Recent Staking Updates

Harmony team updated the Token Economic Model, ahead of the Open Staking launch. The goal is to achieve a higher staking ratio, to simplify the model & to create a path to 0 issuance, all of which they believe will bring long term benefits for Harmony.

Constant annual reward of 441M ONE regardless of changes in underlying variables such as block time and staking ratio. Transaction fees offset issuance creating a path to 0 issuance as protocol gains adoption. 1st year yields range: 164% (at 5% staked) to 9% (at 95% staked). For more in-depth information, take a look at the spreadsheet model.

CasperLabs Pivots Away From Ethereum to Fundraise With Its Own Blockchain — BitMax hosted public sale of CasperLabs (CLX) on March 30. In September 2019 CasperLabs has closed $14.5M USD private fundraising round with participation from Acuitas Group Holdings, Arrington XRP Capital, Consensus Capital, MW Partners and Hashkey Capital among others. According to CoinDesk, BitMax will automatically stake CLX for buyers when the mainnet launches later this year, after which there will be an enforced 90-day lock-up to prevent prompt sell-offs. BitMax is committed to operating a full node at CasperLabs’ mainnet launch to facilitate staking services for CLX and selling up to $3 million worth of tokens, as evaluated by both participating companies. More details to be released.

Introducing Staking 2.0 on COTI — COTI has released details on its updated staking model. According to the recently released blog post, the staking volume will be increased as of May 2020. Both community and advanced nodes will allow staking of 5M COTI. The node selection algorithm will now additionally take into consideration the amount staked on a node. COTI is offering one of the highest annualized staking rewards at the moment. Staking on exchanges TBA.

BitMax has launched staking as a service program on its platform as of April 2. Tezos (XTZ) and Cosmos (ATOM) will become the first coins offered for staking with 5.4% and 6.5% annualized return rate respectively. Staking of Kava (KAVA) and Harmony (ONE) to follow shortly. According to the recently released blog post users will be able to unstake their coins any time, use staked assets as margin collateral and maximize returns through automated redelegation of rewards. It will not be an automated staking like other offerings among cryptocurrency exchanges. Users should stake and unstake their coins manually. But it will offer both earning and margin trading on one platform.

Everstake Becomes The Harmony Staking Partner. Considering the Harmony initiative, the ecosystem made a decision to test open staking experience on the blockchain by inviting staking partners for participation. This stage of the open staking process is important before moving to an extensive open testing stage. By running the system in the test mode the project can find different bugs as well as vulnerabilities, that must be fixed before entering the mainnet.

Cardano Community Outraged by Cardano Staking Cartel in Shelley Testnet. A large number of staking pools in the Cardano community have formed an alliance on the Shelley Incentivized Testnet. Other members have criticized the alliance for promoting centralization.

Group of stakepools formed on Cardano called ISPPA. Pool operators produce around 12%-13% of the blocks in the network. Community fears such coordinated efforts could lead to centralization.

Daily Cosmos Outpost Apr 03, Inflation 7.0% Bonded 72.0%.

Validator Views by Staked:

{Keep Update — March 31, 2020}

Keep is expecting to launch the Keep Network mainnet with staking and trustless Bitcoin (tBTC) in the near future. KEEP tokens will be unlocked on-chain over the same period of time as their Use Restriction (6 months, 12 months or 24 months). The KEEP tokens will be released for withdrawal into the owner’s account linearly, as each block of the Ethereum mainnet is generated. Locked KEEP tokens can still be staked, but only from the wallet address that is associated with the owner. Keep’s standard SAFT terms require owners to stake their tokens. 100,000 KEEP is the minimum required to stake on either the Keep or tBTC networks. The minimum stake will decrease over time according to a schedule the Keep team will be publishing at the time of launch!

{ETH 2.0 Update — March 26, 2020}

The Least Authority team recently completed an audit of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications. The audit identified seven issues and made three best practice suggestions. Furthermore, the audit highlighted two areas that would benefit from further review and additional documentation: the Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking layer and the ENR system. Read the full audit report here. It is now time for multi-client testnets and the Phase 0 bug bounty program!

2. The first ETH 2.0 testnet slashing of an external validator recently occurred. The slashing was caused by a GCP instance migration, as two validators were validating behind the same key. View the slashing in the block explorer here.

A Birthday Present for the Cosmos Hub — One year ago on the 13th of March, the Cosmos Hub produced its first block, marking the world’s first decentralized launch of a permissionless BFT network. Staking Beyond Consensus — An op-ed by Union Market’s Shayne Coplan on the state and the future of the staking economy. Shayne describes staking and its function as a cryptographic primitive seeking to reduce transaction costs in marketplaces in the digital economy. It’s a very spot-on take that describes how staking mechanisms should be thought of beyond determining consensus participants. Edgeware — A Slashing Case Study — A slashing incident happened shortly after the Edgeware mainnet launch and now serves as a case study on remediating slashing events. Staking Facilities suffered the slashing penalty after a relatively short downtime due to a mixture of an unforeseen bug and high downtime penalties on Edgeware. The team has been working with the Edgeware community on how to deal with the situation since. The approach they have taken is to reimburse losses from their own funds first and issuing a proposal to Edgeware on-chain governance to recover lost funds from the treasury. Read the writeup of what happened and check out the recovery proposal here. There also was an interesting discussion on the Staking Economy Telegram about this incident and the implications for validators, who are usually running beta software and may suffer from such slashing penalties for minor mistakes, or things that are completely outside of their control. Overall, the consensus was that slashing should be deployed carefully, potentially increasing penalties once the protocol’s software has matured significantly. Hedged Terra Staking — Korean payments network Terra introduces an idea for another innovative financial product seeking to protect the principal used for staking from price volatility of the network’s native staking token Luna. Anchor’s design aims to allow users to receive staking rewards by pledging collateral denominated in stable tokens. This product is one of the first structured products that become possible when staking and decentralized finance intersect. Tezos Carthage and Lawsuit Settlement — The third governance-induced protocol upgrade passed all voting periods and was activated March 5. Meanwhile, the Tezos Foundation agreed to pay $25m in settle claims from an ongoing lawsuit claiming the 2017 ICO violated US securities laws. Celo Incentivized Testnet Summary and Alliance Formation — Celo’s Great Stake Off successfully concluded and saw the participation of more than 100 entities check out the details here! In addition, the Celo Alliance, a collective of organizations seeking to support and utilize Celo’s platform to bring financial tools to millions of users with a mobile phone, was announced.

Top Cosmos Validator Chorus One Strategically Partners With Band Protocol — Band Protocol is excited to announce the long-term partnership with Chorus One, a globally diversified and industry-leading validator with over $12,000,000 in assets staked across Cosmos, Kava & Terra. Partnering up with an enterprise-grade validator with audited security setup shields for both cyber and physical attacks will strengthen the resilience of BandChain and allow BAND tokens to be delegated safely.

Libra alternative Celo Foundation gives out initial grants:

In brief:

The Celo Foundation announced $700,000 in grants to recipients helping build a more inclusive financial system. Earlier this year, the Celo Foundation announced the Alliance for Prosperity, a network of organizations committed to using the Celo stablecoin. This is the first in a series of expected grants from the Libra alternative.

The first game built on Tezos blockchain preparing for alpha launch. Tezos (XTZ) co-founder Kathleen Breitman is preparing to launch the alpha version of the game built on top of Tezos — a crypto-powered collectible card game called ‘Emergents.’ Emergents’ in-game cards will comprise non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that players have full ownership over. Coase intends to comprise both the primary and secondary marketplace for the cards. The company will also act as both a buyer and a seller for the NFTs.

Kava Integrates Chainlink as its Official Oracle Network to Bring DeFi to Cosmos. Integrating Chainlink’s world-class oracles strengthen the Kava DeFi platform with secure price data, now made available for the first time to all Cosmos chains. Kava’s scalability combined with Chainlink’s oracles provide the Cosmos ecosystem with the highest-quality data to make secure, truly reliable Decentralized Financial Products.

Our Network: Issue #15:

{Tezos}

Protocol Upgrade: With world-wide spotlight elsewhere, the Tezos community quietly focused on hardening its base layer with a third protocol upgrade (codename Carthage) that went live on March 5. Voted for by 46% of all bakers and backed by 72% of network stake the participation rate was slightly down from earlier votes (46%/84% in Athens, 45%/83% in Babylon). Like expected for a bugfix release the on-chain upgrade went much smoother this time. >85% of all bakers had upgraded their software ahead of time and baker churn was limited to ❤% (down from 10% in earlier upgrades). Note that a protocol upgrade in Tezos is not backwards compatible like in Bitcoin, so all infrastructure including indexers, wallets and dapps need to follow.

Staking: Custodial staking at the top 3 exchanges Coinbase, Binance and Kraken continued its strong 2-digit growth trend during March while smaller exchanges saw almost no change. On April 1st a whopping 65.7M tez (10% of all staked coins, 7.9% of total supply) was staked at Coinbase alone. Together the top 5 custodial exchanges manage 136M tez (21% staking supply, 16.4% total supply). At these numbers monthly income from staking fees for Coinbase should be around 82.5k tez ($140k USD).

Staking: 3.3M new tez were minted last month, network wide staking ratio dipped back 1.2% to 78.5%, staking rewards are at 6.07% annually, future expected yield above inflation increased slightly to 1.3%. At first sight it seems as if the downtrend in price from mid February heights could have caused delegators and bakers to liquidate some of their stake.

A closer look at the data reveals, however, that the opposite happened. Total delegated supply (the part of staking supply that is not owned by bakers) actually reached an ATH of 522M towards end of March. Reason for the network staking dip was baker churn. Around 3% (10M staking supply owned by bakers and another 7M delegated to them) went inactive during March.

{Cosmos}

Inter-blockchain Communication (IBC): IBC is the flagship digital asset and data transfer protocol for communicating value across bespoke blockchains. When IBC is launched in a few months’ time, it will usher in the era of an Internet of Blockchains — a watershed moment that will benefit the entire industry because it would bring about what I liken to the Industrial Revolution for the macro crypto economy. Today, IBC is nearing production-readiness and is being stress-tested in a testnet environment.

This visualizer shows you the number of established IBC connections there are between any two IBC-enabled Cosmos SDK blockchain which, once connected, start relaying IBC packets between one another. There are currently 8 separate Cosmos SDK-based testnets (e.g. Dokia, Ping IBC, Iris, etc.) that have established IBC connections to each other’s testnets and are transporting IBC messages to one another across chains. Image 2 isolates Dokia’s testnet chain and shows that it has 25 connections established to allow it to “trade” data/value/etc. with the economies of the other chains. Metaphorically, it helps to think of each IBC connection as a highway or even a trade route, a relayer as any untrusted vehicle (you don’t need to trust the relayer in order to be sure that the contents in the package were not tampered with) that delivers payloads (e.g. smart contract calls, tokens, location data, etc.) from chain A to chain B, and finally, a bespoke chain as a sovereign economy that wishes to embark in trade with another chain’s economy. Put it all together and what do you get? Globalization as the end-state for token economies.

Game of Zones (GoZ): Incentivized testnets were a thing pioneered by Cosmos in 2018. Game of Stakes (GoS) was the first of its kind which subsequently spurred the creation of at least 11 other incentivized testnets since its inception, including that of Cardano, Solana, Near, Oasis, Irisnet, Celo, Matic, Icon, Lino, Coda, and Nucypher, to name a few. Game of Stakes was necessary for preparing for the Cosmos Hub launch to ensure that no critical vulnerability would break the mainnet. This year, GoZ is the sequel to that for stress-testing IBC before diving, head first, into a high-stakes connected multi-chain world. This year, participants are going to be spinning up relayers and racing to drive the most IBC packets across federated testnets for GoZ. The GoZ topology will look something like this:

Cosmos Governance: The Cosmos Hub community tax pool had been slowly accumulating ATOMs since the launch of the mainnet to having over 340 thousand ATOMs. At the end of January 2020, the very first community spend vote was passed: Prop 23 (source)

In Cosmos, there is a semi-liquid democracy whereby votes are by default cast by validators and individuals with voting power inherit the votes of the validators they’re staked with. However, if individuals choose to cast their own votes, they can override their validators’ votes, which is what happened with this proposal. Because of this governance feature, Cosmos governance differentiates itself from representative democracies as seen in DPOS protocols like EOS.

Staking Amidst Market Crash: March was a tough month for everyone. If rewind to February 2, 2020, a peak was seen at staking in the network at 187 million ATOMs. It fell by 4% six weeks later, just two days after the entire crypto market took a nosedive on March 16th following Bitcoin’s lowest price point since 2017. Bitcoin, Gold, and the DJIA were all of a sudden correlated. But because Bitcoin movement informs all the rest of the token economy’s movements, ATOM, like comparable POS protocols (e.g. EOS, Tezos), took 69% haircuts ubiquitously. Network staking levels:

Because it takes 21 days, or 3 weeks, to unbond ATOMs, you can see the first wave of people who undelegated at the first trough on January 28th. The second lower trough came exactly 3 weeks later on March 17th, where the ATOM price hit its year-to-date all-time-low to $1.55 — a 69% dump. One can only infer that those first wave of undelegators were the ones who sold off to the bottom of the market.

After over 18 months of development, Pocket Network team are excited to announce that the Pocket incentivized testnet is ready to launch! Pocket Network is an independent, application-specific blockchain. It is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol using the Tendermint consensus engine with a native cryptocurrency, denominated as “POKT”. Both Applications and Service Nodes must stake POKT to access or provide work to Pocket Network.

The launch of the testnet will be rolled out in two phases:

The first phase will include a smaller focused group of node operators and application developers who will help with the testing of the initial validation and security parameters within the network. This phase will include a preliminary permissioned implementation of the Pocket blockchain along with the Pocket coordination layer. The second phase will begin the following month with a larger set of validators and node operators. The goal of the second phase is to, once again, test validation and security, but under a more hostile environment by scaling up the amount of activity and relays flowing through the network. In parallel to these testnet phases, they will also be running their own thorough audit, as well as contracting a third-party firm in order to ensure the security of the network in preparation for the Pocket Network Mainnet later this year.

{Tezos}

Tezos Foundation settles $25 million lawsuit Tezos Grants $37 Million to Ecosystem Developers Tezos Foundation published its biannual report Atomex added FA1.2 Tezos token standart Tezos-starter-kit is fully Carthage-proof now

{ICON}

ICONLOOP sets a goal to reach 1 million users Broof has been successfully introduced ZenSports app implemented ICON public chain ICON Integrates with Dapp.com

{EOS}

CoVax app will assist the world in COVID-19 vaccine research Jacques Whales releases a video podcast regarding COVID and DIY liquidity pool Thomas Bertani conducted an AMA session Block.one CEO criticizes EOS Worker Proposal System

{Cosmos}

Cosmos community member has published ATOM staking guide through Lunie Cyber Congress is one step ahead of decentralized search engine ETHDenver2020 has been successfully finished

{IOST}

IOST Network will be interviewed by AWS China IOSToken conducts Binance Giveaway Swiss Business Hub in Japan endorses IOST IOST officially launches BaaS platform

{Tezos}

Cryptonomic releases Conseil Interview with Mytro Arapinis, creator of E-cclesia Tezos risks for DeFI, NFT’s and STO’s explained First game based on Tezos blockchain is ready for Alpha launch ProtoFire published a JavaScript smart contract integration guide

{ICON}

ICON releases Monthly Grant Recap March 2020 ICX gets listed on BiKi Exchange ICON Ecosystem Map V1.0 has been released StateOfTheDapps integrates ICON ICONProject Governance series #4

{EOS}

EOS Worker Proposal System has been implemented EOS New York ceases its operations and joins block.one Interview With Dan Larimer: B1 will announce new products this year Genobank.io partners with Telos for efficient COVID-19 testing

{Cosmos}

cyber~Congress published 4th day report Interchain.FM releases an interview with Andreas Antonopoulos Game of Links: Intergalactic Tournament From Cyber

{IOST}