argument for this is that Surf Stake centralizes the network by building stakes for its own validators. Let’s figure out how it really works and whether the decentralization of Surf stakes is affected.

Surf Stake uses 17 depools:

• Five service DePools are special depools that the Surf team uses for experiments related to increasing the profitability of staking and testing new mechanics.
• Seven DePools are application commands.
• Five DePools are from Surf’s partners.

According to what principle are partners chosen? Validators are selected who have their own large stake and show uninterrupted operation with high profitability for users based on historical data.

Surf Stake strives for a balance between user security, decentralization, and convenience.

In addition to the five partner depools, another 12 will be added in 2022. What’s more, if you are a validator, you can get into Surf staking!

“If a validator has 2M EVER for the investments needed to increase the number of his own depools, and the desire to work together, send me a message and we’ll talk,” — Eugene Teslov, CPO Ever Surf

By the end of the year, the Ever Surf team will thus have only 12 of the 29 depools used in Surf stakes.

Most importantly, manual selection of validators for this type of staking is an intermediate stage. The team is already testing algorithmic selection of the best validators for staking, which relies on a large amount of data, including the “decentralization index” — the highest indicator of this index will be for the validator whose node is physically farthest from the average global location of Everscale validators.