“Diversification preserves wealth, concentration builds it”
- Altcoin investors, January 2018
Market overview
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
- Check out the Panel Speech of the Founder Staking Rewards & CEO Blockdata GmbHat the 5th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai last month. Talking about Staking Rewards new metrics, scores and features coming to the platform soon. Also touching some thoughts about the History and Future of PoS
- Polkadot uses NPoS (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) as its mechanism for selecting the validator set. In NPoS you can either be a validator or a nominator, to maximize chain security. Read more about staking in Polkadot.
- Twitter Staking Threads — Some of the most interesting staking-related discussion on Twitter from the past two weeks presented without comment:
- Is PoS less wasteful than PoW?
- Transaction fees in PoS lower real inflation for stakers
- Staking-as-a-Service is a bad business model
- Staking Economy meetup including representatives from Solana, CodaProtocol harmony, forbole, Skalelabs, LivepeerOrg, Matic, Althea, NuCypher, IncognitoChain Aion, and POKTnetwork:
- Great comprehensive slide deck on the state of PoS by Stake.fish.
- Paradigm Citadel successfully achieved Tier 2 in Iost Token Reward System (see post):
- 15 Blocknet: Building the Interchain with Arlyn Culwick. Arlyn Culwick is one of the pioneers exploring the design of the internet of blockchains. With Blocknet, he is working to realize this vision of the interchain. In this podcast episode, Brendan and Alwyn explore the API ecosystem in Web2, the interoperability technologies that Blocknet is building, as well as details and challenges of their design. The conversation specifically covers the differences between the Cosmos model and Blocknet’s approach, how to move digital assets across chains, DEX scaling and liquidity, as well as the XRouter Beta, a product to orchestrate contracts on any chain to enable interchain dapps.
- 16 Solana: Composability at Scale with Anatoly Yakovenko and Eric Williams
This episode recorded during Berlin Blockchain Week is a discussion between Anatoly and Eric from Solana and Brendan and Felix from Chorus One. The conversation covers Anatoly’s and Eric’s backgrounds and how the founders got together to build Solana. The second part of the conversation then mainly focuses on discussing the value proposition of a blockchain system that can scale without the need for sharding. Finally, the episode goes into Solana’s approach to creating a developer ecosystem, as well as the experience of building a validator community leading up to the incentivized testnet competition Tour de SOL.
Celo is a Proof-of-Stake network focused on usability and financial inclusion in emerging markets. The team is combining innovations that aim to financially empower unbanked people in developing economies. In this episode Brian talks to Marek Olszewski, founder and CTO of Celo Labs. The episode specifically tackles Celo’s staking and full node incentive design, but also goes into how Celo built a mobile-first smart contract platform. This includes a lightweight identity protocol that maps phone numbers to public keys, a protocol to create stablecoins through overcollateralization, economic abstraction to allow fee payments in different tokens, an innovative light client protocol, as well as pilot programs that the team of 40 are currently working on in different parts of the world to test out their technologies.
- AVA Q&A with Kevin Sekniqi. Check it out if you’re interested to learn more about the unique capabilities of the AVA platform.
- Introducing Complete Knowledge (CK) proofs, that allow a user to demonstrate that they *really* have control of secret data, and the data isn’t shackled by SGX or MPC. Implications on communication protocols, smart contract bribery prevention, ZKPs, etc.!
- Tezos “Babylon 2.0” Protocol Upgrade Incites Confidence by William McKenzie
“Tezos is a self-amending cryptographic ledger capable of amending itself and implementing new features onto the protocol through a formal on-chain amendment process. Through this process, you can effectively port the best parts/features of other projects and implement them on Tezos to improve the protocol and benefit from it — while incentivizing developers to contribute code to the core protocol through invoicing otherwise known as “inflation funding”.”
- Aragon’s first presentation of the new AragonOneTeam built with ethermint and cosmossdk:
“There should be a plan to build capacity for a diverse and growing set of stakeholders to participate in governance before establishing an elaborate governance system.”
At Figment Networks, they support Proof-of-Stake (PoS) projects from the earliest stages of pre-testnet system design to end-user adoption. And everything in between: running testnets, the mainnet launch, governance leadership, community contributions, feedback and education. They build software and tooling (Hubble).
Figment’s goal is to make long-term, high-value contributions and engagements with the projects they select. These are some of the most important things that they consider:
- THE BUSINESS CASE
- THE TEAM
- THE PRODUCT
- THE COMMUNITY
- THE TECHNOLOGY
“From the TQuorum: Global Summit. Cryptium Labs co-founder Adrian Brink presents their work on programmable staking, a feature that enables different keys to have different capabilities.”
- Awa Sun Yin tweeted “One of the biggest enemies of governance systems is voter apathy. Wanted to point out how high participation of bakers in tezos on-chain governance is: 83.06% (quorum was 74.70%). This is a 4-step on-chain process that lasts ~3 months, in which bakers have to vote 3 times.”
Latest Staking Update
- Buterin went on a research spree during Devcon and published six research posts related to Eth2.0 covering the transition, composability of DeFi applications, a proposed update to the sharding design, and 3 other topics. Eth2 shard chain simplification proposal by Vitalik Buterin:
- There is no longer (much of) a concept of a persistent shard chain. Instead, every shard block is directly a crosslink. Proposer proposes, crosslink committee approves, done.
- Shard count is reduced from 1024 to 64. Shard block size is increased from (16 target, 64 cap) to (128 target, 512 cap) kB. Total capacity is 1.3–2.7 MB/s depending on slot time. Shard count and block size can be increased over time if desired, eg. eventually going up to 1024 shards / 1 MB blocks after 10 years.
- Many simplifications at L1 and L2: (i) much less shard chain logic required, (ii) no need for layer-2 cross-shard acceleration as “native” cross-shard comms happen in 1 slot, (iii) no need for DEX to facilitate paying txfees across shards, (iv) EEs can become much simpler, (v) no need to mix serialization and hashing anymore
- Main drawbacks: (i) more beacon chain overhead, (ii) longer shard block times, (iii) higher “burst” bandwidth reqs but lower “average” bandwidth reqs
The Babylon upgrade, initially proposed by Cryptium Labs & the research and development group Nomadic Labs, affects the networks’ consensus algorithm, smart contract functionality, and its governance mechanism.
One of the changes makes it easier to develop smart contracts by making the code of complex contracts simpler and cleaner.
The reward system for bakers (validators) has changed to incentivize them better to include all available endorsements. Endorsements are what confirm that a newly constructed block was valid.
Lastly, the upgrade simplifies the delegation process. Previously, users had to generate a specific type of address (KT1) that allowed them to delegate their funds. With Babylon, users now can delegate from their public key (addresses starting with a tz1, tez2, or tz3) and not be forced to generate a new contract with a KT1 address.
- Registration is open for Stake Wars, NEARProtocol’s incentivized testnet program! Compete with other validators on the NEAR testnet for rewards.
Horizen is designing Sidechains and a Sidechain SDK to allow developers and enterprises to quickly and affordably spin up their own blockchains. The next sidechain engineering milestone is just days away! Check out the answers for most important questions!
- Celsius Network version 4.0 — Check out the latest updates and newest features now available on the Celsius Network app.
- Binance adds staking support for Harmony.
This action is a lightweight staking initiative to get Binance users familiar with Proof of Stake blockchains, without having to set up their own nodes to fulfil minimum staking amounts.
Current hot topics on Cosmos Forum:
- Request for new testnet participants to test export/migrate functionality + new binary.
- Cosmos Hub 3 Upgrade Proposal E.
- Community pool Grant request.
- Cosmos validator diversification reward.
- Cosmos Hub 3 Upgrade Post-Mortem
Cosmosnaut ecosystem updates:
- Comdex’s proprietary settlement platform is based on Tendermint.
- Lunie announces Browser Extension.
- Cosmostation open sourced their Cosmos JavaScript Library and introduced Keystation, an end-to-end encrypted key manager for dApps built on Cosmos SDK.
- Codechain proposes randomized leader election using VRF to mitigate possible denial-service-attacks on Tendermint.
- Kysenpool introduces CosmosOutpost.
- Agoric launches testnet for Cosmos interoperable smart contracts. Sign up here.
- Chainflow receives ICF grant for developing validator alerting and monitoring tools.
- Daniela and Riccardo from CommercioNet explained their motivation to kick start The Cosmos Guardian.
- Summa partnered with ICF to bring cross-chain communication libraries to the Cosmos ecosystem.
- Forbole is building out Desmos, a social network chain based on Cosmos SDK. Sign up here for early access to their token presale.
- B-Harvest proposes 2 peer-to-peer feature enhancement proposal.
- View the implementation progress of the bi-directional peg-zone between Cosmos and Ethereum (codenamed “Peggy”).
- Stake Capital announces their Crypto-Fiat On-Ramp project for Cosmos at Cosmos Guardian meetup in Devcon Osaka.
- stake.fish announces grant.fish, a 100% comission validator with 99% fees going to Cosmos ecosystem builders.
- Bity will be decommissioning its Cosmos Validator node on 11 November 2019. All Bity delegators are advised to undelegate by 20 October 2019 or redelegate their stake away.
- Content blogs of projects built on Cosmos SDK: i) Althea Network, ii) Tichex & iii) Regen Network, and last but not least..
- Aragon Chain explains the rationale why they intend to switch over to Ethermint (powered by Tendermint) as compared to other upcoming networks — they are awaiting for their community to approve AGP-106 in the upcoming Network Vote. You can find their feasibility report on Polkadot vs. Cosmos here.
Listing announcement: Kava will be on Binance! Binance research report.
After a long period of hardwork, the IOV team finally launched the IOV Name Service Mainnet, alongside i) Weave SDK, ii) IOV-core, a multi-chain library to build chrome extension, iii) Neuma, chrome extension and iv) Web Wallet and a Hardware Ledger Application for IOV Name Service. StakeWith.Us is proud to be one of the genesis validators for IOV.
- EXCHANGE STAKING
The landscape of exchanges staking on behalf of their customers is maturing. Binance announced their staking platform. So far only a few staking tokens that require relatively little node operations and don’t have slashing are part of the offering (e.g. NEO, XLM, and ALGO), but it probably won’t take long until slashable tokens like XTZ and ATOM will be stakeable with Binance as well.
Another recently announced custodial staking solution is KuCoin’s Pool-X, which aims to bring liquidity to staking tokens that have a lockup period. The team did an AMA describing how this platform will work also mentioning that they plan to decentralize this offering long-term. For a comprehensive overview of the state of Staking-as-a-Service offerings, check out the slides of JK from stake.fish from a recent event in Seoul here.
- FAILED COSMOS HUB UPGRADE — A bug in the migration code resulted in a rollback to the previous software version during a planned hard fork upgrade of the Cosmos Hub. The community of validators managed to coordinate and relaunch the chain, read Stake Capital’s post-mortem for a complete timeline of events. As a consequence, the planned upgrade needs to be rescheduled through the governance process. Overall, this episode both highlights the coordination capabilities of the Cosmos community, but also the need for better testing, improved documentation and the merits of an automated governance upgrade process.
- REGEN AMAZONAS UPGRADE — Shortly after the failed Cosmos Hub fork, Regen, a network being built with the Cosmos SDK, completed their Amazonas upgrade. It used an automatic upgrade module that Regen is building. The upgrade went very smoothly and resulted in only a few minutes of downtime.
- CODA TESTNET — Coda just launched the second phase of testnets, join their Discord channel to participate. The first phase concluded successfully with 90 nodes participating. Coda is the first succinct PoS blockchain and the first production implementation of Ouroboros Genesis consensus.
- MATIC ECONOMICS — Layer-2 scaling project Matic released details on their staking economics together with a teaser of their plans for an upcoming testnet competition.
- INCOGNITO VALIDATOR — A Kickstarter campaign that launched this week. An interesting development from the perspective of validating going mainstream. In addition to running a validator using the hardware being sold via Kickstarter, operators can also run virtual nodes and monitor them with a mobile app. Chris tried the process and was up and running in less than 20 minutes.
DevCon Updates
- ARAGON COSMOS CHAIN — Ethereum project Aragon focused on creating and managing decentralized organizations is going to launch its own Proof-of-Stake chain using the Cosmos SDK toolkit. They made this decision following a feasibility reportcarried out by Chainsafe comparing multiple scenarios and the state of development of Polkadot versus Cosmos.
- OPEN & CLOSE LIBRA — Devcon also saw the announcement of OpenLibra, an initiative to fork Facebook’s Libra and development project to port the MoveVM to Tendermint (Movemint). Additionally, some of Libra’s most prolific fintech partners left the association (eBay, Mercado Pago, Stripe, Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa).
- ATHEREUM — AVA Labs announced their friendly fork of Ethereum (EVM + current state as an AVA subnetwork with 99% ETH and 1% AVA). Check out the Chorus One Podcast episode and AMA with Kevin Sekniqi if you’re eager to learn more about AVA and their feature-specific subnetworks.
- ETH2.0 STAKING CALCULATOR- A community-led UI to calculate returns for staking once Ethereum Proof-of-Stake goes live teased during Devcon. Looking forward to seeing the live version of this.
- COSMOS GUARDIAN EVENT — A Cosmos-focused event with around 50 attendees. Topics included an Iris Network introduction, Adrian’s Brink validator business plan talk, and a wide-ranging panel discussion. During the event, Sikka also announced their fee increase fee from 0% to 3%. The Cosmos Ocean party happened afterward. It brought together various members of the community including Tendermint team members, validators, delegators and other projects building on the Cosmos SDK.
Other Updates
- TRUSTWALLET STAKING PLATFORM — Trustwallet released their staking platform with support for Cosmos and Tron. Through the platform you can stake with a curated set of validators using Trustwallet or other wallets that support WalletConnect. In the near future, Ledger and Trezor, as well as other PoS blockchains (Tezos, Waves, IoTeX) and DeFi applications (Compound) will be supported as well.
- NUCYPHER FINAL COUNTDOWN — Proxy re-encryption network NuCypher announced their $10.5mn “professional staking” round in which a variety of companies including PoW miners (Bitfury, Bitmain) participated. These players committed to locking their acquired stake (8% of the initial NU supply) for 2 years. NuCypher is in public testnet phase and will host an incentivized testnet followed by their WorkLock token distribution and mainnet launch ~Q1 2020.
- STAKING SECURITY MODEL — Bison Trail’s Viktor Bunin wrote about the cost of attack comparing PoW and PoS making the point that attacks in PoS are more likely to result from hacks and thefts than from someone buying up the staking token.
- COLD STORAGE INTERACTIONS — Coinbase detailing how they build a solution that allows their customers to participate in MakerDAO governance from cold storage. Including key management recommendations for protocol designer of blockchains that require participation (staking, governance,…).
- NETWORKS NOT APPS — Chris published a post discussing how staking networks are building networks more like apps instead of networks. He makes the case for staking protocols to add DevOps resources. His take is that this will create a more balanced development approach and bridge the gap between project teams and their validators.
On Wednesday, October 9 a high-severity security vulnerability in Tendermint that impacted the security patch released in Tendermint versions 0.31.9 and 0.32.5, and Cosmos SDK version 0.34.8 was reported through the Tendermint Bug Bounty program. This issue was reported at 3:31 UTC, with triage beginning immediately among core development teams who were operating in North America, Europe, and Japan.
The Bug
In the patch for Cosmos Mainnet Security Advisory Magenta, the core development team initially chose the simpler of two options outlined in the initial advisory to remediate the code flaw that would have enabled an attacker to launch a Denial of Service attack against public sentry nodes on the Cosmos Network.
In Secret_connection.go at line 126 in v. 0.31.9 of Tendermint, a nil check was used where a type assertion was required per best practices in Go, and the handler was not wrapped in a panic rescuer to prevent the nodes from panic.
Investigation and Response
Within a couple of hours of cutting the initial security release, core developers discussed the first patch for the issue and had identified the risk that it may not sufficiently resolve the issue. Within an hour and a half of receiving and verifying the vulnerability report, the triage team continued previous monitoring of the network for exploitation. At the time of this post, they are unaware of any incidents of exploitation.
Remediation
After validating that the initial patch for Magenta was flawed, members of the core development team discussed technical solutions to better resolve the issue. The team chose to rewrite the patch following best practices in Go that include using type assertions and opted for additional mitigation by wrapping all p2p handler interactions in goroutines to prevent panics from terminating the Tendermint process to resolve the issue.
After writing, reviewing, and testing the code comprising the patch, the Tendermint team made a patch available in versions 0.31.10, 0.32.6, and the CosmosSDK team made a patch available in version 0.34.9.
Vulnerability Coordination
To quickly remediate this vulnerability, the triage team chose to fast-track the release of this patch as a hotfix in lieu of waiting until Monday, October 14th to cut a new software release. In this case, they have chosen not to observe their standard 24-hour pre-notification window for a security fix, and they began communications with impacted parties after the patch was made available to the public.
The issue will be fully remediated once service providers patch their software, and they recommend updating to the latest, most secure versions of the CosmosSDK and Tendermint.
Retrospective
After discussing the coordination and timeline of this issue, the core triage team has identified several opportunities for action among stakeholders that would prevent the recurrence of a similar issue in the future in the future.
As part of an internal retrospective, the core developers of the CosmosSDK and Tendermint will be improving their software review and testing processes to prevent errors in code like this one from making it into production software.
- The core developers who were involved in writing the initial patch will review best practices in Go, with a focus on type assertions.
- The testing suite for CosmosSDK and Tendermint will be tuned to improve detection of code flaws, and to prevent them from being introduced into production environments.
- Regen Network Crosses $1MM Raise Led by Interchain Foundation and Announces Chorus One Partnership and Completion of Techstars Sustainability Accelerator Program. “Regen Network is realigning the economics of agriculture by creating a global marketplace and contracting platform that allows brands and institutions to compensate farmers and ranchers around the world for their positive ecological impacts. By creating a new class of ecological financial instruments, Regen Network is harnessing $35 billion (and rapidly growing) market that will supercharge efforts to combat climate change. They are bullish that Regen Network’s technological platform and business model will make combating climate change a lucrative endeavor for global businesses and land stewards.”
