State of Stake vol. 36

Paradigm

Published in

Paradigm

20 min readNov 13, 2020

Paradigm’s biweekly update on Proof-of-Stake ecosystem, 29th October — 13th November

Global Market Overview

The current Staking Market Cap (valuation of all projects that have a staking mechanism) is now about $34.0 billion USD, while two weeks ago it was $35.5 billion.

During the last 2 weeks Average Total Staked % and POS Dominance were both hovering around 21%.

Now, the leading projects by locked in staking are Polkadot, Cardano, Tezos, EOS, Cosmos(!), and Algorand. Avalanche is currently rated 7th.

Current Value in Staking by Asset

Think & Stake

Why Proof of Stake (Nov 2020)

by Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik elaborates three key reasons why PoS is a superior blockchain security mechanism compared to PoW: “But even if the risks do turn out to be significant, they seem to me to be much lower than the immense gains that PoS systems get from their far greater efficiency and their better ability to handle and recover from attacks.”

Design a Proof of Stake Based Directed Acyclic Graph Chain

by H Tian, H Lin, F Zhang

The concept of blockchain comes from the Bitcoin system where transactions are organized in blocks. However, blocks are not necessary. Researchers have found ways to use a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to build a chain without blocks. Currently, these chains still rely on some kinds of proof of work, which is not environmentally friendly. The authors here design a DAG chain with a proof of stake for independent nodes in the Internet. They split nodes into two categories. One is client nodes that produce only normal net transactions (NNTs). The other is chain nodes where active chain nodes are selected periodically based on their stakes and aspirations to participate in the chain management. Active chain nodes produce chain transactions (CTs) that may include hashes of NNTs. CTs form the DAG chain, which helps an ordering process of the NNTs. With the ordering ability of transactions from client nodes, the chain naturally supports global state transition. With a brief analysis, they found that the theoretical performance limitation of the chain depends only on the bandwidth and computation power of chain nodes.

Proof-of-Stake Networks’ Updates

Ethereum 2.0

Proof-of-Stake scheduled to launch December 1st

Ethereum 2.0 is getting closer every day! The biggest event from these weeks was the release of the Beacon Chain’s deposit contract.

$5M staked in eight hours as community cautiously backs ETH 2.0: The Ethereum team released v1.0 of the Eth2 specs, including the mainnet deposit contract address — 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa. The launch of the deposit contract introduced the ability for users to deposit 32 Ether required to participate in staking. ETH 2.0’s beacon chain genesis will take place on Dec. 1 if at least 16,384 deposits of 32 ETH each are received. That’s a total of 524,288 ETH, worth about $200 million
Eth2 quick update no. 19: A very quick update from Danny Ryan that runs through the release of the deposit contract.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #58 — “Mainnet Announced”: Biweekly update from PryLabs discussing the eth2 phase 0 mainnet announcement, the Medalla testnet, the usual development updates and more.
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #32: Yolov2 is launched, Binary trie format, Medalla deep dive, EIP-1559, and other Ethereum community updates.
What’s New in Eth2–31 October 2020: The usual round of updates from Ben including coverage of phase 0, Medalla, the eth2 roadmap, and links to important resources.

Check out our recently-published ‘Defi in Ether’ — biweekly update on Ethereum DeFi ecosystem vol.17 full of news from the ecosystem.

DeFi in Ether: 1inch launches v2, Keep3r Network v1 beta now live, UMA announces developer mining…

Biweekly update on Ethereum DeFi ecosystem vol.17, 27th October — 10th November

medium.com

Avalanche

Introducing the AvalancheTipBot: AVAX Tips Now Available on Twitter, Telegram, & Discord: AvalancheTipBot empowers the Avalanche community to recognize, encourage, and reward each other with AVAX.
Avalanche Partners with Encode Hack Club for a 10-Week Hackathon for Academia: Encode Hack Club will run for 10 weeks from December 14 through January 15–with $7,500 in prizes.
MoneyDance Recap: Day 4 with Genesis, Securitize, Brave, Lightning Labs, and More: On Wednesday, October 21st, Avalanche hosted the fourth day of the MoneyDance Summit, featuring experts across both decentralized and institutional finance. This post is a brief overview of each segment, with a few highlights and a hyperlink to their video.
Avalanche is achieving decentralization at an unprecedented pace. Less than 2 months since mainnet launch, there are already 600 full, block-producing validator nodes on the network. Join the ranks, stake your tokens, and earn AVAX rewards now:

Cosmos Network

Five Reasons Why Cosmos Validators Want to Participate in the Stargate Simulated Upgrade by Zaki Manian
The Road to Ethermint: Ethermint is an implementation of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), built using the Cosmos SDK, that runs on top of Tendermint Core’s BFT Proof-of-Stake consensus engine. ChainSafe is currently wrapping up work on all of the pre-testnet deliverables outlined above. They have run an initial benchmark on Ethermint which yielded some impressive results, finished work on the Web3 Personal API and will release an article on this work shortly. The Ethermint team is also working on upgrading the SDK to Stargate, its largest and most important update since Cosmos went live. More info to follow.
Ethermint Supports Web3 Personal API: Follow along as the team explains their completion of Ethermint’s most recent deliverable.
Congratulations to the winners of HackAtom V: HackAtom V has come to an end. Here are the winners.
Introducing Cosmos Jobs Board: Discover how Interchain Foundation intends to support the Internet of People in addition to the Internet of Blockchains.
ICF Update — Nov 3rd. Q3 Funded Proposals; UX Working Group; Cosmos Conversations; ICF Invests in ixo; ICF Sponsors ZKSummit; Confio Launches CosmWasm Dapp Examples; Chainsafe Completes New Milestones on Ethermint; Informal Systems Extends Service Agreement to Include Proposer Based Timestamps and Tendermint P2P in Rust; Eventivize Launches the First Token Drop Event.

Daily Cosmos Outpost November 12th:

Check out our latest biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 34 covering the following topics: Starport v0.12 is here, Althea successfully tested the Ethereum <-> Cosmos bridge, HackatomV has ended and judging is on the way, Interchain Conversation II registration open, Starname integrates Band Protocol, IRITA Hub has launched at BSN, the Oasis ROSE Garden is live, and more!

Cøsmos Network: Starport v0.12 is here, Althea successfully tested the Ethereum <-> Cosmos bridge,

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 34, 20th October — 3rd November

medium.com

IRIS Network

Terra

Kava Labs

Hard Cross Chain Money Market To Use Chainlink Price Reference Data: Kava Labs announced that HARD Protocol, the cross-chain money market built on the Kava blockchain is now using Chainlink’s widely used price reference data oracles from the Kava blockchain.
Announcing “The Hard Protocol” — a rebranding of Harvest.io

Secret Network

Secret Network Ecosystem Update: October 2020: Read a comprehensive update on what is happening across the Secret Network ecosystem, including product and technical updates, 5 episodes of Sharing Secrets, potential community-spend proposals, and new charters by leaders of the various committees.
Secret NFTs: Privacy for Verifiable Goods and Experiences. Read about non-fungible Secret Tokens, which enable verifiable representation of unique items and events, such that ownership and transactions are private by default.
Secret Bids: Trust-Minimized Auction Contracts: Follow this detailed walkthrough by one of Secret Network’s dev committee leaders, Baedrik, who explains the ins and outs of a unique bidding mechanism that introduces new opportunities for all kinds of content creators, on and off the grid.
Introducing The Puzzle Committee: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help shape Puzzle to meet the needs of the Secret Network as they evolve. Join the Puzzle Committee today.
Citadel.one Overview: Secret Network: Secret Network ($SCRT) Is Now Integrated To Citadel.One.

Kira Network

Persistence

-StakeDrop is a distribution mechanism which allows holders of PoS network tokens to acquire XPRT simply by staking on their favorite networks.

-Networks included in the StakeDrop campaigns are: Cosmos Network, Terra, Kava Labs, IRISnet, Polkadot, Matic Network and Tezos.

-1% of the total XPRT token supply (1,000,000 XPRT) is allocated for StakeDrop rewards.

-Reward amounts for specific participants depend on a variety of factors, including which network/s they are staking on, whether they are delegating to an AUDIT.one validator (higher rewards) or a different validator, and the length of their participation in each campaign.

Band Protocol

Band Protocol October 2020 Community Update: In the recap, the team covers the successful mainnet upgrade, notable updates on BandChain and oracle scripts as well as nine partnership developments for the month.
Starname (IOV) Integrates Band Protocol to Reliably Price Decentralized Usernames
LunaDEX Strategically Partners With Band Protocol to Secure Solana-Based Decentralized Exchange
Haven Protocol Integrates Band Protocol To Secure Decentralized Private Assets

Starname

Integration Announcement: Band Protocol: Starname announces the integration with Band Protocol, the cross-chain data oracle platform.
Partnership Announcement: Savitar
Partnership and Integration Announcement: Aleph.im

Akash Network

The Akashian Challenge Phase 3 Teaser

E-Money

E-Money Mainnet Upgrade Successful: The upgrade occurred at 13:00 UTC time on 4 November at block height 630964 and took 38 minutes all in all. All features operated exactly as expected. The headline features are as follows:

NGM tokens are now transferrable
Updated token model, including a buyback and burn on NGM tokens
DEX update allowing market orders: Good Until Cancel (GTC), Immediate or Cancel (IOC) and Fill or Kill (FOK).

Oasis Network

Tezos

Tezos upgraded at block 1,212,417. Tezos ‘Delphi’ Upgrade Slashes Gas Costs by 75%.

Licensed Swiss Crypto Bank Launches Tezos Trading and Staking: Sygnum Bank, a digital assets company licensed in Switzerland, has launched services for Tezos, its first listing of a proof-of-stake blockchain token. The company is regulated as a bank by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), and offers a range of digital asset services with a focus on the B2B market.
Tezos Community Update — November
Latest Tezos weekly:

Polkadot

Polkadot Decoded, the first official Polkadot gathering since the network’s launch, will take place on December 3, 2020.

Polkadot Digest 13th Nov 2020:

Near Protocol

The winning submissions for the Hack the Rainbow ETH/NEAR bridge hackathon have been announced
TrustToken Bridges TUSD to NEAR
How the NEAR Foundation is Supporting Network Decentralization
NEAR joins FlamingoDAO
NEAR Developer Research: Validating the NEAR DevX Tech Stack — Round 2
Balancer’s DeFi Protocol is bringing Programmable Liquidity to NEAR: One of the aspects of Balancer is giving liquidity providers an opportunity to earn passive income from swap fees when they stake their assets into liquidity pools. This gives token holders across a variety of assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NEAR (soon!) the ability to earn a return by holding their tokens in order to provide liquidity in the market.

Solana Network

Announcing the Solana Foundation Delegation Strategy: This is the first post in a three-part blog series on initiatives the Solana Foundation is undertaking to enhance the network’s censorship resistance over the coming months. This post announces the Foundation’s new stake delegation strategy, while the following two posts will cover the launch of inflation and staking pools, respectively.
Audius, the ‘Decentralized Spotify,’ Is Moving Part of Its Service to Solana Blockchain
Decentralized music app Audius announced it will migrate its content management system over to Solana’s high-speed blockchain from an Ethereum sidechain operated by the POA Network that runs on a set of trusted validators.
October Newsletter:

Wormhole Bridge released connecting Ethereum with Solana
Audius Brings Decentralized Music to Solana
USDC-SPL is live with $25M already in circulation on Solana
Wormhole Hackathon Commences with 1,000+ builders participating
NFT Marketplace Launched on Serum
Wormhole Events with Compound, Aave, Curve, Balancer, and more

StaFi

Official Release of StaFi Staking Liquidity Solution for Ethereum 2.0
StaFi Protocol Monthly — October Community Updates: StaFi has made exciting progress in October. In terms of technology, the StaFi network has been upgraded to v0.3.2. The Ethereum Bridge has also been developed and is now in the security audit phase. It is expected to be launched soon, bringing more quality assets into the Ethereum ecosystem. Community work is becoming more sophisticated. StaFi has released a validator incentive program and launched a governance tool to open the way for community self-governance. The MEME design campaign has also attracted many enthusiastic participants. Furthermore, they have also reached a strategic cooperation with Chainlink, an excellent oracle provider in this sector, to create a new staking derivative solution.
StaFi Warriors Program

Matic Network

Matic welcomed Distributed Town (DiTo) to the Matic ecosystem: Bringing DAOs to Matic Network. DistributedTown aims to be the new standard in Collaborative Economics. It’s building a network of interconnected, self-sovereign communities (DAOs). They have also introduced ERNE Finance a decentralized financial platform to farm, mint and lend.
NFTFest held airdrops, quizzes and speakers from Open Sea, Aavegotchi, Terra Virtua, Zed run, Arkane, and many more! The action went here:

Algorand

InfoCert_it, the largest Certification Authority at European level, recently announced a partnership with Algorand to create a digital identity ecosystem based on blockchain.
Uncommon Creative secures Algorand Foundation Grant: The team announces that Uncommon Creative has secured an Algorand Foundation Grant in the category Applications and Use Cases. Uncommon Creative is a new project aiming at disrupting the current freelance platforms and empowering remote workers with trustless tools for securing contracts, guaranteed transactions, and quick resolution of potential disputes.
Mentat Leverages Algorand for SAP Connector, Paving the Way for Enterprise Blockchain Integration, Receives Foundation Grant Award: Mentat Innovations, a leading artificial intelligence and blockchain solutions provider to global enterprises, announced that it will develop an open source SAP connector and Enablement API to the Algorand blockchain.
AlgoSigner, the First Algorand Wallet Extension for Chrome, is Upgraded to a New Version: PureStake, a leader in secure and reliable blockchain infrastructure, has released a new version of AlgoSigner in the Chrome Web Store. This update adds significant functionality for Algorand Standard Assets (ASAs) and enables users to perform more types of transactions in addition to payments. Users can now transact with a large variety of asset and token types from the universe of available ASAs when interacting with AlgoSigner-enabled dApps. These capabilities are a key component for building DeFi applications on Algorand.
Update on Algorand Foundation Leadership Team: Update on a change to the Algorand Foundation Leadership Team
Cudo’s are the latest Algorand Foundation Grant recipient: Since the Algorand Foundation launched its Grant Program earlier this year, many developers and innovators around the world have been eager to participate. After thorough review and selection, we are delighted to announce that Cudo is the latest recipient of an Algorand Foundation Grant.

Elrond

PlasmaPay Integration To Enable New Payments, Fiat Gateways and DeFi Opportunities For eGold: The team announces a long term partnership with PlasmaPay, which will make eGold a part of an array of products for payments, fiat gateway & DeFi. PlasmaPay is building a blockchain ecosystem that will enable users to onboard the cryptocurrency space easily and participate in DeFi activities across multiple chains from a single interface.
Top Romanian Investor Joins Staking Agency As Partner, Injects Capital To Strengthen Elrond Network Global Infrastructure: Romanian investor Florin Cojocaru joins Staking Agency as Partner. The move is set to strengthen our staking infrastructure provider, which thus becomes the biggest Elrond partner in Romania.
The New Financial Order at Internet-Scale — Beniamin Mincu on National Television: Beniamin recently sat down with Andi Moisescu, who is a renowned media person that has been heading many popular shows on national television, is an active online influencer and a judge on Romania’s got talent.

Elrond Mainnet Milestones

The Elrond network has seen tremendous growth over the last few months.

Some impressive milestones since genesis:

The Elrond mainnet is only 100 days old and has already surpassed 1 million transactions from 40,000 accounts!
There are now more than 2,000 validators supporting the Elrond network.
50% of the eGold supply is locked for staking with yields between 10% to 36% APR.
Launched the Elrond IDE, making it easier than ever to deploy DeFi and Web3 apps to the Elrond blockchain.

Icon

Icon newsletter #35:

ICON Development Roadmap Update — October 2020: Gangnam Testnet Release and Update on Contribution Proposal System.
60.7%+ of the circulating supply remains staked vs. 38.4% at the end of 2019. As mentioned, this continues to show long-term confidence in $ICX.
Weekly wallet growth remains consistent and the team believes this will soon begin to increase as many new use-cases for $ICX go live in the coming months (some covered in this newsletter).
Healthy signs of community activity with Forum Total Posts/Comments noticeably increasing recently (+5% in the past couple of weeks).
Project Nebula, a new NFT game, kicks off with a BANG with 99 planet NFTs selling out in 4 minutes. The first planet sells for 5,009 ICX.
The STIN — Styrian Gin Distiller’s Cut is finally available to order. Special limited 999 bottles can be verified for authenticity on the ICON network.
ICONbet’s DAOlottery jackpot surpasses 100,000 ICX.
New $ICX listing on Bitcoin.com Exchange.
Gangnam Testnet goes live + October Roadmap Update
ICONLOOP’s Jeju Island project gets featured on VentureBeat.
ICON appears on Korean government’s NIPA Survey.
Lots and lots of ICON videos and podcasts.

NuCypher

Version 4.1.2 is here
NuBLS Threshold Signature Library: the team announces the release of NuBLS, a BLS signature library that implements threshold protocols like threshold signatures (TSS) and a Proxy Re-Signature (PRS) algorithm designed by NuCypher called Penumbral (paper in-progress).
NuCypher proposal #0 — Unused Sub-stake Removal: It’s NuCypher’s first official DAO-driven upgrade. Everyone currently staking NU is eligible to participate in the inaugural validation process. This upgrade will reduce the daily costs of node operation, and more specifically, sub-stake management. Currently, configuring or editing your sub-stakes can lead to inactive, or ‘unused’ sub-stakes remaining in your sub-stake array.

COTI

CVX 4th Claim has been Successfully Complete: The fourth claim period is over and we are now happy to say that this distribution round of the CVX tokens has been successfully completed for the COTI holders, both for COTI native holders and liquidity providers on Uniswap.
CVX 3rd Claim has been Successfully Completed
US Elections — Fear and Uncertainty as reflected in the CVX index
The CVX Index is now LIVE

IOST

Zilliqa

Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — October 2020 A.K.A ’10 awesome things that happened in 10/2020’:

Just hours after non-custodial staking went live on 14th October, Zilliqa crossed the 1 billion $ZIL staked milestone.
The team recorded another big achievement shortly thereafter: 2 billion ZIL were safely staked by 19 October. Over 25% of the circulating supply is now staked.
Zilliqa announced a partnership with leading crypto-friendly OTA Travala, to integrate ZIL as Payment Option on the booking platform. Following the integration, token holders across the globe will be able to purchase over 3 million travel products using ZIL, and can benefit from up to 40% in cost savings as well as exciting discounts and rewards when booking with Travala.com.
The tech team adeptly resolved the minor bugs that popped up following the staking launch. Following a mainnet upgrade to version 4.6.2, they were able to regulate the reward frequency, bringing it back to approx. once a day.
Zilliqa Podcast Episode 5 was released, featuring Ivan Poon from Switcheo Network. Watch this interview to learn more about Zilswap, Switcheo’s TradeHub and how they’re making tremendous progress on the path to further decentralising the network!
Solid ecosystem growth was recorded; the team is already seeing the effects of the new circular model kicking in!

The Pillar Protocol, an algorithmic stablecoin dApp managed by people around the world who hold Zilliqa’s governance token, gZIL, was launched
Zilflip gaming app is now building on Zilliqa. The testnet has been launched here!
ZILHive partner Coinrule raised $450k from a successful crowdfunding campaign
Mintable’s brand identity is getting a makeover!

7. Ceres, a graphical interface tool that will help enrich the developer experience on Zilliqa is under construction.

8. Zilliqa was featured in top broadcast and online news outlets the past month. Hear the experts speak about non-custodial staking, the approach to DeFi, Zilswap and much more on the Wild West Crypto show, Futurized, Base Layer Podcast, CrowdFund Insider and Cryptonites.

9. For all these developments and much more, Zilliqa community activity and support has once again helped us hit a great score on LunarCRUSH’s Galaxy Score, and Zilliqa was listed among the Top 15 coins. By month end, the social listening site recorded 1,893,762 total $ZIL engagements.

10. 10 seed node operators are now on-board in the non-custodial staking programme: Zillacracy, Moonlet, Viewblock, Shardpool, eZIL, CEX.Io, Zilliqa Research, staked.us, Zillet, Atomic Wallet.

Orbs

Orbs PoS V2.5: The Age of Guardians is here. V2.5 contains a variety of crucial improvements:

Automating reward distribution on the protocol
Guardians will be able to determine the level of distribution to Delegators
Delegators will collect their rewards on their own schedule
Streamlining validator node operations
Additional parts of the PoS system will be moved to Ethereum
A minimum self-delegation requirement imposing
A more sustainable reward rate
Adopting a new architecture for reducing gas prices based on the state of the art contract design patterns that are gaining popularity in yield farming contracts

The official launch date is set for the 30th of November 2020.

Orbs Update November 2020:

DeFi Ecosystem Grant Program
Locking of Team’s Tokens
KBW 2020
State of the Network
Orbs on CoinGecko
Media Highlights
Meet the Orbs Team Vlog

Mina Protocol (formerly Coda Protocol)

Mina Protocol has surfaced some ideas for developing a voting system that leverages zero-knowledge proofs to implement privacy and tamper-proofing and challenged developers to build it.

Filecoin

Introducing Slingshot Phase 2: In this blog post, we are introducing Phase 2 of the Slingshot competition. If you are interested in earning FIL rewards for storing valuable data on the Filecoin network, Slingshot is for you.
Highlights from Shanghai Blockchain Week: Looking back at the week in Shanghai with the awesome Filecoin community in China.
The Intersection of Filecoin and DeFi: Highlights from a conversation with Stani Kulechov of Aave, Corbin Page of ConsenSys Codefi, and Loong Wang of Ren Protocol about Filecoin’s position in the DeFi ecosystem.
Slingshot Phase 1 Recap: Phase 1 of Space Race 2: Slingshot is in the books. Slingshot is a two-part community competition for storage clients and developers that rewards the storage of real, valuable, and usable data onto the Filecoin network. The goal is to onboard 10PiB of valuable data to the Filecoin network. Teams are rewarded for storing more useful data, as well as building interesting, novel, and functional user interfaces (UIs) or applications associated with the data they store.
The Filecoin API from Infura allows developers to connect to the Filecoin mainnet and build their own applications. There is an ongoing beta, which you might gain access to.
Metamask and Protocol Labs are working together to build a Filecoin Snap, enabling a variety of Filecoin features and permissions for MetaMask and Filecoin users.
Filecoin miners, developers, and users can now access Ethereum tools and integrate with decentralized finance via ConsenSys’ product suite.

The Graph

Introducing The Graph Council: The mandate of The Graph Council will be to make sure The Graph continues to be a stable foundation for applications that are designed to run forever, while also fulfilling The Graph’s vision of becoming a global open API layer for decentralized data. In addition to technical governance, The Graph Council will govern over The Graph Foundation community grants from the foundation’s GRT allocation.