CoinDesk reported:
Instead, staking offered high returns (also paid in HEX) simply for locking up a holders’ HEX for a long period of time. After all, for the first years of its existence, HEX didn’t even have its own chain to secure, so “staking” was a non-sequitur. Instead, as the SEC spells out, “staking” incentives were primarily intended to keep HEX tokens off the market. That is, like most purported “features” of HEX, it was meant to manipulate the token’s price higher – something Heart publicly discussed – rather than to actually accomplish anything technically useful or necessary.