{Tezos} — Contributor: Alexander Eichhorn, Founder at Blockwatch Data

Staking: Custodial staking on centralized exchanges continues to grow massively. At the end of Feb 2020, 126.8M tez (19.4% of all staked coins, 15% of total supply) are held by custodians, up +27% (30.6M) from January. Network-wide staking is still on the rise with +3.2% (20M) to reach a new ATH of 79.14% (655M). In perspective, only 2.9M new tez were minted last month. Staking rewards are at 6.48% annually, yield above inflation dropped to 1.44%.

2. Custodians: Growth of custodial staking services is impressive. With 8.4% of the network stake, Coinbase has become the largest staking provider in Tezos within the past 4 months, directly followed by Kraken with 4.2%. Only the Tezos Foundation manages more stake (26.7%). Smaller custodians are on decline, although Chinese exchanges OKEx and Huobi grow as well. Zero-fee staking at Binance shows impact on traditional bakers who either shut down like Airfoil or begin offering zero-fee promotions. However, custodial growth is slowing down. After all there are only 128M (15%) more tez unstaked, about the same amount that has been moved on-chain this month.

3. Adoption: Testnets still outshine the smart contract situation on Tezos Mainnet. Calls on Mainnet have almost doubled compared to January (+7,587), the Atomex DEX saw some limited traffic (33 swaps) and early experiments with FA1.2 tokens have started. Babylonnet remains the most active network with a new record of +3,516 contracts and +74k calls this month, but note that these are all test contracts, often deployed and called by automated CI systems. The diversity of unique contract types (identified by their call interfaces) grew by +157 to 530 in total. 8 out of the top 10 contract types are generic programming examples. The most prominent contract people work on is DS Token (used by Securitize and Elevated Returns) with 111 total deployments and 6,652 calls in February.

Regen Network Community Validator Update — check the link for more!

A) Regen Network Testnet 3000: Kontraŭa Testnet

Primary Goal: Testing CosmWASM

Status: In devnet now

Estimated Testnet Launch Date: March 9th pending devnet results

Testnet Focus:

Load testing Adversarial testing Upgrade testing Prepping for GoZ Cross-chain smart contracts and transactions

B) Kontraŭa Testnet Incentive Structure:

Rewarding early participants (starting rewards calculation from time of first vote, instead of time of first block) They want to reward more secure configurations, they will take some inspiration from Celo and run a light version using Linnus to test configs for security

C) Algradigon-1 Scores Published.

Bison Trails will allow users to set up Polkadot validators on its platform. The company has been running validators on Polkadot’s trial network, Kusama. Polkadot is moving toward a mainnet launch.

An official announcement can be also read here.

Major Milestone Achieved: Polkadot and Chainlink Integration Using Substrate. This is the first blockchain ecosystem outside of Ethereum that Chainlink will support. By being the first Substrate-based oracle solution, Chainlink is set to become the first and primary oracle provider for all Substrate-based chains and eventually the entire Polkadot network. Polkadot developers can use Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks to quickly connect their smart contracts to all the inputs and outputs they need to run securely and reliably end-to-end, while avoiding the major pitfalls associated with trying to deploy your own oracles, such as long time delays, additional expenses, and even fatal security flaws. (Integration Demo Video.)

Cosmos Governance February Update:

Terra validator KysenPool launches Harvest wallet & crypto finance platform Harubank offers 15% returns on KRT Many exchange staking services launch for Luna: Coinone launches luna daily staking — read here; Kucoin launches Luna staking — read here; GDAC GROW launch read here. Jigu SDK has launched for Terra Chai updates

TezTracker Update #5 — quick overview of TezTracker, where you will find what has been done by the Everstake team so far.

SKALE Network announced a partnership with ConsenSys Codefi, a huge step forward for SKALE and a big moment for proof of stake networks.

Tezos holders voted in favor of implementing Carthage upgrade:

+ upgrade will increase gas limit by 30%, allowing developers to run more complex applications

+ latest poll experienced a significant decrease in participation

Participation rates in Tezos governance has declined over the last 3 voting periods — infographics by Messari:

One explanation for this decrease could be the rise in staking-as-a-service. Both Coinbase and Binance did not participate in the Carthage vote on behalf of their users. PoS participation could continue to decrease until exchanges develop viable voting solutions:

The Celo Validator Community: Security Audits and Lessons Learned — cLabs working on Celo created a validator challenge before the launch of the Celo platform to aid in validator operational experience and to establish security best practices for the Celo community. The Great Celo Stake Off (“TGCSO”) ran on Baklava, Celo’s incentivized testnet. TGCSO operated in phases, with each phase focusing on a different part of the protocol or infrastructure.

NEAR Community Update: February 28th, 2020

A) An introduction of Stardust, which is one of the projects that is building on NEAR. The Stardust API just went live, and within a few weeks of its launch, they are already supporting over 2,000 players daily. If you are creating a game, collectable art house, or any other business with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), you can use their API to help you leverage blockchain technology in under 10 lines of code.

B) The engineering work on the unbiased randomness beacon is in full swing. They pushed the cryptographic primitives and are almost done with the integration. It will take time to stabilize the beacon, and the initial launch of NEAR will use a simpler beacon, in which block producers have one bit of influence. The simple beacon is done and pushed.

C) The team is largely in the stabilization mode, preparing to restart Stake Wars. In the past two weeks they have fixed a variety of issues:

Tezos

Madfish solutions make an update of Thanos wallet. Ryan Lackey participates on Tokyo FinTech podcast Solidity to LIGO transpiler challenges Tezos Ukraine presented Tezos technology on the Ukrainian CBDC Conference organized by NBU. LIGO Lang releases new update on Tezos smart contract languages Tezos Ukraine keeps working towards Tezos-based CBDC in Ukraine Payzos releases the first demo of its Tezos payment service for WooCommerce AirGap released the new version of its Beacon Wallet TezosCommons publishes a descriptive material related to Tezos advancements in the STO Space Tezos margin trading became available on Kraken and Kraken Pro Cryptonomic plans to make asset tokenization available on Tezos soon.

ICON

Bank of Korea Develops Blockchain-Based Bond System Everstake launches a small bug bounty program ICON foundation has published the February update on the Development Roadmap Keep track of ongoing ICON projects using the special overview tool Bohdan Opryshko from Everstake released the ICON monthly recap RHIZOME: The P-Rep community meeting will be shifted to a bi-weekly schedule ICX Station publishes the ICON Deconstructed material which describes in detail network specifics at the basic level

EOS

BlockArcade became live on WAX Block.one works on a new technology called DISK which allows storage of larger amounts of network data. Agora Innovation gets funding from FinLab EOS VC EOSIO smart-contract with EVM invoking capability challenge is still ongoing Ethereum smart contracts are 10 fold faster when running on EOS GO Crytpo Wise publishes the blockchain functionality comparison material for NEO and EOS EOS Nation announces that Matthew Darwin will be their representative on the Open City Network

Cosmos

Now Cosmos can be used to buy things on Amazon, Bestbuy and other through gift cards Bitcoin Suisse publishes an ATOM staking guide Cosmos India successfully finishes the 36-hour hackathon at VIT University ATOM staking becomes available in Magnum Wallet Cyber releases an explainer material related to their blockchain network MESG Network Explorer has been released. Tendermint releases an update on State of All in Bits Inc Cosmos India will participate in Parallax Hackathon.