Overview

Research from Staked predicts that ~25% of the total cryptocurrency market will use proof-of-stake (PoS) as a security model by the end of 2019. Founded in April 2018, Staked operates highly available and highly secure, institutional grade staking infrastructure for leading proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Upon release of Wanchain’s PoS solution later this year, as described in the recently released 2019 roadmap, Staked will offer staking of Wanchain’s native token (WAN) to institutional and retail customers.

“The recurring theme in crypto over the years has been the promise of ‘institutional investment’ coming to the industry,” said Jack Lu, Founder and CEO of Wanchain. “Staked is an excellent example of an innovative approach to solve problems of complexity, security, accessibility, and reporting for institutional investors and retail investors alike. This is the innovation that the broader industry needs in order to reach true adoption with major players globally. We look forward to working closely with Staked as we roll out our own PoS solution for WAN later this year.”

Funding

Staked recently raised a $4,500,000 seed round from a group of leading cryptocurrency investors. Pantera Capital led the round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Global Brain, Digital Currency Group, Winklevoss Capital, Fabric Ventures, Applied Crypto Ventures, and Blocktree Capital, among others.

Currencies and Customers

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending, depending on the currency’s reward and mining protocol. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency.

Holders of proof-of-stake currencies are paid block rewards by “staking” their assets and running the server software that secures the blockchain. Staked provides the secure infrastructure required for staking and the company’s services currently support six cryptocurrencies including Tezos, Dash, Decred, Livepeer, Factom, and EOS. Customers include top-tier crypto funds, venture capital funds, family offices and hedge funds. Staked also offers a white-labeled staking platform that enables exchanges, custodians, and wallets to offer staking rewards to their customers without an expensive and complex technology build out.

Technology

The Staked infrastructure is deployed in a multi-tier signing and listening cloud configuration that combines geographic diversity and redundancy across on premise data centers and cloud providers. Staked uses Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration to achieve near-infinite scale, self-healing and hardware decentralization.