Quicksilver: Liquid Staking for the Interchain
In this next installation of Keplr’s partnership interview series, we learn from Roea Mortaki, co-founder of Quicksilver, about Quicksilver’s liquid staking platform.
Learn more in-depth about the Interchain ecosystem, starting with the teams that are shaping our interoperable future through Keplr Wallet.
Hi Roea, great to have you share with us more about the Quicksilver platform and liquid staking. Can you tell us more about yourself?
I’m Roea Mortaki, one of the three co-founders of Quicksilver, the Cosmos Liquid Staking Zone. I am also the co-founder of Ingenuity, the development company building Quicksilver. While my background is in traditional finance, I was introduced to crypto a few years ago and started working for a staking service provider, where I got to learn more about Cosmos and liquid staking.
Who makes up the Quicksilver team?
We are a fully distributed team of seven people across four continents.
How did the Quicksilver team assemble and decide to start building?
Vish, Joe, and I met while at Chorus One. Joe actually designed the first liquid staking implementation during the 2019 Hackatom, but Cosmos technology back then could not stretch to fit that design. Vish, on the other hand, had spent a good amount of time conducting liquid staking research. When Interchain Accounts were announced, Joe’s vision became possible, and after attending Cosmoverse in Lisbon in November of 2021, we decided it was time to start building Quicksilver.
It’s a great feeling when you have all the pieces to start building. Let’s get into liquid staking. What is your definition of liquid staking and why is liquid staking important?
At a basic level, liquid staking is the mechanism through which the delegations that are bonded through staking are made liquid. So, it’s essentially a way of securing a chain through staking, and still taking advantage of the full potential of your assets.
It’s important because it solves the ‘Stakers’ Dilemma’; for quite some time in Cosmos, staking and DeFi were mutually exclusive, which meant users often had to choose between securing a chain through staking or earning higher yields in Defi. Liquid Staking removes this constraint, and Quicksilver, in particular, does it all while providing users with a frictionless UX, and keeping them empowered and able to make decisions for themselves.
For quite some time in Cosmos, staking and DeFi were mutually exclusive, which meant users often had to choose between securing a chain through staking or earning higher yields in Defi.
Can you tell us more about Quicksilver and how it works? Also, congratulations on Quicksilver’s mainnet launch!
Thank you, it’s really exciting.
Quicksilver is a sovereign Cosmos-SDK zone that provides liquid staking for the Cosmos ecosystem. It’s a liquid staking protocol that was custom-designed for Cosmos in order to enable users to liquid stake in a way as close to staking as possible. Quicksilver will be scalable to any and all IBC-connected, ICA-enabled zones, and will enable users to signal their intent to delegate to validators of a native zone onboarded to the protocol and retain their voting rights when liquid staking through Quicksilver.
The way it works is very simple–users on the protocol can mint a qAsset, a voucher representative of their staked Asset, except unlike the Asset, the qAsset is liquid and can be used in Defi protocols.
It sounds simple, but I’m sure you guys faced a lot of challenges. What can we learn from other liquid staking protocols? How can we improve?
While we were at Chorus One, my co-founders and I had the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge and understanding of staking in general, and liquid staking in particular — Joe having designed the first liquid staking implementation, and the company having actually built Lido for Solana, for example.
We also learned a lot from observing the liquid staking game unfold on Solana. We extracted the appropriate key learnings from all these experiences and did our best to integrate them while building Quicksilver, especially in the context of Cosmos. We knew, for example, that restricted validator sets lead to a concentration of stake among a handful of entities, which is detrimental to the health of a chain–especially in Cosmos where validator sets are much smaller than on Ethereum. We also understood that users losing their governance rights was detrimental in any context, but unimaginable in the cosmos ecosystem where community and governance participation is paramount to users.
The other thing that was a common denominator to traditional liquid staking solutions at time was the poor UX with unbonding periods, for example, so we put a lot of care into trying to design a UX as frictionless as possible, and we’re trying to include the LSM as much as possible in our GTM to mitigate unbonding periods.
What do you think users will enjoy most about Quicksilver’s UX?
I hope they enjoy how frictionless and intuitive it is. We took great care in crafting the user journeys and designing the UI. This has been made easier by the protocol’s novel and innovative features, and we plan to keep tweaking it in the future to improve it further. On a personal level, I’m a strong believer that a smooth UX that caters to the needs of users (especially the less crypto-friendly among them) is going to be paramount in accelerating mass adoption, so this has always been a priority for me and for the team.
Great to hear! UX is also something that the Keplr team is really thoughtful about. Can you explain more about how Quicksilver is taking extra effort to ensure decentralization?
Decentralization is at the forefront of our vision and we have intended for the protocol to be a champion for decentralization in Cosmos.
On the protocol level, we have implemented that vision through a number of innovative features, the first being Intent Signalling, which allows Quicksilver to allocate stake to validators based on users’ intent.
In addition to that, we implemented the Participation Rewards feature, which we designed to incentivize users to delegate to decentralized, performant validators that are active in governance. On the Quicksilver chain level, we launched with a healthy and diverse validator set of 150 validators.
In each case, the goal is to ensure that assets on a given chain are as evenly distributed as possible, therefore contributing to the long-term security and censorship resistance of the chains.
Decentralization is at the forefront of our vision and we have intended for the protocol to be a champion for decentralization in Cosmos.
What does the Quicksilver team look forward to in the future?
Now that the chain has launched, we are looking forward to rolling out the Protocol’s user-facing interface and the full range of features, which will happen in a steady way all the way through Q1 2023.
It’s a new and exciting time for Cosmos — liquid staking gaining in prominence will unlock untapped possibilities for Defi innovation, which we very much intend to keep contributing to. One way we plan to do that -and one additional thing we’re looking forward to!- is by enabling CosmWasm on the chain later next year. This will make it possible for other teams to build all sorts of Defi products on top of the Quicksilver chain, leveraging the chain’s unique features. I think it will be a great way to curate a thriving ecosystem around the Quicksilver chain that will complement the existing Defi offering in Cosmos.
Quicksilver is already delivering things to look forward to… How can Cosmonauts get involved?
In a number of ways. First and foremost by using the protocol to liquid stake their assets and unlock their full potential.
Secondly, by diving deeper into what we’re building. We made a collective effort since last February to bring awareness not only to Liquid Staking and its mechanisms, but also to other prominent pieces of technology like Interchain Accounts, the Liquidity Staking Module, Interchain Queries, etc. Many community members have since then provided feedback and triggered thought-provoking conversations. Quicksilver is Research and Development driven and as a team, we value every opportunity to geek out with the Community!
Finally, Cosmonauts are always welcome on all our social media platforms, to interact with the team and the rest of the Quicksilver community.
Nice! I’m sure the Cosmonauts are excited to get involved. Thanks, Roea, for sharing more about the Quicksilver protocol, and thank you to your team for bringing a thoughtful and thorough approach to liquid staking for the Interchain. 🔭
Quicksilver is an interchain liquid staking protocol for the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond.
To learn more about Quicksilver, visit: https://quicksilver.zone/
Quicksilver on Medium: https://medium.com/quicksilverzone
Quicksilver on Twitter: https://twitter.com/quicksilverzone
Find Quicksilver on Keplr: Keplr.app
