Think & Stake

Awesome discussions about Staking and Interoperability challenges in cryptos with Julien Bouteloup, Antoine Herzog, Edouard from POSBakerz & Gautier Marin, moderated by Pierre Laurent. See post.

Interview with Min Kim, Founder of ICON project & ICON Foundation Council Member and Ricky Dodds, Head of Institutional Markets at ICON Foundation. A multitude of topics was discussed, including partnerships, the ICON consensus protocol & governance structure, and adoption. Regardless of whether you’re new to or familiar with ICON, this is a webinar you don’t want to miss.

The Deep End Podcast by DigitalOcean. In this episode of the Hatch Storytellers’ Series, DigitalOcean VP of Product Apurva Joshi chats with Edouard Lavidalle, Co-Founder of POSBakerz. Listen to Edouard discuss how he built the POSBakerz team, remote work, the future of crypto, and where he finds his inspirations.

A Solana Podcast: Meher Roy & Reisen — Co-Founders of Chorus One Ep #14 — Chorus One is operating infrastructure to help you securely increase your crypto holdings. Meher & Reisen go into the founding history of Chorus One, the high availability validation project StrongGate and its implications for Solana, as well as the future of Proof-of-Stake and validation in general.

A Solana Podcast: Jill Carlson — Partner at Slow Ventures / Co-Founder Of The Open Money Initiative — For this episode they took a different approach; instead of doing a deep technical dive on a specific project Anatoly and Jill discuss the history of Bitcoin, practical uses for blockchain technology, ways to stay authentic and true to the vision in the crypto space, and so much more.

32 Coda: Sound Money and SNARKs with Emre Tekisalp and Brad Cohn. In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Emre Tekisalp, director of BD, and Brad Cohn, strategy & operations from the O(1) Labs team to discuss Coda’s approach to building a new blockchain platform. The podcast starts out going into the background of the two, a high-level overview of Coda follows and they discuss what Coda’s unique design enables and cover the go-to-market strategy of the project. From there the discussion leads them to discuss monetary policy and the implications of taxes on Proof-of-Stake networks. After this quick detour, they get back to discussing how the Coda protocol technically works leading to an extensive celebration of zk-SNARK technology during which Brad and Emre explain the progress in the field and why zk-SNARKs are so exciting. Finally, they wrap up the episode with some information on Coda’s Genesis testnet program.

Recording of Liquid Staking group call (#3) is live, for those that didn’t join, they had presentations of the Everett Protocol and B-Harvest’s Delegation DEX (both Cosmos-based approaches to liquid staking).

+[Report] Contribution Guidelines #4 — A core outcome of the Liquid Staking Working Group (LSWG) is a research report that takes a holistic look at liquid staking solutions and their implications for Proof-of-Stake networks. There are a few deliverables to achieve this:

Defining what is liquid staking A taxonomy to classify different implementations Describing implementations and placing them in the taxonomy Analyzing benefits of liquid staking solutions Analyzing concerns with liquid staking solutions Defining the ideal characteristics of a liquid staking solution Analyzing the tradeoff space Coming up with a framework to compare implementations Compare implementations using the framework Concluding recommendations

The plan is to periodically release section drafts overtime to foster focused discussions around particular parts. Upcoming working group calls will increasingly focus on specific sections and discussion-worthy pieces associated with liquid staking.

Beware staking yields: The finances of proof of stake by Ryan Watkins.

“With PoS blockchains now storing over $10 billion of value, and a batch of new PoS blockchains coming online including the crown jewel Ethereum 2.0, PoS is set for a huge year. Seeing the writing on the wall, staking-as-a-service providers are falling over each other to attract user deposits, even as fees for staking services trend towards zero. The name of the game, after all, is capital aggregation.”

Ryan Watkins also created a Twitter thread where he shares his thoughts on staking.

How Staking Tezos May Generate ‘Rental’ Income by Forbes.

Bakers Summit Recap (2–7–20) — On February 7th, 2020, 43 bakers spanning across 13 different countries made their way to Vienna, Austria to convene and hold a Bakers Summit.

Speakers of the night (FOR THE SUMMIT):

Tezos Isreal showed about what they’re doing in Israel and some of the upcoming events that have planned. Tezos On the Road and community building; Baker Tools; Tezos Reward Distributor(“TRD”) by StakeNOW; Daniel showed some cool things he was building on which will make batch reward distribution a lot simpler for bakers. TezosUK showed some of their upcoming events and some of their partnerships. Very neat stuff! Jonas from Tezos Capital and StakerDAO showed his plans for Staker DAO and how they’re pushing forward with sophisticated smart contract building using the Tezos network.

Trustless Staking Token — a decentralized financial instrument by Mike Radin, Cryptonomic Inc., with contributions from Keefer Taylor, Vishakh, Itamar Reif, et al.

The Tezos blockchain has some unique features that make financial instruments easier to implement in a trustless, fully decentralized manner. This paper explores design for a synthetic financial product based on the stake delegation rewards process intrinsic to the Tezos platform. This instrument has several features to make it appealing to various classes of investors and serves to demonstrate the vibrant possibilities of blockchain-based finance. This smart contract, henceforth referred to as “Trustless Staking Token” or “TST”, has the following properties: