This is no secret to anyone that the Proof of Stake space is growing rapidly, largely due to the fact that almost all new blockchain networks are launching with some kind of Proof of Stake Consensus. Layer 2 protocols are of no exception either.

Proof of Work is great, but inevitably due to many reasons we are facing a multi-chain future of Proof of Stake Protocols. PoS-based assets also play into a larger macro trend of yield-bearing assets and growing interest to passive income.

There are over 70 live PoS Networks today and their number is growing.

So let’s have a look at the Top 10 emerging Proof of Stake Networks according to our team:

1. Ethereum

The switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake has been on the Ethereum roadmap since 2014. Ethereum 2.0 will launch in 2020 with the Casper Proof of Stake Consensus Mechanism. There will be a smooth one-way transition where users can move to the Ethereum 2.0 PoS Chain with much better scalability, but won’t be able to move their tokens back to the old Proof of Work Chain. The shift of Ethereum to PoS is one of the key events of 2020 which will put the staking industry into the spotlight for the broader masses.

Validators on Ethereum are required to hold at least 32 ETH which currently estimates to around ~$5000.

-> Estimate your rewards with individual network assumptions in our advanced Ethereum Staking Calculator

2. Polkadot

Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi‑chain technology that will be powered by Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS). The main vision of Polkadot is to enable blockchain interoperability on both asset and smart contract level.

The Polkadot Network is bootstrapped with the help of the Web 3 Foundation, which raised a total of $230M and allocates funds wisely building out the ecosystem.

The Kusama Network which launched 5 month ago is the official “Polkadot Testnet” (despite not everyone agreeing to that definition) and incentives KSM holders (1 DOT entitles to 1 KSM) to participate and earn respective rewards.

The NPoS Scheme rewards all elected validators equally and thus thrives to ensure a high degree of decentralization and a more even distribution of stake and voting power.

Slashing: Validators and Delegators (progressive, up to 100%, based on the number of simultaneous identical equivocations)

3. Cardano

Cardano is a long awaited candidate in the Proof of Stake Space. The Blockchain will be governed by the Ouroborus Consensus mechanism and is expected to go live in Q2 2020.

Cardano is developed from a scientific philosophy and is designed and built from a global team of leading academics and engineers.

Cardano recently launched their incentivized Testnet Shelley with over 350 active Stake Pools.

4. Celo

Celo is still under the Radar from many in the space. Celo is seen as the blockchain of stable value currencies (stablecoins), aiming to be made available to everyone with a mobile phone.

The Project is amongst others backed by Polychain Capital and Andreesen Horowitz.

Currently Validators compete in the incentivised Testnet “The Great Celo Stake Off” to earn their share of $2M Celo Gold.

5. Crypto.com Chain

Crypto.com offers a Wallet that is connected to Visa Card that allows to spend crypto with real-time exchange rates anywhere in the world.

Additionally the team is developing the Crypto.com Chain, a public blockchain solution powering instant crypto payment transactions between customers and merchants.

Council Nodes (Validators) are responsible for execute settlement, order and verify transactions and provide an escrow service, while earning up to 18% annualized rewards.

Slashing: none

6. Matic Network

Matic Network is a blockchain agnostic layer-2 scaling solution.

Block Producers confirm transactions on the layer-2 chain in 1 second intervals and Validators push block hashed from block producers to the ETH mainchain every ~5 minutes (256 blocks).

Matic Network is currently running an incentivized Testnet where participants compete for a total of 3 million MATIC tokens (~$45k).

7. Telegram Open Network

The ICO of the infamous messaging platform Telegram has raised $2 billion in 2017.

The sharding Blockchains Proof-of-Stake Approach reaches consensus through a variant of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance. There will be:

Validators validate transactions and earn inflation rewards Fisherman are cross-checking Validators to receive the slashed tokens of misbehaving validators Nominators (Delegators) are providing Validators with Capital and receive partial amounts of the inflation rewards Collators are pointing out shard chain block candidates to receive partial amounts of the inflation rewards

The Team seems to operate mainly in “stealth-mode” and does not give explicit details on their blockchain design or launch yet.

8. NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is introducing a new Proof of Stake mechanism where the annual reward is initially set to 5%. The Network Inflation via Block Rewards is dynamically adjusted based on the number of Network Rewards (Transaction Fees).

NEAR is currently running the Stake Wars incentivized testnet program. Participants are rewarded with 1% of the initial mainnet token supply.

Slashing: Validators and Delegators

9. Solana

Solana is a layer 1 PoS blockchain with a pBFT-derived consensus mechanism, offering support for 50,000 TPS. Such scalability is achieved via certain calculated trade-offs, Proof-of-History (each validator maintains its own clock and does timestamping of events) and the fact that Solana is multi-threaded.



Solana is currently running its own incentivized testnet competition Tour de Sol.

Slashing: Validators and Delegators

10. Ava

The underlying consensus mechanism of Ava is Avalanche which has a probabilistic safety guarantee. Every newly proposed block is broadcast to a number of nodes, at random, and the question is posed to determine which blocks should be considered valid. The nodes then indicate their preference. Using the responses from the sample group will allow the insight to see which version the network is leaning towards before confirming and broadcasting produced blocks.

The first proof-of-concept deployment of its subnetworks functionality has been launched in October 2019 under the name Athereum and represent a full copy of the Ethereum Blockchain.

If you are interested to dive deeper and explore more upcoming Proof of Stake Networks make sure to check out the full list of all upcoming new protocols on our site.

Also please feel free to let us know which networks you are most excited about or if you think any other network should be included in the Top 10.

Further Proof of Stake Networks (launching in 2020) that we are particularly interested in are