KyberDAO staking contracts with instant reward claims
When KyberDAO launched its staking and governance model, rewards reached stakers only after pool operators ran them out by hand, a manual step that could leave a staker waiting up to 14 days. Most staked KNC also ran through centralized intermediaries, which cut against the point of an on-chain DAO.
Protofire built a set of proxy smart contracts and a non-custodial delegation service, meaning stakers kept their own KNC, so any token holder could become a pool operator, and any staker could delegate votes and claim rewards directly from the contract. The result removed the manual distribution step: stakers claimed rewards instantly, on demand.
The pool-master proxy contract Protofire built is public, and third parties, including Stake Capital, later built staking products on top of it.
“The contracts were trustless, meaning a staker did not have to rely on any operator acting honestly to get paid.”
Why KyberDAO staking rewards depended on manual pool operators
KyberDAO let KNC holders stake, vote on proposals, and earn a share of protocol fees. In practice, most holders did not stake directly. They delegated to pool operators, who voted on their behalf and then distributed the reward share back to each staker. That last step was manual.
An operator had to calculate each staker's cut and push the rewards out, so payouts lagged and a staker could wait to receive what they had already earned.
During a joint discovery phase with the Kyber Network team, Protofire mapped the staking and governance flows and traced the delay to where custody and distribution sat. Most staked KNC ran through centralized intermediaries that held the tokens and controlled when rewards went out, which undercut the decentralization KyberDAO was built to deliver.
How Protofire built proxy contracts for KyberDAO staking
Protofire built a proxy smart contract layer that sat between stakers, pool operators, and the KyberDAO staking contracts, and moved the reward logic on-chain. The contracts were trustless, meaning a staker did not have to rely on any operator acting honestly to get paid. Two roles fell out of the design.
Any token holder could become a pool operator and stake or vote through the contract. Any holder could delegate their governance weight to an operator and still earn their reward share, while keeping custody of their KNC.
The change that stakers felt was reward distribution. Instead of an operator computing and pushing out rewards on a manual cycle, the proxy contract calculated each staker's share on-chain and let them claim it themselves, at any time. That removed the manual wait: a staker no longer depended on an operator choosing to pay out.
Protofire also tuned the claim logic to keep gas costs down, so claiming small reward amounts stayed economical for stakers and operators alike.
Because the contract was non-custodial and open, it worked as shared infrastructure rather than a one-off. Community initiatives such as the KyberDAO Community Pool used it to let holders delegate to community representatives, and Stake Capital built its StakeDAO product on top of Protofire's contracts, integrating KyberDAO staking into a broader revenue-sharing offering.
Stake Capital reported StakeDAO drawing more than $50M in TVL after launch, a figure driven by StakeDAO's own product and users rather than by Protofire.
Results
Proof pack
The core contract is public: kyber-pool-master-proxy-contract is Protofire's Solidity proxy for KyberDAO pool masters, authored in the Protofire GitHub org, not a fork. Protofire also published kyber-subgraph, a subgraph indexing the Kyber Network contracts.
The engagement was written up in Protofire's account of the trustless delegation solution for KyberDAO.