What is aPAD?

aPAD represents your share in the staking pool. When initially staked you contribute a certain amount of PADs to the pool, changing its size and receive a certain amount of aPAD to represent your current share of the pool.

As the pool grows with more PADs getting staked and more PADs transferred to the staking contract by us monthly to reward stakers, your share stays the same but it is worth more PAD than before because there are now more PADs in the pool.

When you unstake, aPADs are burnt and you forego your share of the pool but get awarded the PADs you are owed, changing the proportion of the PADs to aPADs in the pool.

As the result the PADs you get is the equivalent of what it costs to purchase the same share of the pool at that time. So, if let's say you staked 100 PADs to get 50 aPADs, and after some time you unstake to receive 150 PADs, while burning 50 aPADs, it will now cost 150 PADs, instead of the 100 PADs to get the same amount of aPADs as before.

This is why when you unstake and then restake and there were no changes to the pool size, you will need to spend the same amount of PADs you received to gain the same allocation as before (because there are more PADs in the pool and it takes more PADs to get the same share size).

To put it simply, to increase your aPAD (and with it the allocation) you need to stake more PAD.