KysenPool Q3 2019 Quarterly Report
Our very first quarterly report is packed with updates — with introductions to Cosmos Outpost, expansions in our supported blockchain Networks, a newly translated website, Staffing additions and a new Publication
What We Will Cover
The following are the list of topics that we will be covering in our quarterly report summary:
- Cosmos Outpost — launched a macro-economic insights dashboard!
- Network Updates — launched Polkadot (TestNets) and Terra, with updates on Cosmos, Harmony, Cardano, Algorand, Kava and Solana
- KysenPool website— content is now translated to Chinese
- Staffing additions— meet our new CMO!
- Publications — newly added publication, with recent and relevant articles
Forward Looking Statements
The following goals written here may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially especially when it depends on third parties implementations of the technology and eventual user adoption. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout the coverage of these results, we will attempt to present some important factors relating to our business that may affect our predictions.
Goals for KysenPool in Q4 2019 and beyond
Our goals for the next quarter will be the following approach, namely:
- Improve our research-to-deploy velocity to increase the Staking Service coverage of blockchain networks that fit our business model
- Strengthening our infrastructure through automation to reduce Mean-Time-To-Detect and Mean-Time-To-Recovery (MTTD/MTTR)
- Developing a sales and marketing pipeline to build out partnerships with retail investors and capital venture funds
- Contributing to the blockchain community with a cadence of social media marketing, publications, and chatroom support
- Building out our team with a combination of co-founding and outsourced staffing, focusing on culture fit
- Developing a macro-economic data analytics platform given the success of the Cosmos Outpost proof-of-concept, which matches our service model to help generate interests using telemetry
Now, onto the milestones that we achieved in the past quarter…
Introducing Cosmos Outpost
Revealing our macro-economic insights dashboard
W e started off being curious about transaction activities within blockchains, specifically the CosmosHub blockchain network. We saw great value in block explorers built by Figment Networks (Hubble), Forbole (BigDipper) and Cosmostation / David Park (MintScan). They were explorers and had a great way to drill down into each transactions through a web of information, parsing through the Merkle tree without any issues.
But we didn’t see one that shows the larger picture, spread out across time. We had questions like — What happened on CosmosHub yesterday or a few days ago? How about last week or the last month? What were people doing on CosmosHub? What are the number activities on the blockchain such as new staking delegations and speculative value transfers? What actions did we miss out on? It was pure FOMO-driven curiosity.
Hence, we set off on a journey to build a single-pane macro-economic insights dashboard!
We were interested in educating ourselves on how to interact with the Cosmos blockchain via its existing interfaces that were readily available, and some which we found that aren’t there yet. We made some technical trade-offs for the laser-focused attempt to bring macro-economic insights as the top priority.
After weeks of tinkering with the gaia RPC interfaces, wire-framing, UX design selections, setting up API contracts, designing the storage/caching layer, and making hard tech stack trade-off decisions. We went back to the drawing boards several times and deferred a ton of features to come up with a minimum viable product (MVP). We were able to push to the finish line in mid-September and revealed CosmosOutpost.io!
Features
- Global Uptime — this shows ALL the active validators and their successful pre-commits on the last 100 blocks (approximately 15 mins). If there were a single validator, or several that didn’t have their pre-commits sent in time for the next block proposer, then the community considers that a missed block. There are incentives involved in submitting pre-commits (to not miss blocks) in order to receive a bonus from each block proposed.
- Network Stats — this is an interactive dashboard that currently shows a 15-day summary, summed up daily as a histogram analytics set of panels. We are able to accurately calculate, on the start of day in Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT) to dermine — 1/ the number of Delegations that happened (Delegate, Undelegate, Redelegate), 2/ the number of Rewards withdrawn by delegators (including validator commissions), 3/ number of Transactions that occurred each day, and 4/ the number of ATOM tokens Sends between wallets … all in a single interactive page!
We circulated this within a targeted audience of Cosmos Validators to gather feedback and see whether we had a right product-market-fit. We did this through several online preview sessions and were pleasantly surprised to hear an overwhelmingly positive responses. Our conversations digressed into many topics around why a certain activity occurred, drawing out conclusions from some hypothesis, drawing down on a deep and long history behind the network of validators, and we learned a whole lot!
The trials and tribulations finally paid off! Within a few days, we launched the dashboard with very little design changes. It took us another couple of weeks to stabilize the services layer and most importantly the accuracy of the data, and we’re glad to announce that it’s reached a steady state in mid-September.
Special thanks to Gavin (@Figment Networks), Jack Zampolin (@Tendermint), Adriana (@KalpaTech), Kwun Yeung (@Forbole), Mira Storm (@ztake) and P2P Validator (@P2Pvalidator) for their valuable feedback!
We’ll be building out the feature sets of Cosmos Outpost and also extending it to Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol networks. Stay tuned!
Network Updates
Cosmos
Cosmos Upgrade to cosmoshub-3 … (in progress)
Through our validator, 🌐 KysenPool.io, we participated in a recent governance-approved upgrade from cosmoshub-2 to cosmoshub-3. There were several steps required to shift away from the cosmos-sdk codebase (focuses on DApp developers) and into a new gaia codebase (focuses on running the Proof-of-Stake blockchain network).
A majority of the active validator community hopped online to upgrade the network at block height 1,933,000 based on the approved governance proposal 16 to perform the upgrade. We were dialed into several developer chatrooms including Telegram and Riot.im.
Unfortunately there was an issue with the “transition” step in the upgrade. There were no issues with the new gaia codebase (which has been running for a while) but the transition step to preserve the last signed block to the new cosmoshub-3 genesis block — that part failed to generate the correct genesis.json file, when the validator hex identifiers failed to translate properly.
We have signed up to volunteer our time and resources to participate in the next attempt to upgrade to cosmoshub-3. Stay tuned.
Moving onto the next network update on Polkadot.
Polkadot
We’re now live on the Polkadot TestNet. Wait, isn’t it called Kusama?
There are several TestNets for Polkadot, and the two that we’re interested in were namely Alexander and Kusama. In early September, KysenPool hopped onto an initiative to launching our first TestNet nodes for Polkadot. The Parity Technologies team decided to participate in the Polkadot’s canary network called Kusama — this TestNet is to make available a frequently updated TestNet for validators to run. We hear that this is to help with merging stable and battle-tested code into the Alexander TestNet. Hence the Kusama network was necessary for the Polkadot community.
We are monitoring the behavior of Polkadot closely on Alexander (v0.4.4), and its canary network Kusama CC1 (initially v0.5.0). Strange things do seem to happen, the network stops sync’ing, the node crashes, but it recovers well. We’ve just recently upgraded to Kusama CC2’s network (v0.6.0).
Besides running a solid and resilient consensus protocol, we’re pleased to see the effort placed by the Polkadot team on documentation and instrumentation to surface operational datapoints using telemetry. We really do appreciate that.
Some of the KysenPool team members have been Ethereum indie miners in the past (and present), hence we’re excited to see the Parity Technologies team, from the Ethereum core-development team, building out the Polkadot Network at a steady pace.
Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months. Next up is Terra Network staked using LUNA assets.
Terra Network
Terra, also known by the Twitter moniker as @terra_money and website terra.money is gaining adoption in Korea. The co-founder Do Kwon have been kicking off a series of roadshows of late, especially during Korean Blockchain Week (which is still happening at the time of this draft).
We reached out to them as we were really encouraged about their go-to-market strategy via retailers, enabling them to offer a price advantage when paying through $CHAI assets, backed by Terra $LUNA assets with the ability to be staked at Terra’s validators. Hence we carved out some time to zoom in on bringing up the network and went live with Terra within a week. Talk about speed!
We didn’t do this haphazardly. It has the same architecture as our CosmosHub Network and we leveraged the automation processes and learnings from Cosmos and ported that know-how to operate Terra, since Terra is based on the Tendermint consensus protocol and a fork of the cosmos-sdk.
There’s been a recent run on the media around “Korea Runs on Terra”
There’s also a recent partnership with an integration with BC Card, Korea’s largest payment processor, enabling CHAI to hop onto a pre-paid debit card payment rail.
Take a peek at the following deck to see what Terra is up to via this slide deck
We’re really excited to witness the development of Terra while supporting the Terra Network at the same time! Next up is Harmony
Harmony
We’ve been watching the developments of Harmony, including Harmony’s recent launch of Pangaea — a bold attempt at reaching 1,000 validators in a recent push. This is a relaunch of a new chain that’s testing the Harmony consensus protocol at a greater scale. Really impressed by how they came up with the idea and pushed a new chain out to an audience at the ready.
The first phase has been completed
and so has the second phase
We’re awaiting the third and final phase.
The Harmony team have been able to establish partnership with a ton of blockchain-related initiatives, on a weekly, if not daily basis — we can’t really keep up with it! Checkout their Twitter handle @harmonyprotocol for more info.
They’re even building out an integration with Ledger Nano — https://github.com/harmony-one/ledger-app-one
The team has been traveling as well throughout East Asia, recently in Shanghai.
We recently published an article about them and we’re humbled to be mentioned by the Harmony team and having it well applauded by the community.
Next up, is Cardano.
Cardano
We are researching on Cardano’s Ouroboros PoS mining and have experimented with the Jormungandr self running node. There isn’t much development as of this quarter but we’re seeing quite a bit of activity ramping up and will look forward in the second half of this year to setting up a mining node with a meaningful stake from the start.
We are looking forward to this and will be excited to begin staking on Cardano soon. Stay tuned!
The following sections are announcements related to Staking networks that we have researched on, previously announced our involvements with and our decisions to hold off on moving forward on.
Algorand
We will be holding from moving forward with Algorand. We watched Algorand’s first Dutch Auctions out of Singapore and with further research, we realized that doesn’t fit our current Staking strategy, philosophy and pool of PoS networks. This will allow us to focus on other networks we have live currently.
Solana
We have high respects for the Solana team for pushing forth and receiving $20 million in funding from highly reputable investors. Their approach of scaling vertically vs. horizontally is highly unique and very rewarding to validators that can specialize in this space.
We initially thought we could pivot our prior engagements with Proof-of-Work Ethereum mining equipment into Solana and signed up for it. But due to hardware requirements that are geared towards CUDA-enabled NVidia equipment vs. a more generic set of GPUs such as those from AMD, we will not be able to justify gearing ourselves up and powering up our cabinets for new equipment of this size and scale. There were also barriers of entry from regulatory requirements that we do not qualify at this time.
Kava Labs
Due to regulatory restrictions around receiving meaningful rewards from running a Kava node, we will be withdrawing from Kava Labs for the time being. We may setup a new entity or help the Kava community with the analytical tooling by running a full Kava node, especially if we receive funding for a special project such as this, but with the limited in resources it makes sense for us to withdraw as well.
Now onwards to developments on our website!
KysenPool Website
Translations to Chinese
Since blockhains are borderless we took the opportunity to translate our website to Chinese as our first attempt at translating to another language!
The site now features a language switch at the header navigation bar
We painstakingly made sure that our communication isn’t lost in translation, focused on the important attempts at translating a brand new cutting edge technology where the nouns sometimes aren’t available yet in a non-English language such as Chinese.
The change was really comprehensive and extensive, covering all aspects of our site content, including the FAQ section and the self-help How-to-Stake Guides area and it was detailed in Chinese中文 as well.
Kudos to our nimble web team and a new Mandarin-speaking member of the team joining us to bolster our marketing front and to begin a strategy to build our marketing channels. Hence this brings us to a great segway to introduce her at this next section, Staffing!
Staffing
We’re are thrilled to have Lu Chen join KysenPool as our official Chief Marketing Officer!
Lu is a force on Twitter generating hundreds of thousands of impressions on Twitter within days of establishing herself in the Twittersphere representing KysenPool! Her background in media and event management — plus her undivided passion, organization skills and attention to detail — definitely played a huge role in enabling her to hit the ground running. She heads our social media and marketing efforts, opening new channels of communications as deemed fit.
She’s also been translating content to Chinese on our website, as well as on various blockchain news channels, including the latest developments, events and publications on digital media. She is helping as an extended outreach to the Chinese-speaking communities in the regions of China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and all around the world. She’s also establishing new footprints in social media presence within the Chinese community. We look forward to striking up meaningful conversations in the coming weeks and months with the investment community there.
Her twitter handle is @luchenlivecom1. Please join us in welcoming Lu Chen 👏👏👏 to KysenPool and the world of blockchain!
Next in line, we’ll be talking about our posts on Medium.
Publications
We finally had enough critical mass to start our own KysenPool Medium publication! We were thrilled to be able to fine a home for the purposes of telling our story in a high transparent way that are both relevant and timely.
re: KysenPool
We wrote about our “Journey of a Startup Validator” describing the trials and tribulations of setting up our first major Proof-of-Stake staking service architect-ed with a secure enterprise-grade infrastructure in mind.
re: Cosmos
Jack Chan, one of the KysenPool co-founders, was curious about what the business model is like for a pure Staking-as-a-Service. Hence in his research and writeup, he aptly named the post “The Inglourious Cosmos Validators” — surfacing how passionate validators continue to push forward to test the infrastructures with rather small incentives in the effort to build the foundations for decentralized apps into reality via Cosmos, a Proof-of-Stake implementation on the Tendermint consensus protocol.
re: Harmony
As mentioned briefly above, we published the “Boundaries of Human Persistence”, telling a personal story of the team behind Harmony. A rare view into the days prior to Harmony’s formation and how the team pushed through the impossible from Zero-to-One within a year, and continues their journey to reach the goal of a consensus protocol for the soon-to-be 10 Billion people around the world.
re: Quick Tips
Oh,we also started a “Quick Tips series on Cosmos Network operator Best Practices” series on Medium, in late August, to test what a “series” actually meant. We quickly came to realize that’s it’s a mobile-focused platform that’s rather non-intuitive to navigate and use. We shall post our notes on the series on a periodic basis but it won’t be our core focus.
Summary
KysenPool experienced tremendous growth in just the last quarter!
We are thrilled with the prospects that lie ahead of us and will be looking forward to growing our presence as a Staking Service provider.
We look forward to working with our community of delegators and partners in the staking service economy and would like to thank you for your attention! 🙇
Official Channels
Twitter: twitter.com/KysenPool
Facebook: facebook.com/kysenpool
Medium: medium.com/kysenpool
Weibo: weibo.com/KysenPool
WeChat:
