Jan 25, 2020
State of Stake #12
11th January — 25th January
“Given the wide variety of Proof of Stake blockchain projects coming to market in 2019/2020 and the burgeoning related infrastructure, it is reasonable to expect the overall market for staking and related services to grow.”
- Stuart Young, a researcher at blockchain analytics firm Smith + Crown
Market overview
Staking Market Cap raised with Global Market Cap on 14th January, and now has slight fluctuations.
Staking data
According to the graph, the Average Total Staked sharply increased on 17th January, reaching a peak of 332%. An average on this indicator is about 60%.
Locked in Staking by Asset
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
- Ethereum — Ethereum 2.0 will launch in 2020 with the Casper Proof of Stake Consensus Mechanism. There will be a smooth one-way transition where users can move to the Ethereum 2.0 PoS Chain with much better scalability, but won’t be able to move their tokens back to the old Proof of Work Chain. The shift of Ethereum to PoS is one of the key events of 2020 which will put the staking industry into the spotlight for the broader masses.
- Polkadot — a heterogeneous multi‑chain technology that will be powered by Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS). The main vision of Polkadot is to enable blockchain interoperability on both asset and smart contract level.
- Cardano — a long-awaited candidate in the Proof of Stake Space. The Blockchain will be governed by the Ouroborus Consensus mechanism and is expected to go live in Q2 2020.
- Celo — seen as the blockchain of stable value currencies (stablecoins), aiming to be made available to everyone with a mobile phone.
- Crypto.com Chain — offers a Wallet that is connected to Visa Card that allows spending crypto with real-time exchange rates anywhere in the world.
- Matic Network — a blockchain agnostic layer-2 scaling solution. Matic Network is currently running an incentivized Testnet where participants compete for a total of 3 million MATIC tokens (~$45k).
- Telegram Open Network — The ICO of the infamous messaging platform Telegram has raised $2 billion in 2017. The sharding Blockchains Proof-of-Stake Approach reaches consensus through a variant of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance. The Team seems to operate mainly in “stealth-mode” and does not give explicit details on their blockchain design or launch yet.
- NEAR Protocol — introducing a new Proof of Stake mechanism where the annual reward is initially set to 5%. The Network Inflation via Block Rewards is dynamically adjusted based on the number of Network Rewards (Transaction Fees). NEAR is currently running the Stake Wars incentivized testnet program. Participants are rewarded with 1% of the initial mainnet token supply.
- Solana — a layer 1 PoS blockchain with a pBFT-derived consensus mechanism, offering support for 50,000 TPS. Such scalability is achieved via certain calculated trade-offs, Proof-of-History (each validator maintains its own clock and does timestamping of events) and the fact that Solana is multi-threaded.
- Ava — The underlying consensus mechanism of Ava is Avalanche which has a probabilistic safety guarantee. Every newly proposed block is broadcast to a number of nodes, at random, and the question is posed to determine which blocks should be considered valid. The nodes then indicate their preference. Using the responses from the sample group will allow the insight to see which version the network is leaning towards before confirming and broadcasting produced blocks. The first proof-of-concept deployment of its subnetworks functionality has been launched in October 2019 under the name Athereum and represent a full copy of the Ethereum Blockchain.
- Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ — learn everything you wanted to know about coming PoS implementation.
- Crypto 2020: Staking Market Growth and Dangers — Staking is set to grow in 2020, with analysts expecting more PoS projects to come online in the new year. Along with some obstacles.
“In 2020, there will be more places to put your money than money to be put to work, driving down the real median staking yield further, making staking less profitable and undermining the security of a large number of PoS networks.”
- Lawrence Lundy, the head of research at Outlier Ventures.
With support from the Interchain Foundation, a working group was formed to produce a research report focused on approaches to liquid staking. The goal is to take a holistic look at the design space, evaluate the different approaches with respect to clear criteria and understand their impact on network security and sustainability. They will focus on aspects such as:
- impact on network security
- centralization risks
- impact on governance
- competition between protocols
- risks and benefits of financialization
- staking in a cross-chain context, e.g. moving assets to / through low security zones, bridges & peg zones
- impact on shared security & launching new chains
The publication of the final report is planned to happen by the end of April.
This is a recording of the first Liquid Staking Working Group call that took place January 15, 2020. The Liquid Staking Working Group is an Interchain Foundation funded research effort led by Chorus One to explore the different ways staked assets will be tokenized and the implications on the sustainability of the Internet of Blockchains. The first call was attended by about 30 participants and served as an introduction to the working group and research scope, as well as to the topic of liquid staking itself.
Recent Staking Updates
- According to the stakingrewards.com USD value locked in staking approaches 7 billion USD, while the Staking Market Cap (valuation of all projects that have staking mechanism) is currently at 11.2 billion USD.
They prepared the list of projects sorted by the USD value of the staked tokens. According to the list, the top 7 projects, which are EOS, Tezos, Cosmos, Algorand, Dash, Synthetix and NEM have at least 100M value of USD locked in Staking each. These projects in total have 4.5 Billion value of USD staked which is approximately 65% of all USD value locked in staking. They calculated the ratio of staked coins to the circulating supply as well. The leaders are Cosmos (98.6%), Livepeer (95.6%), Synthetix (88.3%), Kava(86%) and Tezos (85.8%)
- Elrond is currently running a pre-staking program to earn up to 31.9% annualized rewards until the mainnet launch. 17.92% of all eligible tokens are already participating.
- Terra’s current annualized reward rate climbed up until up to 17.54%. The rewards are derived from transaction fees, taxes, and seigniorage within the network. 22.39% of the total token supply is already participating.
- NuCypher Come and Stake It (CASI) Incentivized Testnet — Phase 1 of incentivized testnet (Core Staking and Node Operations) begins January 20th.
- Phase 1 (Core Staking and Node Operations)
Estimated Timeline: January 20 — February 7 — Because the start of this phase coincides with Chinese New Year, they will keep it open until at least February 7. Phase 1 is the foundation for future phases and will require you to complete a variety of tasks like staking, launching a node, accepting policies, and performing re-encryptions.
- Phase 2 (Advanced Staking and Node Operations)
Estimated Timeline: February 3 — February 17 — This phase will focus on more advanced staking commands like dividing your stake, initiating a stake wind-down, toggling re-staking of rewards, and more. It will also help you fully understand all the various staking configurations and how they interact with each other.
- Phase 3 (WorkLock)
Estimated Timeline: February 17 — February 20 — This phase will test the WorkLock token distribution mechanism.
- Phase 4+ — As they progress through Come and Stake It, they may introduce additional phases.
- Contributor Phase (Technical Contributions) — this phase will last for the entirety of Come and Stake It and is unique in that it doesn’t have narrowly-scoped tasks. Instead, it is more open-ended and designed to reward high-impact contributions to the NuCypher Network.
+ 21 grants have been issued to 16 new projects
+ Tezos grant requests are up ~140% while grants issued are up ~50% since last cohort
Integration + Kadena team is also working towards interoperability solutions with Polkadot.
{ICON}
- iBriz-Iconosphere has deployed a faucet for the Pagoda testnet.
- Korean financial regulator used ICONLOOP for its operations.
- ICONLOOP CEO JH Kim held a speech at MIT AMP.
{EOS}
- LiquidApps plans to integrate the DAPP Network on WAX.
- EOS network instability has been almost solved.
- EOS VC has announced grants program for EOSIO projects.
- Block.one launched an EOSIO testnet.
{Tezos}
- Dexter, a decentralized exchange based on the Tezos protocol is nearing completion.
- Tezos Rio released an SDK for Tezos allowing developers to easily call smart contracts.
- OpenPy makes the first open source release of its IDE.
- Nomadic Labs released Albert, an intermediate smart contract language.
{Cosmos}
- Cosmos Network has surpassed 1 million of user accounts.
- Coinbase lists ATOM on its exchange.
- BitSong ecosystem launches DEMO of its services.
- operated by 40+ independent validators
- ~500ms breakneck speed blocktimes
- A similar network saw Ø transaction rates of 9k TPS with max bursts up to 60k TPS
- Wanchain 4.0 Goes Live with Support for Private Chains. The project announced the release via a blog post on Jan. 20. This upgrade allows Wanchain to expand its interoperability objectives by providing support for private blockchains, also known as enterprise or consortium blockchains. This version will confront some of the obstacles facing private blockchains, including the possibility that a blockchain may feature permissioned accounts and offer different levels of privacy. Furthermore, each company that uses a private blockchain may configure it differently. The latter has been a significant challenge for standardization.
- Wanchain’s Proof of Stake: A consensus mechanism drawing from Cardano’s Ouroboros, with over 50 validators from 30 + countries, more than 20 million $WAN staked & 1000 + tps. See post.
- Check the recent updates on PoS Networks, created by Paradigm Fund:
