So real quick, DOT is one of those coins you need a ton of coins to stake it normally. So, what most people do is they stake on exchanges to get around this. What most might not know is you can stake DOT in places like LIDO, you get a token representing your holding, and then you can basically make passive income from that by DeFi.

NOTE there is a few places other than LIDO that lets you do this. But I'm using them because I've dealt with them before.

BIG NOTE:

For some reason using a hardware wallet like Ledger I run into problems with polkadot[js]. When we go to step 1 and you download the proper stuff, just create a software wallet and load that with what you want to stake.

Note that it could've just been something on my end. But I couldn't find any evidence of that.

What you need?

What you need to do this is obviously DOT and you need some GLMR. You don't need a lot of GLMR. Just enough to cover for gas. It might be worth getting something like a few dollars. Beyond the transfer from KuCoin, for me it cost me about 3 cents USD in gas to do all this.

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Step 1:

Go to https://polkadot.lido.fi/transfers

What we are going to do here is use Moonbeam. We are basically swapping DOT for xcDOT. This is basically wrapped DOT on the Moonbeam network.

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Step 2:

From here, you

https://preview.redd.it/cscwixoehvu91.png?1323&format=png&auto=webp&s=28837e028d2e8d745a5f9d8e26acb15fe478de9d

Go to stake, then put in the amount, and press the button. If you did everything right and are on the right network. 3 will be a button. It's pretty straight forward. BTW this is one area where GLMR will be used.

NOTE: Jump to step 3 to figure out the amount. Like you can stake it and run with that. In which case IMO it is worth doing the max amount. OR you can figure out how much you need to leave behind for the staking pool. NOTE the 3 cents of gas is to include where I messed up on staking all in this step and let curve automatically equal things out.

Step 3 Curve:

Go here https://moonbeam.curve.fi/pools

What you need to do is find a proper pool. Right now it will be the first one due to rewards

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https://preview.redd.it/yuki5q32jvu91.png?1478&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb0797c462b8a80cad0179beb728380d1d7d290d

Click on it and

https://preview.redd.it/vpd53u6ajvu91.png?1220&format=png&auto=webp&s=7af97475eb5eb142a73cea496a2704ae0271158a

click deposit on the top, put in the amount, and then click deposit & stake.

You can at any time look at the withdraw/claim to see how things are going. Sadly, I don't know of anything for DOT that like Concentrator which you can earn even more rewards from beyond this point. If you do, then please let everyone know.

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Anyways, by the time everything is said and done my API% is estimated after all this to be something like 32% or so. This is to include the LDO reward. Far more than the 9-12% from Kraken.