Smartstake — staking performance dashboard and analytics

Grantee Spotlight

Alex Yates

Published in

Harmony

4 min readAug 19, 2020

About Harmony $7M Grant

Harmony Grants are to drive our platform’s mainnet utility 🔧, decentralized community 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦, and cryptographic innovations ⚡ — aligned with our 2020 roadmap on cross-border finance 💸 and auditable privacy 🛡️.

Your grant and project are fully transparent to everyone. Details of all grants such as application materials, funding amounts, community discussions, governor decisions and wallet addresses are publicly available at harmony.one/open-grants.

Learn more and 👉🏼 apply for a Harmony Grant 👈🏻.

What is SmartStake?

Smart Stake provides validation services for proof-of-stake blockchains. We provide a transparent, reliable, and feature rich staking service. Smart Stake provides validation services in about 5 chains, 3 in mainnet & 2 in testnet.

Smart Stake is all about enhancing the ecosystem of the blockchains where we provide validation services. We started the validation service as a community member in Aion. Staking is a very engaging activity for all participants of the network. The high degree of involvement by all community members means that there are always questions around various aspects that were not thought of earlier or are not first class features of the network’s staking dashboard. We saw that the community & validators struggled with answering basic aspects around performance and returns and ended up building tools to augment the features offered by the blockchain. Since then, any network that we participate in, we develop custom tools to enhance the ecosystem based on each blockchain’s unique needs.

Tell us about the Smartstake Team

Smart Stake is based in Canada and operated by an IT professional with 20+ years of experience in enterprise software development. BigB is the sole operator of the validator service. Still early days but as we grow, we will likely have a team managing the service.

Tell us about your Dashboard

Smart Stake has built Harmony Analytics dashboard for the Harmony community. The dashboard has three modules for delegates, validators, & network.

Delegates module known as “My Account” allows delegates to configure addresses, use alias for cross device use, check address details, delegations, USD/BTC values, delegation performance, stake history, rewards, rewards history, & address events.
Validator module provides tools for comparing performance of all validators, summary stats for returns, signs & missed blocks. It also includes historical views for various stats and provides access to all network events.
Network module provides features for viewing network stake history, overall rich list, rewards calculator, & network events.

There are many Layer 1 projects out there. Why decide to partner with Harmony?

Smart Stake participates in networks that offer distinctive features, have good fundamentals, have reasonable transparency, and a solid experienced team. Harmony fits the bill on all fronts and it was a natural choice to align with.

Do you think staking and consensus mechanisms will continue to evolve? If so, what will they look like in the future?

With so many blockchain projects attempting to implement consensus mechanisms bit uniquely, the space is likely to continue evolving for the next few years. It is hard to imagine where do we go from here but given the number of blockchains and the focus on security, decentralization, scalability, simplifying the barrier on entry. I expect the space to continue to evolve dramatically.

If you weren’t in blockchain what would you be doing instead?

Smart Stake is operated by a software developer and if not contributing in blockchain, would have been building enterprise software.

Where can others find more information about Smartstake?

SmartStake.io is a good place to start to learn more about Smart Stake. We encourage community to have 1–1 conversation with validators to understand more about their offering and are always available on Telegram at t.me/SmartStake or in most of the Harmony Telegram channels. We can also be reached on twitter at twitter.com/SmartStake.

Become ONE with Harmony

Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications, suited to handle DeFi and cross-border finance. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing.

We ❤️ Developers.