The Cosmos vision is one of many application-specific blockchains interoperating with each other. It is the belief that creating domain-specific, sovereign ecosystems will often prove more suitable than building on a shared, general purpose blockchain substrate like Ethereum. But how does value accrual work in such a system? What domains could provide enough value to justify the cost of needing to operate their own blockchain?

Regen Network is building a network focused on ecological regeneration. The goal is to provide tools to actors in the climate finance industry and turn them into stakeholders of the Regen ecosystem.

Regen is a…

With this issue, we welcome Xavier, who recently joined Chorus One as a Research Analyst, as a new author for Staking Economy. We’re excited to welcome Xavier, who has already written a bunch of great content — such as a report on the non-financial risks in decentralized finance — to the Staking Economy team.

💰Economics

Parachain Crowdloans Polkadot is edging one step closer to its goal of providing cross-chain interoperability. On March 26th, Polkadot auctioned off the first public parachain on Rococo testnet to Acala. Polkadot is experimenting with a revolutionary token distribution model by auctioning off parachains to teams that…

💰Economics

The Defiant published an editorial Chris wrote called “Rich Getting Richer in PoS Chains”. The post started as an idea to discuss how he feels stake isn’t decentralized at the moment. It turned into a summary of many of his thoughts and observations over the past 3.5 years on the problems and trend of stake centralization.

The post was not necessarily meant as a critique of proof of stake, but rather the intention was to warn of the direction that proof of stake chains are heading.

🌐 Ecosystem

Liquid Staking on Terra and Anchor Launch Lido is expanding to the multichain world…

💰 Economics

Ethereum 2.0 Slashings

The 10th Bison Trails Eth2 update dives into three recent slashing incidents that “…now account for 81% of all slashings on eth2 and roughly estimated total losses of $600k between slashing penalties and missed rewards.”

One of these mass slashings can safely be attributed to Staked, one of the largest staking providers that accounts for upwards of 5% of all current validators, who published a post-mortem on the incident.

🌐 Ecosystem

Shapeshift New Frontiers

Shapeshift released this report comparing and contrasting Cosmos, Polkadot and NEAR. It provides a useful primer on the three networks, while the comparison chart on p.36 provides further beneficial framing.

Written…

On February 10 the Solana community passed a vote to enable inflation on mainnet. SOL holders delegating their tokens to validators on the network will now start to earn staking rewards.

Solana is a composable, unsharded blockchain focused on maximizing transaction throughput through various hard- and software optimizations. Like most smart contract platforms, the Solana network is secured through Proof-of-Stake.

This post is an overview of the staking economics on Solana going into the factors that influence rewards, as well as the risks and restrictions associated with staking SOL tokens.

A Word on Epochs

Staking-related updates in Solana happen at epoch boundaries. An epoch…

We’re back from an extended Christmas break with our first issue in 2021:

💰 Economics

Liquid Staking on Ethereum

Between the last issues and now, a lot has happened with respect to Ethereum 2 staking. There is now almost 3m ETH, roughly 2.5% of the total supply, in the deposit contract and participating in consensus on the Beacon Chain making Eth2 the #1 in terms of total value locked (TVL) in ETH surpassing Maker by a tiny margin. As Eth2 matures, we’d expect this lead to increase further.

Some of this growth can be attributed to liquid staking protocols like Lido and Stkr that enable Ethereum…

Happy New Year! Today, we are excited to announce the launch of our The Graph mainnet indexer node. Find us e.g. on the official dashboard (chorusone.eth). This post will focus on our journey so far and what you can expect when considering to delegate GRT tokens.

Why We Are Supporting The Graph

The Graph has become the industry standard for retrieving data from Ethereum applications, with prominent users including Coingecko, Uniswap, and many others.

We have experienced ourselves what it means to write custom code to retrieve blockchain data, to store it, and to service it for our staking platform Anthem. One of the reasons that…

This newsletter is supported by Chorus One, a provider of staking services in decentralized networks. Chorus is currently hiring for a Research Analyst role, learn more here.

Last week, we hosted a 2h event to memorate the launch of the Ethereum beacon chain — the first step of the migration to Proof-of-Stake of the largest platform for decentralized applications. We had speakers covering various topics related to Eth2 — including economics ( Collin Myers), a study on UX ( EMPIRE), clients ( Prysm), as well as staking pools ( Lido and Rocket Pool). …