Recent Staking Updates

In the April 13 announcement, Binance clarified that no action will be needed for Tezos holders to start earning rewards. Additionally, Binance.US noted that the exchange already supports major Tezos trading pairs like XTZ/USD and XTZ/BUSD on Binance.US app, website and API. Similar to already-supported staking coins on Binance.US, the exchange will be taking hourly snapshots of user’s XTZ balances to calculate rewards. While rewards will be calculated daily, distributions will take place on a monthly basis before the 20th day of each month. As such, XTZ’s first distribution will take place in May 2020, Binance.US explained.

Bitcoin Association Switzerland (BAS), together with the involved companies, announces yet another way to use Bitcoin: tzBTC, a token on the Tezos blockchain backed 1–1 by Bitcoin. With Bitcoin being the de facto reserve-currency of cryptocurrencies, tzBTC is one of the first examples of tokenization on Tezos. It enables the use of the Tezos blockchain features with Bitcoin. The Tezos community’s values are to a certain degree similar to most Bitcoiner’s values. Nic Carter’s (a respected researcher and investor in the Bitcoin community) assessment of the Tezos community is that it has strong shared values, arguably as strong as Bitcoin’s.. The fact that the Tezos Foundation continues to be one of the largest holders of Bitcoin reinforces this. All this makes Tezos a natural choice as the first public blockchain for a Bitcoin-backed token from BAS.

The Algorand Foundation has earmarked 250 million ALGO tokens from its 2.5 billion ALGO treasury to help fund projects building on the Algorand blockchain. The foundation will oversee the distribution of this grant money, worth $50 million at the time, over the next two to four years. The announcement of the new grants program also revealed the first three recipients — Bloq, Pure Stake AlgoSigner, and Reach — who each have received six million ALGOs.

Why it matters:

Algorand unlocked the ability to create new tokens and build applications last November, which is to say the current ecosystem is relatively barren. While it has had a few positive developments as of late, now is the time for the Algorand Foundation to start funding specific efforts that could lead to an increase in on-chain activity. This new grants program is more aggressive than the foundation’s first effort to spur ecosystem development. The organization’s first program offered rewards from 5,000 to 250,000 ALGOS depending on the project, a small fraction of the six million given to the new grantees. In total, the Algorand Foundation is dedicating 10% of its original 2.5 million ALGO treasury through this latest program.

Coinbase Custody teams up with Bison Trails to offer Polkadot staking to clients. Coinbase Custody has partnered with infrastructure provider Bison Trails to give clients the ability to start staking Polkadot’s DOT tokens once the protocol goes live. The news comes a few months after Coinbase’s custody arm launched support for DOTs, allowing investors to claim their token allocations from Polkadot’s previous funding rounds.

Why it matters:

This Coinbase and Bison Trails partnership could extend beyond the Polkadot integration, according to CoinDesk. While staking is a critical part of Coinbase’s services, it’s not their core product, and the exchange might be better off outsourcing validator management to staking-centric companies like Bison Trails, especially for networks with more complex validator requirements. A few months ago, it looked like exchanges would make smaller staking providers obsolete. But this newfound partnership might indicate there’s a long-term role for these companies in the market. Polkadot is still in a pre-launch stage and has plans to roll out its mainnet in phases. The first versions of Polkadot will have limited functionality and feature a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism instead of its proposed Nominated Proof of Stake (PoS). Investors should not expect network staking (and the potential for yield) to arrive until after the project’s security audits are complete. While there is no timeline for any of these product releases, DOT holders can find solace in the networks lofty initial inflation rate (10%) and annual staking yield (~20% but depends on the number of tokens actively staking).

ICON Foundation released an article on LFT2 Consensus Algorithm

LFT2 is based on the PBFT consensus model, with a proprietary algorithm to emerge commit messages into a 2-step consensus process. This alleviates communication overhead and complexity of PBFT’s 3-step consensus process, leading to a lightweight and highly performant blockchain consensus algorithm. Additionally, LFT2 guarantees safety and liveness even under a simplified scheme, by incorporating a Candidate/Commit Block mechanism to resolve any potential security issues that could be raised in a partially synchronous network. In short, LFT2 is a revolutionized PBFT implementation that enjoys the same benefits with reduced complexity and enhanced performance in network latency, block confirmation, and transaction throughput. LFT2 has recently been audited by KAIST, one of the leading research universities in South Korea [audit report]. For more information, please check the [LFT2 whitepaper].

Block.one, the firm that launched the EOS blockchain, has announced plans to start putting part of its 100 million EOS holdings to use next month by actively staking and voting on the network. Up until this point, the company has remained neutral regarding which network participants get voted into the coveted top 21 block producers, who earn the lion’s share of inflation rewards. The announcement comes a few months after Block.one signaled interest in voting for upgrade proposals as part of EOS’s on-chain governance system.

Why it matters:

Block.one is making a concerted effort to become more actively engaged with EOS developments. While not necessarily a bad thing, its massive token holdings could enable the company to significantly influence the block producer rankings and direction of upgrade proposals. The move will also allow Block.one to start claiming a percentage of block rewards (some block producers payout a portion of their rewards to delegators) to limit the dilutive impact of network inflation. The firm did not reveal how many tokens its plans to stake. Block.one holds the rights to 100 million EOS (~9.5% of total supply and decreasing), but only a little over 18 million have fully vested. If the company ends up staking its entire token allocation, it will hold the most voting power on the EOS network.

A Year of Data on Cosmos Staking — A look at token supply, staking participation, and account growth on the Cosmos Hub by Felix Lutsch. Felix took a look at network data and visualized how token and staking supply, reward, and issuance rate, as well as other metrics like active accounts developed on the Cosmos Hub since launch more than a year ago.

For more info and explanations, see the original article.

Bitfinex has become the latest crypto exchange to offer staking services to users, which allows customers to collect inflation rewards on their otherwise idle Proof-of-Stake (PoS) assets. The exchange’s new Staking Rewards Program currently features returns on Cosmos, V.Systems, and EOS. It also supports Tezos. But since it takes multiple cycles for staked XTZ to start earning rewards, Bitfinex users won’t receive their first Tezos payouts until May 11.

Why it matters:

Staking is becoming a must-add service for exchanges to keep up with the competition. Several other major exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, have been offering staking services to retail users for months. The push to add staking should also start to extend to crypto custodians and possibly funds that manage assets on behalf of their customers. One consequence of major exchanges and custodians adopting staking services is the increased concentration of staked assets and, in some cases, voting power. Since exchanges make staking stupid simple, this trend should continue unabated in the short to medium-term. But this concentration of voting power due to convenience could be offset by a viable voting solution for users that delegate assets through an exchange.

Daily cosmos outpost (April, 17) — Inflation 7.0% Bonded 72.1%

Enigma Community Update: April 10, 2020 — this post is their 6th installment of Enigma’s weekly community updates, which they created in order to be as transparent and collaborative as possible. Read about their recent testnet fix and initializing cosmwasm-sgx-vm.

Solana Partners with Terra to Build a Low-Latency Token Bridge, Bringing Stablecoins To The Solana Ecosystem

Together they’re building a new high-speed token bridge that facilitates the transfer of Terra stablecoins into Solana’s dapp ecosystem. Terra’s tokens will be the first stablecoins on the Solana network. By bringing stablecoins onto their network, they aim to dramatically expand the design space for developers, opening the door to novel applications that require price-stable payments. Similarly, and by the same token, they hope to support Terra’s expansion by creating a seamless gateway to the developer community.

{Solana Mainnet Beta & Binance}

Solana launched its Mainnet Beta network in conjunction with a small token auction facilitated through CoinList. This is an evolution of what was the Soft Launch Period (SLP) network and is currently an “idling mainnet”.

The SLP network started as a closed network of selected validators. It was then opened to a larger group. It’s this larger group that’s now supporting the Mainnet Beta network. You can check it out on the new Staking Facilities explorer Solana Beach.

Furthermore, Solana’s token SOL got listed on Binance and their research team posted a comprehensive overview of the project.

{Game of Zones}

The Cosmos ecosystem is making great strides towards realizing the interchain vision. Details about “Game of Zones”, the successor of the mother of all incentivized testnets “Game of Stakes”, were recently announced. Registration for the 3-week long event that aims to stress test the interoperability protocol IBC will end Apr 25 and the competition will begin May 1. Find more information here.

{Ethereum Staking User Study & Roadmap}

Aqeel Mohammad published the results of his comprehensive ETH 2.0 Staking and Validator UX study. A couple of survey results stood out in contrast to the way validators view staking network operations in today’s major staking networks. For example, the majority of respondents said they’d stake using their personal computer. It was also interesting to see that the second most important consideration when choosing a staking/validator client was usability, edging out stability, as #2 behind security.

Ethereum appears close to phase 0 of the transition to Proof of Stake. A recent update by Prysmatic Labs mentions a multi-client testnet that will launch this month, with a mainnet rollout of the beacon chain to follow potentially this summer. Vitalik also shared his comprehensive take on a roadmap covering the different core protocol initiatives in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Other Network Updates

{Centrifuge}

A soft-launch of the Substrate-based Centrifuge chain took place last week. They also had CEO Lukas Vogelsang on the Chorus One Podcast to explain Centrifuge’s vision of an open supply chain financing platform.

{Tezos}

A new upgrade (Protocol 007) bringing meta transactions, programmable staking, and privacy features through Sapling circuit integration (used in Zcash) to Tezos is slated for summer 2020.

{NEAR}

NEAR continues to be the project with some of the best educational content. Make sure to check out the reverse whiteboard session in which Alex Skidanov is interviewed by Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation comparing the NEAR design to Eth2.0.

{Celo}

The Celo Foundation gave out $700k in grants to 13 startups, with plans to spend up to $15.7m on community funding in 2020.

{Coda}

Testnet 3.2 (“Bugspray”) will launch with 200 participants on April 20.

{Tezos}

Lunacrush has conducted a social-economic analysis of Tezos TezCast releases the Tezos Podcast Episode 5 TzKT make a Tezos explorer update Tezos is working on two CBDC application proposals Tezos Southeast Asia and ACCA Sign MoU to Explore Blockchain Potential in Accounting Tezos: Announcing Tokenized Bitcoin tzBTC and The TezEdge P2P Explorer DeFi Expansion 2020 — ‘Big Firm’ Chicago Alliance; Tezos & TRON & Tether DeFi

{ICON}

Check out the latest P-Rep community meeting Samsung Securities will be involved in issuance and verification of MyID ICON Newsletter #13 has been published ICON (ICX) is now implemented in Exodus wallet Corey Crypto held a discussion with Min Kim

{EOS}

{Cosmos}

Meet Dynamic #IBC (dIBC) by @agoric Cyber has finished the genesis ceremony for euler-6 Deab Tribble Publishes a Material: The Road to Dynamic IBC Announcing Lunie’s Latest Official Mainnet Staking Integration Cosmos to participate with Agoric & Band Protocol DeFi enabled Ethereum bridge for Cosmos

{IOST}