“Proof of stake is finally going to be real.”
— Vitalik Buterin
Market overview
Current Value in Staking by Asset
- Staking Yearly Yield is the annualized yield for staking at current supply levels, as calculated by stakingrewards.com.
- Real Staking Yield is the annual yield expected from staking, after accounting for the network’s inflation. Real Yield is calculated as the nominal staking yield adjusted for the inflation rate.
- Token Staking is the number of tokens currently staking on the network, as reported by stakingrewards.com.
- Network % Staking is the % of current circulating supply that is currently staking, using data provided by stakingrewards.com.
- 5 Years Yield is counted like compound interest.
Think & Stake
- Staking Rewards Interview with stakefish. stakefish is running validators on Cosmos, Tezos, IRIS Network, Kusama, Loom Network, The OAN, Kava and also securing Chainlink, Algorand, Storj and BOS. In total, stakefish is currently facilitating staking for approximately $65M worth of assets.
Key takeaways:
- Decentralization in PoS Networks is a metric that is individually predefined within the economic token model
- Exchanges may never be able to capture the highest rewards
- Proof of Stake Networks are more security-efficient
- Base-layer protocols should strongly consider building Ethereum bridges early on, to take advantage of DeFi projects.
- The strategies taken to bootstrap demand for a protocol will ultimately determine which survive in the long-run
- How to stake Radium (RADS) — Staking Rewards is providing this tutorial in collaboration with the Radium Team.
- Anthem, a multi-network staking platform, designed by ChorusOne, can be used to track & manage POS portfolios and earnings! You can create a personalized staking dashboard for any Cosmos address with detailed data & charts to cover your ATOM staking portfolio. They are in the process of completing the data history for the first two Cosmos Hub versions and to add support for other Proof-of-Stake networks.
- Some time ago, Asish from Matic Network presented their liquid staking design to the Liquid staking group. Join the conversation in the Liquid Staking Working Group.
- Polkadot Ambassador Spotlight Series: Bryan Chen — CTO of Laminar Protocol, Bryan Chen, discusses their two Polkadot projects, Acala Network and Laminar chain, their plans to deploy parachains on Kusama, and what he does as a Polkadot ambassador.
- Ryan Watkins’ Twitter thread:
- In a world increasingly losing faith in institutions, how power and wealth is distributed within public blockchain networks may prove decisive. Proof-of-Stake networks run the risk of creating an entrenched class that could stifle future adoption.
2. Proof-of-Stake blockchains will forever be burdened by their initial token distribution. This issue is especially true for PoS blockchains with tightly coupled on-chain governance.
3. With staking made cheap and easy through staking-as-a-service providers, not only do initial token holders have a perpetual claim to a blockchain’s seigniorage, but they also have a perpetual claim to a blockchain’s decision-making power.
4. In PoS you gain a proportional right to all future issuance simply by virtue of having invested into the network at launch. The percentage of future issuance you capture has a floor at the percentage of the network you own. Competition cannot bring this claim down to zero.
5. This claim on seigniorage could be worth the trade-off if it brings greater security. But when on-chain governance enters the picture this perpetual claim on new issuance begins to entrench initial PoS token holder bases, opening Pandora’s box for rent-seeking behavior.
6. With fixed power this class of stakeholders can influence the direction of the network into perpetuity. What does this imply for public blockchains’ promise of independent property rights if governance is captured? Find out more in his article.
- Vitalik Buterin Talks ETH 2 and the Future of Money — One-on-one with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, talking ETH 2, the future of money and much more.
- Ethereum’s Buterin: Proof-of-Stake is finally going to be real — an article by AMB Crypto related to Vitalik Buterin’s interview above.
- You can check the status of Harmony’s $ONE mainnet and open staking testnet via the link.
- Building Cardano with IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson — There are very few people who have created a top 20 cryptocurrency. Charles Hoskinson is one of them. In this conversation, Charles details his path through a failed project with Dan Larimer, an unsanctimonious departure from the founding team of Ethereum to ultimately creating Cardano. Charles details how he structured Cardano “like a DARPA project” with a deep focus on R&D and why they’re concentrating heavily on development in Africa. He lays out his philosophy and strategy for building a network that will one day no longer be reliant on its founders and how he views the overall competitive landscape. He also clears the air on an infamous tweet.
- How do Randomness Beacons based on Threshold Signatures work? Back in 2015 DFinity made the community extremely excited with their design of a randomness beacon that was leveraging BLS threshold signatures to produce a randomness output that is both unbiasable and unpredictable. As of 2020 building, an unbiasable and unpredictable randomness beacon remains extremely challenging, and very few protocols have one live. In this post they describe the complex protocol of using threshold signatures to generate random numbers in very simple terms.
- Exploring Passive Income in Cryptocurrencies: Will 2020 be Year of Staking? Read this captivating article by Vasily Sumanov, researcher of decentralized systems, and learn more.
- IOST Blockchain Explained Part 2: Network Participants. The blockchain industry offers numerous cryptocurrencies to stake, and all of them have different annual returns as well as staking rules. In the first part of this Blockchain Explained series, the Everstake team has described in detail technological aspects of the IOST ecosystem, and in this material, you will find more information regarding the network participants that play key roles in the consensus mechanism.
Upcoming Staking Events
- 25th April 2020 — Tezos Baking Tour: Thailand by Tezos Southeast Asia & Blockspaper. Tezos Southeast Asia’s next stop in the Tezos Baking Tour is Bangkok, Thailand! Join TSA and Blockspaper and learn why you should be part of the Tezos community and how you can earn a passive income through validating (a.k.a. ‘baking’) on the Tezos blockchain through this hands-on workshop. Bring down your laptop and interact with their developers at the workshop where they will guide you step-by-step.
Recent Staking Updates
- Introducing the Ren Alliance — The Ren Alliance is a consortium of DeFi companies and/or projects that are helping secure, develop, and utilize RenVM.
Foundational Roles — Three Facets of the Ren Alliance:
- Utility — Integrating RenVM or adding renBTC, renZEC, etc.
- Security — Increasing RenVM security via Darknodes
- Development — Helping develop RenVM
{Tezos} — Contributor: Alexander Eichhorn, Founder at Blockwatch Data
- Staking: Custodial staking on centralized exchanges continues to grow massively. At the end of Feb 2020, 126.8M tez (19.4% of all staked coins, 15% of total supply) are held by custodians, up +27% (30.6M) from January. Network-wide staking is still on the rise with +3.2% (20M) to reach a new ATH of 79.14% (655M). In perspective, only 2.9M new tez were minted last month. Staking rewards are at 6.48% annually, yield above inflation dropped to 1.44%.
2. Custodians: Growth of custodial staking services is impressive. With 8.4% of the network stake, Coinbase has become the largest staking provider in Tezos within the past 4 months, directly followed by Kraken with 4.2%. Only the Tezos Foundation manages more stake (26.7%). Smaller custodians are on decline, although Chinese exchanges OKEx and Huobi grow as well. Zero-fee staking at Binance shows impact on traditional bakers who either shut down like Airfoil or begin offering zero-fee promotions. However, custodial growth is slowing down. After all there are only 128M (15%) more tez unstaked, about the same amount that has been moved on-chain this month.
3. Adoption: Testnets still outshine the smart contract situation on Tezos Mainnet. Calls on Mainnet have almost doubled compared to January (+7,587), the Atomex DEX saw some limited traffic (33 swaps) and early experiments with FA1.2 tokens have started. Babylonnet remains the most active network with a new record of +3,516 contracts and +74k calls this month, but note that these are all test contracts, often deployed and called by automated CI systems. The diversity of unique contract types (identified by their call interfaces) grew by +157 to 530 in total. 8 out of the top 10 contract types are generic programming examples. The most prominent contract people work on is DS Token (used by Securitize and Elevated Returns) with 111 total deployments and 6,652 calls in February.
- Regen Network Community Validator Update — check the link for more!
A) Regen Network Testnet 3000: Kontraŭa Testnet
Primary Goal: Testing CosmWASM
Status: In devnet now
Estimated Testnet Launch Date: March 9th pending devnet results
Testnet Focus:
- Load testing
- Adversarial testing
- Upgrade testing
- Prepping for GoZ
- Cross-chain smart contracts and transactions
B) Kontraŭa Testnet Incentive Structure:
- Rewarding early participants (starting rewards calculation from time of first vote, instead of time of first block)
- They want to reward more secure configurations, they will take some inspiration from Celo and run a light version using Linnus to test configs for security
C) Algradigon-1 Scores Published.
- Bison Trails will allow users to set up Polkadot validators on its platform.
- The company has been running validators on Polkadot’s trial network, Kusama.
- Polkadot is moving toward a mainnet launch.
An official announcement can be also read here.
- Major Milestone Achieved: Polkadot and Chainlink Integration Using Substrate. This is the first blockchain ecosystem outside of Ethereum that Chainlink will support. By being the first Substrate-based oracle solution, Chainlink is set to become the first and primary oracle provider for all Substrate-based chains and eventually the entire Polkadot network. Polkadot developers can use Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks to quickly connect their smart contracts to all the inputs and outputs they need to run securely and reliably end-to-end, while avoiding the major pitfalls associated with trying to deploy your own oracles, such as long time delays, additional expenses, and even fatal security flaws. (Integration Demo Video.)
- Cosmos Governance February Update:
- Proposals are in the works! Sunny’s (All in Bits; Sikka) proposal to change slashing
- GWG Month 2 community call (21 people) joined to discuss gov work sustainability
- Participation in the Cosmos GWG exceeds Month 2 targets in all areas but one-looking for more wallet operators
- The Cosmos ‘Community Spend Best Practices’ doc has been published with templates
- Follow the ‘Cosmos Parameters Wiki’ and best practices development here
- Q2 funding for governance work
- Community discussions are happening!
- Terra validator KysenPool launches Harvest wallet & crypto finance platform Harubank offers 15% returns on KRT
- Many exchange staking services launch for Luna: Coinone launches luna daily staking — read here; Kucoin launches Luna staking — read here; GDAC GROW launch read here.
- Jigu SDK has launched for Terra
- Chai updates
- TezTracker Update #5 — quick overview of TezTracker, where you will find what has been done by the Everstake team so far.
- SKALE Network announced a partnership with ConsenSys Codefi, a huge step forward for SKALE and a big moment for proof of stake networks.
- Tezos holders voted in favor of implementing Carthage upgrade:
+ upgrade will increase gas limit by 30%, allowing developers to run more complex applications
+ latest poll experienced a significant decrease in participation
- Participation rates in Tezos governance has declined over the last 3 voting periods — infographics by Messari:
One explanation for this decrease could be the rise in staking-as-a-service. Both Coinbase and Binance did not participate in the Carthage vote on behalf of their users. PoS participation could continue to decrease until exchanges develop viable voting solutions:
- The Celo Validator Community: Security Audits and Lessons Learned — cLabs working on Celo created a validator challenge before the launch of the Celo platform to aid in validator operational experience and to establish security best practices for the Celo community. The Great Celo Stake Off (“TGCSO”) ran on Baklava, Celo’s incentivized testnet. TGCSO operated in phases, with each phase focusing on a different part of the protocol or infrastructure.
- NEAR Community Update: February 28th, 2020
A) An introduction of Stardust, which is one of the projects that is building on NEAR. The Stardust API just went live, and within a few weeks of its launch, they are already supporting over 2,000 players daily. If you are creating a game, collectable art house, or any other business with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), you can use their API to help you leverage blockchain technology in under 10 lines of code.
B) The engineering work on the unbiased randomness beacon is in full swing. They pushed the cryptographic primitives and are almost done with the integration. It will take time to stabilize the beacon, and the initial launch of NEAR will use a simpler beacon, in which block producers have one bit of influence. The simple beacon is done and pushed.
C) The team is largely in the stabilization mode, preparing to restart Stake Wars. In the past two weeks they have fixed a variety of issues:
- Distribution of reward based on the stake, not seats
- Fixing the pricing of storage
- Using the correct epoch for approvals on epoch switch
- Fixing an inconsistency in the epoch manager
- Fixing a bug with empty method names
Tezos
- Madfish solutions make an update of Thanos wallet.
- Ryan Lackey participates on Tokyo FinTech podcast
- Solidity to LIGO transpiler challenges
- Tezos Ukraine presented Tezos technology on the Ukrainian CBDC Conference organized by NBU.
- LIGO Lang releases new update on Tezos smart contract languages
- Tezos Ukraine keeps working towards Tezos-based CBDC in Ukraine
- Payzos releases the first demo of its Tezos payment service for WooCommerce
- AirGap released the new version of its Beacon Wallet
- TezosCommons publishes a descriptive material related to Tezos advancements in the STO Space
- Tezos margin trading became available on Kraken and Kraken Pro
- Cryptonomic plans to make asset tokenization available on Tezos soon.
ICON
- Bank of Korea Develops Blockchain-Based Bond System
- Everstake launches a small bug bounty program
- ICON foundation has published the February update on the Development Roadmap
- Keep track of ongoing ICON projects using the special overview tool
- Bohdan Opryshko from Everstake released the ICON monthly recap
- RHIZOME: The P-Rep community meeting will be shifted to a bi-weekly schedule
- ICX Station publishes the ICON Deconstructed material which describes in detail network specifics at the basic level
EOS
- BlockArcade became live on WAX
- Block.one works on a new technology called DISK which allows storage of larger amounts of network data.
- Agora Innovation gets funding from FinLab EOS VC
- EOSIO smart-contract with EVM invoking capability challenge is still ongoing
- Ethereum smart contracts are 10 fold faster when running on EOS
- GO Crytpo Wise publishes the blockchain functionality comparison material for NEO and EOS
- EOS Nation announces that Matthew Darwin will be their representative on the Open City Network
Cosmos
- Now Cosmos can be used to buy things on Amazon, Bestbuy and other through gift cards
- Bitcoin Suisse publishes an ATOM staking guide
- Cosmos India successfully finishes the 36-hour hackathon at VIT University
- ATOM staking becomes available in Magnum Wallet
- Cyber releases an explainer material related to their blockchain network
- MESG Network Explorer has been released.
- Tendermint releases an update on State of All in Bits Inc
- Cosmos India will participate in Parallax Hackathon.
- DAI Soft Staking Official Rules — Cash Back Investment Program for DAI (Dai) Holding — check the rules of KuCoin new release! KuCoin has focused on fulfilling the mission to bring more value to the users. To maximize their benefits holding DAI (Dai) on the platform, KuCoin has launched the DAI Soft Staking Program.
- Check the recent biweekly updates on PoS Networks, created by Paradigm Fund:
