Latest Staking Update

ICON announced updates ahead of the Pre-Voting Period (which starts August 26th UTC 05:00)!

Updated ICONex — August 26th UTC 03:00

Updated ICON Tracker — August 26th UTC 03:00

See post for more details.

Staking Rewards launched fresh new site: https://beta.stakingrewards.com They added the most advanced reward calculator, new clean look, updated asset table + pages and a large categorized staking glossary!

New Cycle and Governance Screen (+ History) New Operation Screen for all 12 types New Baker Account Screen with a Staking Rights Heatmap and a brand-new metric “Bakers Luck”

Staking screen: shows staking participation across cycles, the evolution of locked-up capital, roll owners and the number of active bakers/endorsers as well as the cumulative staking capacity of all bakers and their overall efficiency.

TERRA STAKING

An initiative to increase staking rewards on Terra, stablecoin and payments network, went live last week. 21.7mn Luna tokens will be distributed in the first year to achieve a staking yield of around 10% at the current staking ratio to subsidize the staking ecosystem while the network is growing in terms of transaction volume (up to 100mn Luna have been committed in the medium term to keep Terra staking competitive). Learn more about this effort called “Project Santa” here.

In addition, Do Kwon, Co-Founder of Terra, joined the Chorus One Telegram for an AMA and shared a lot of insights into how they have been growing (Chai mobile payment app has >360k registered users), their technology and the relation to regulatory and the Cosmos ecosystem, as well as what is in store in the future. If you’re interested, you can find a cleaned up transcript of the AMA here.

VALIDATOR PROFITABILITY AND ICF DELEGATIONS

Jack from KysenPool published this Cosmos Validator business model analysis. He models potential reward scenarios and lays them out against various cost models. His current analysis estimates profitability for only the top 10 Cosmos Validators. The general takeaway is that validators need to diversify across networks in order to spread cost and risk.

To help keep Validators in the game, the Interchain Foundation made their most recent round of delegations. This round’s intention was to delegate “ATOMs to validators making significant contributions to the larger Cosmos community.” The Foundation used a 16 point scoring model to determine delegation amounts awarded to the 46 applicants.

HARMONY EPoS & PANGEA

Harmony published the details and rationale of their PoS algorithm that is designed to encourage a large number of nodes validating the network. Chris published his analysis of Harmony’s original staking and incentive design here. The new design is based on a function that aims to shift stake to validators with lower stakes by adjusting rewards based on validator backings. The post also features a nice overview of current validator selection algorithms in PoS. Furthermore, Harmony launched their incentivized testnet competition titled Pangea to stress test the network in 3 stages: launch, race, and attack.

It is currently quite painful to track earnings from staking tokens, especially across blockchains. Some validators try to differentiate by offering compliance solutions to their delegators. At Chorus One, we are currently developing a public tool that will help to track investment portfolios and access opportunities (we teased it for the first time in our Cosmos fee reduction post). The MVP we will be releasing by the end of this quarter will start with staking on Cosmos and in the future expand to other staking blockchains and DeFi areas.

The Staking Facilities team recently launched Cosmos support on their reward dashboard. There, stakers can see what they earned from staking on Tezos and Cosmos taking into consideration dollar valuations at both current and historical prices, a useful feature for accounting purposes.

Staking Facilities’ “Building a bare-metal validator for Solana”. Solana’s guiding principle is that software shall not get in the way of hardware. Approaching Mainnet: Given the strong focus on hardware, running a validator for Solana is particularly interesting. Staking Facilities are looking into ways to build infrastructure that serves the network in the best way possible. Solana is implementing a native delegation feature that allows token holders that are not willing to operate a validator on their own to still participate in the consensus.

Harmony Partners with Everstake to expand Staking as a Service to institutional investors.

Everstake Validation Stats speak for themselves:

As of today the digital asset staked worth exceeds $630.5 Million, more than 4.3 M blocks produced, while the rewards distributed are close to $250k.

Everstake runs already Harmony nodes sharing the same security and infrastructure standards as one of the top EOS validators.

Among the most important elements of this partnership is the ease of use, since clients enjoy a simple deposit and withdrawal experience, along with detailed reporting features.

Crypto dot com Chain is a ground-breaking high performing, secure and privacy-protected public blockchain solution powering instant crypto payment transactions between customers and merchants, anywhere, for little to no cost. Crypto dot com Chain core transaction ledger is maintained by geographically distributed nodes (a.k.a. Council Nodes) that execute a Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol on Tendermint Core. Council Nodes are entrusted with key roles on the network, including but not limited to:

Execute settlement; Order transactions; Verify all transactions.

Refactored existing on-chain event watching code to use the new blockwatch package — we’re now handling re-orgs properly Completed most of the work to add a round watcher that caches round information whenever a new round is initialized which will be used to avoid sending additional RPC requests during PM ticket creation/validation Kicked off prototyping and design exploration for the staking contract update to expand the orchestrator set Completed most of the work required to support pixel accounting within the transcoder library that we use (LPMS). The transcoder now returns a count of the pixels encoded and the pixels decoded after each transcode. Streamflow protocol engineering will be able to make use of this data to finalize the payment accounting implementation. Big milestone in our effort to integrate outside GPUs into our internal test harness — our GPU provider is behind a VPN that is proving difficult to work with. We were able to get a setup working from outside the VPN to within our test network. Just need to automate the process now. More exploring boundaries with reliability testing: we’ve been gaining confidence in the node itself by stress testing things under small-scale and controlled environments (one-O, two-O, three-O). We have roughly 99.99–100% transcoding success rate for networks that are configured appropriately, and have a better idea of what the behavior is like for networks that are not configured appropriately. Groundwork for the dual encoding + mining project. Most of the time was spent around getting the necessary software compiled / installed and playing nicely with the hardware. Things are currently close to the point where we can test and start seeing benchmark results. Ongoing progress and testing toward the LivepeerWowza 0.1.0 release Documentation and prep of the above First user testing of 3Box integration; working through a few bugs in cooperation with the 3Box team (see screenshots)