Everett wins the 1st Prize at HackAtom Seoul 2019
The DeFi Hub of Staking
Hello Cosmonauts!
My guess is that most of you guys aren’t familiar with us, so I figured we’d take this time to introduce ourselves. We participated as hackers in the 2019 HackAtom Seoul (July 19–21) held at Seoul Startup Hub. With many sleepless nights (thank you coffee & red bull), we won 1ˢᵗ place in the HackAtom.
Here’s the story of what we built and why we built it.
How It All Started
Most good ideas begin from unexpected places. In this case, it was a pub at the heart of Gangnam. It was around May 2019 when Ryan came up with an idea: to create liquid staking positions on Cosmos.
When I first heard about this idea, I was a bit confused on utilizing an asset that secures the network (Staked-ATOMs) and felt that this might potentially bring more risk to the network.
As we continuously debated about this idea, we settled to the conclusion that this idea, if implemented in a decentralized & transparent and Byzantine Fault Tolerant way, could actually help to increase network security. At this point, the idea of utilizing staking position as collateral to create the secondary tokens sounded convincing enough. So we began brainstorming for more ideas.
Why & How?
The first thing we had to consider was whether minting a token backed by staking positions is necessary. The reason why was actually quite simple, to make it possible for bonded ATOMs to go around the 21 days for unbonding period. A comprehensive analysis, lead to the conclusion that the Cosmos ecosystem has the needs for the utilities from having liquid staking positions. However, we quickly concluded that this was not convincing enough and we had to find more solid reasons.
Hub Staking Competes with Future DeFi Deposits on Cosmos.
In order to find a reason appealing enough for the positions liquefying staking to exist, we had to find the potential problems on the grander scale.
The first thing we did was to observe the current state of other proof of stake blockchains: What could go wrong in the post-Casper Ethereum? When Ethereum transitions to PoS, regarding security, greater number of ETH being staked represents more difficulty for attackers. In other words,
Staking Ratio∝ Network Security
However, in the status quo, we observed that a large amount of ETH has flown into the DeFi ecosystem, and at a steep pace. This basically means that from an incentive-wise point of view, staking in post-Casper Ethereum (Staking Rewards) has to compete with investing in DeFi. This also applies to other PoS based blockchains as well. As such, we came to the conclusion that staking, which is responsible for network security, should not be competing with ecosystem usage/investments.
How we found our Lead Dev, Tony Yoon
nonce (A co-working & co-living Space in Gangnam) was the place that we first met Tony. He was also a resident of nonce, working as a developer at node A Team (Cosmos Validator). We shared our ideas about utilizing staking positions and it caught Tony’s attention right away. He has even helped us planning on the implementation of our idea after IBC(inter blockchain communication) goes live. We spent long days and nights discussing how to bring this idea to the real world, and during all of that, I thought “he’s the guy we’re looking for”.
BUIDL and Hackatom
A month before BUIDL, as we were trying to buy tickets to the event, thinking “what if we could share our brilliant idea to other cosmonauts coming to the event?”. However, just before purchasing them, we found that if we participate in the Seoul HackAtom as hackers then the tickets to BUIDL are free! So immediately we signed up as nonce A team (Jake, Ryan, Tony).
The video underneath is about Ryan explaining, what Everett Protocol is and how it works, and our output from the last four months (please keep in mind that we had less than a day to prepare this presentation, so that quality might not be the best :)).
