State of Stake vol. 35

Paradigm

Published in

Paradigm

21 min readOct 29, 2020

Paradigm’s biweekly update on Proof-of-Stake ecosystem, 15th October — 29th October

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 $33.4 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, and Algorand. Cosmos is currently rated 6th. Band protocol is maintaining its 8th place. In that sense, nothing changed in 2 weeks.

Current Value in Staking by Asset

Think & Stake

The Continuous Materiality Of Blockchain

by Alesja Serada

In this paper, the author explores three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. Alesja applies the concept of ‘continuous materiality’ to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. She starts from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and ends with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. Ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.

Fast-HotStuff: A Fast and Resilient HotStuff Protocol

by Mohammad M. Jalalzai, Jianyu Niu, Chen Feng

The HotStuff protocol is a recent breakthrough inByzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus that enjoys responsiveness and linear view change. It uses a clever three-chain commit rule to achieve responsiveness while the vast majority of BFT protocols are using the standard two-chain commit rule. This brings us to a fundamental question: Is a three-chain commit rule really necessary to achieve responsiveness? In this paper, the authors answer this question by designing a two-chain variant ofHotStuff called Fast-HotStuff that still enjoys responsiveness with simplified view change. Compared to the three-chain HotStuff, Fast-HotStuff has lower latency and is more resilient against forking attacks. Moreover, Fast-HotStuff can be combined with Proof-of-Stake (PoS) while still maintaining safety and liveness. In sharp contrast, HotStuff and its variant LibraBFT (which plans to use PoS) fail to have this property as malicious nodes can take over the network. In order to achieve all of these advantages, Fast-HotStuff adds a small amount of overhead information during the block proposal phase, which is only needed if the previous primary node fails. The correctness of Fast-HotStuff is established in terms of safety and liveness. The effectiveness of Fast-HotStuff is demonstrated through experimental results.

PoSAT: Proof-of-Work Availability and Unpredictability, without the Work

by Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse

An important feature of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains is full dynamic availability, allowing miners to go online and offline while requiring only 50% of the online miners to be honest. Existing Proof-of-stake (PoS), Proof-of-Space and related protocols are able to achieve this property only partially, either putting the additional assumption that adversary nodes to be online from the beginning and no new adversary nodes come online afterwards, or use additional trust assumptions for newly joining nodes.

The authors propose a new PoS protocol PoSAT which can provably achieve dynamic availability fully without any additional assumptions. The protocol is based on the longest chain and uses a Verifiable Delay Function for the block proposal lottery to provide an arrow of time. The security analysis of the protocol draws on the recently proposed technique of Nakamoto blocks as well as the theory of branching random walks. An additional feature of PoSAT is the complete unpredictability of who will get to propose a block next, even by the winner itself. This unpredictability is at the same level of PoW protocols, and is stronger than that of existing PoS protocols using Verifiable Random Functions.

A Tendermint Light Client

by Sean Braithwaite, Ethan Buchman, Ismail Khoffi, Igor Konnov, Zarko Milosevic, Romain Ruetschi, Josef Widder

In Tendermint blockchains, the proof-of-stake mechanism and the underlying consensus algorithm entail a dynamic fault model that implies that the active validators (nodes that sign blocks) may change over time, and a quorum of these validators is assumed to be correct only for a limited period of time (called trusting period). The changes of the validator set are under control of the blockchain application, and are committed in every block. In order to check what is the state of the blockchain application at some height h, one needs to know the validator set at that height so that one can verify the corresponding digital signatures and hashes. A naive way of determining the validator set for height h requires one to:

(i) download all blocks before h,

(ii) verify blocks by checking digital signatures and hashes and

(iii) execute the corresponding transactions so the changes in the validator sets are reproduced.

This can potentially be very slow and computationally and data intensive.

In this paper the authors formalize the dynamic fault model imposed by Tendermint, and describe a light client protocol that allows to check the state of the blockchain application that, in realistic settings, reduces significantly the amount of data needed to be downloaded, and the number of required computationally expensive signature verification operations. In addition to mathematical proofs, they formalized the light client protocol in TLA+, and checked safety and liveness with the APALACHE model checker.

Proof-of-Stake Networks’ Updates

Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 is getting closer every day

Designing Ethereum with Vitalik:

ETH 2.0 AMA with Danny Ryan on ‘Bankless’.
What’s New in Eth2–18 October 2020: All eyes on the eth2 deposit contract in this update from Ben — he expects it to go live “any day now” with eth2 phase 0 mainnet going live 6–8 weeks after that.
Ethereum Cat Herders Update #31: Eth2.0 Zinken launch, EIP-1559 community outreach, Berlin, YOLO v2/v3, Eth1.0 clients’ update, EIPIP, breakout room, Peep an EIP, community updates, and more.
The State of 1559 — Update 002: Another healthy EIP-1559 update from Tim Beiko that provides updates on latest core dev discussions, the implementers call and that the mainnet readiness checklist is now live.
Ethereum Gas Price Extension Updated: You can now select a gas price provider, you can now see a ‘rapid’ price option on the extension and more in this update.
Ethereum set to become first blockchain to settle $1 trillion in one year: The Ethereum network is processing more than double the transaction volume of Bitcoin, and is on-course to process $1 trillion this year.
ConsenSys collaborates with Banque de France digital euro partner: Blockchain firm ConsenSys is becoming increasingly active in the central bank digital currency space.

Check out our recently-published Defi in Ether — biweekly update on Ethereum DeFi ecosystem vol.16 full of news from the ecosystem.

Avalanche

A few days ago, Avalanche hit 600 full, block-producing validators. They’re marching toward 1,000 and beyond.
Halborn Gives Avalanche Wallet Stamp of Approval After Extensive Security Testing: Halborn, a cybersecurity team focused on blockchains, completed an extensive security audit and penetration testing of the Avalanche Wallet. Testing spanned just over 3 weeks, and the Avalanche Wallet is officially approved for its security. We funded Halborn’s aggressive, thorough attempts to crack the Avalanche Wallet through the Avalanche-X grants program–our accelerator for developers building decentralized finance applications.
Avalanche Integrates with Magic to Bring Passwordless Authentication to the Internet of Finance: Avalanche is just the third layer one protocol to be integrated with Magic, a leader in passwordless logins and more user-friendly key management in crypto securing over 20 million user authentications per month. You may know Magic better by its former name, Fortmatic. Since launching in February 2019, over 6,500 developers–including established DeFi brands like Uniswap, Aave, Augur, Bancor, and Zerion–have used its products and experienced dramatic improvements in user conversion rates, from ~10% (with browser extensions) to 84%. With Magic’s software and Avalanche’s complete support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and all of its tooling, it has never been easier for developers across the Ethereum, Magic, and Avalanche communities to launch powerful applications with frictionless onboarding experiences.
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.
Bloq Launches Support for Managed Avalanche Nodes: Users can launch a cluster of Avalanche nodes in just minutes via the Bloq platform.
MoneyDance Recap: Day 3 with Chainlink, Ava Labs, TrustToken, and Thorchain: Avalanche hosted the third day of the MoneyDance Summit, and our first day exploring how developers can use and build on Avalanche.

State of Avalanche 2020: Gabriel Cardona, Developer Evangelist at Ava Labs

‘Binance Learn & Earn’ with Avalanche is here:

Interview with Emin Gün Sirer — Founder and CEO at Ava Labs: Avalanche went live last month. In light of these events, we were thrilled to have an opportunity to interview Emin Gun Sirer, an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, Founder and CEO at Ava Labs. Emin talked about his background and research interests, past present and future of Avalanche, its inner workings and outstanding features, Athereum, Avalanche X program, DeFi, and a lot more!

Cosmos Network

Announcing the ‘Big Bang’ Stargate Testnet: The biggest event from these weeks was the announcement of ‘Big Bang’ Stargate testnet. The goal of it is to create a multichain test environment that tests, simulates, and benchmarks the post-Stargate Cosmos. As every stack of software required for Stargate upgrade has matured, the software used and procedures handled in Big Bang will mimic the real world. The Big Bang testnet will be broken down into three stages, each having emphasis on different aspects of new features introduced by Stargate, and will be operated by Regen Network, Vitwit, and Tendermint.
Cosmos Stargate Release Bug Bounty Program: For Stargate the team launches a special bug bounty program that will last through December 31, 2020. Rewards for this program will be temporarily increased from rewards in prior programs to encourage the community to actively support bug discovery. Submit bugs at the Hacker One program: https://hackerone.com/tendermint
Interchain.fm Ep 7: Tarun Chitra, Staking Derivatives: Live recording session of Interchain.fm podcast with Tarun Chitra, Founder of Gauntlet Network, where they discuss staking derivatives on proof-of-stake networks:

Daily Cosmos Outpost October 29th:

Check out our latest biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 33 covering the following topics: HackAtom V is in full swing, ‘Big Bang’ Stargate testnet announced, Stargate Bug Bounty Program released, Tendermint Fellowships introduced, Interchain.fm new episodes, IRISnet’s Bifrost Phase-1 launches, KyberSwap integrates Band Protocol, Akash to integrate Chainlink, BitSong testnet-4 is live, and more!

Interview with Peng Zhong — CEO & President at Tendermint: Our team has recently talked with Peng Zhong — CEO & President at Tendermint — on his background, Tendermint’s mission, long-term priorities and strategy, its goals and roadmap for 2020, Starport, connection with enterprises, challenges of balancing regulation with the decentralized ideology, and more!

IRIS Network

-Bifrost, IRISnet’s DeFi and Interchain Testnet has launched Phase-1 with incentivized tasks: Bifrost is the DeFi and Interchain Testnet that IRISnet launched to support the Cosmos Network’s interchain vision and bring IBC as well as DeFi features. Bifrost Phase-1 plans to mainly test the upgrade modules and new modules:

Testing Service function, including the service creation, binding, request, response, service fees withdrawal, etc.
Testing Oracle function, querying the response value of the running Oracle
Testing Record function, including creating and querying record
Testing NFT function, including issuing, minting, editing, transferring and burning NFT tokens
Testing Random function, requesting random numbers with or without Oracle
Incentivized tasks has been accordingly released based on the above modules. Rewards will be distributed in the form of NFT badges within the Bifrost testnet, and there will be three reward levels (Gold/Sliver/Bronze) according to the percentage of achievement of tasks. These NFT badges can be reflected in the upgraded IRIS Hub mainnet: developers can not only chose to hold these badges as icons of the honor, but can also transfer them to IRIS tokens.

-IRIS Foundation Launches Tech-Grants Program to Accelerate the Development of the IRISnet Interchain Ecosystem

Terra

Kava Labs

Kava 4 Gateway Launched: Featuring Harvest.io Cross-chain Money Markets and Support for BTC, XRP, BUSD, KAVA, USDX, and HARD Collateral types.

Secret Network

SecretSCRT: Privacy Tokens are Live on Mainnet! Combining the programmability of ERC-20s with the privacy of Zcash or Monero, “Secret Tokens” unlock important use cases and create new value. The first Secret Token is now live on the mainnet.
Secret Ethereum Bridge: Programmable Privacy for Ethereum and ERC-20s: The Secret Network / Ethereum Bridge is now live on testnet, bringing privacy to Ethereum assets at ¼ the cost of Tornado Cash. Learn how it works and what’s next.
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.

Kira Network

Persistence

Cosmos-Persistence StakeDrop Began October 26th. $50,000 Worth of XPRT will be Allocated to ATOM Stakers:

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.

Check out Cosmos StakeDrop Tutorial: How ATOM Holders Can Participate in StakeDrop.

Just 48 Hours over $145 million USD have already been staked:

Band Protocol:

BandChain Phase 1: Successful Mainnet Upgrade and GuanYu Launch: Band Protocol has successfully upgraded BandChain from Wenchang to GuanYu, completing Phase 1 which supports the permissionless creation of customizable data oracle scripts that can query public and permissionless data sources leveraging a decentralized network of 67+ validator nodes.
KyberSwap Integrates Band Protocol for Extensive Low Latency Price Feeds: KyberNetwork’s flagship product and DEX KyberSwap, has completed the integration with BAND to provide extensive pricing data for traders on over 92+ supported assets to safeguard users against price manipulation and detecting slippage rates.
Komodo Strategically Partners and Integrates Band Protocol into Flagship Decentralized Exchange AtomixDEX
CryptoCoin.PRO Now Supports BAND Purchase with Credit Cards and Bank Transfer in GetBlock Partners With Band Protocol To Enable Validator Node Support for BandChain
Coin98 Wallet Integrates Band Protocol Decentralized Price Oracle for Transparency and Security

Akash Network

Oasis Network

Cultivate Oasis’ ROSE garden: A yield farming-esque token distribution mechanism for the Oasis token ROSE was announced and will take place through CoinList. 0.5% of the initial supply will be given out to users locking up USDC or USDC for a month and another 1.5% to those that commit to staking ROSE for 5 months after that.
DeFi’s Breakout Moment
Build the Next Great Privacy-Enabled Application with DataHub by Figment
Oasis:

Tezos

Tezos Delphi Upgrade is now in a promotion period: This proposal is brought to the Tezos community in order to Improve performance of the Michelson interpreter and the gas model to improve gas costs, reduce storage costs by a factor of 4, and fix various small bugs.
The Baking Sheet — Issue #28: the latest news and insights from across the Tezos Ecosystem
Latest Tezos weekly:

Polkadot

Polkadot has announced plans to release a trustless wrapped Bitcoin asset called PolkaBTC in early 2021. Integrations are planned with high-profile ecosystem projects like Acala Network, Edgeware, and Moonbeam.
Injective Integrates with Polkadot to Expand its Decentralized Cross-Chain Derivatives Trading: As Ethereum and Polkadot are two of the giants in the layer-1 space today, the opportunities for the cross-chain derivatives DEX are truly limitless. Thus, Injective integrates with Polkadot to expand Injective’s decentralized cross-chain trading capabilities — it’s made possible by Moonbeam, which provides an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform powered by Polkadot that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications.
Polkadot Digest 29th Oct 2020:

Near Protocol

A validator vote has brought NEAR to Phase 2 of mainnet! As of last week, staking rewards are live.
Community Update — Beyond Launch
Announcing the winners of “Hack the Rainbow” — more than $75,000 USD in Prizes
Balancer’s DeFi Protocol is bringing Programmable Liquidity to NEAR
Getting Started With the NEAR Wallet

Solana Network

Check out videos from Wormhole Hackathon here.
Non-fungible tokens can now be created on Solana.
The first Solana NFT was sold this week on Project Serum!

StaFi

Shanghai International Blockchain Week 2020 for StaFi
StaFi DAO Enters Exploration Phase & Partners with Commonwealth and Edgeware: the StaFi team built tools that facilitate DAO governance for the community members. This marks the official entry of StaFi’s Treasury (Treasury Fund) governance in its exploration stage. In order to strike a balance between efficient development and community autonomy, they divide Treasury’s DAO governance into the two stages:

Stage 1: The DAO governance is headed by foundation governance (StaFi team), and complemented by the community.
Phase 2: Treasury will be mainly governed by the community, with the assistance of the StaFi team.

Matic Network

Validator onboarding Phase 3 continues to gain momentum:

Algorand

PlanetWatch activates innovative air quality monitoring in two key Italian cities and announces grant from the Algorand Foundation: PlanetWatch, a French startup which is leveraging the Algorand blockchain to build a global air quality ledger, announced today that it has already activated over 100 sensors in the Italian cities of Milan and Taranto.
Algorand Asia Accelerator Names 10 Blockchain Startups in Inaugural Batch: Algorand Asia Accelerator by Algorand Foundation, the steward of the world’s first open-source, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol, and Borderless Capital, the Algorand-focused blockchain venture fund, announces the launch of its program with its introductory debut of ten startups. Powered by LongHash Ventures, this year’s cohort has been selected to encourage innovation within Finance 3.0, the more open, permissionless, and efficient financial ecosystem designed and built on blockchain.
Algorand Foundation, Borderless Capital and Eterna Capital launch Algorand Europe Accelerator: Algorand Europe Accelerator launched today to support early stage projects looking to build applications on the Algorand platform. Applications are now open until 18th December 2020.

Elrond

It’s time to stake:Builders are looking forward to leveraging Elrond’s high throughput, smart contracts royalties & inexpensive token transfers to build DeFi 2.0 Sustainable structures are built on strong foundations. It’s time to stake.

The Elrond Mainnet, Visualized — Track The Most Important On-Chain Activity On Flipsidecrypto’s Interactive Reports: The public nature of the Elrond blockchain makes it possible for anyone to track its activity in realtime. The task of capturing all the relevant information is not trivial and the resulting data sets can be overwhelming. Elronf joined forces with Flipsidecrypto to provide everyone with a clear overview of what is happening on our mainnet.The results of the analysis are available for all interested parties, you can see them here: https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/cooperative/elrond
Elrond Adds The Rosetta API Framework Developed By Coinbase To Accelerate Protocol Development And Ecosystem Growth: Rosetta is an open standard purposely built for blockchains that acts as a common language between different systems, which brings us two important advantages:

-Third-party developers can easily integrate with Elrond

-The developers can focus on advancing Elrond protocol & tools

PlotX To Prototype an Iteration Of Their Prediction Markets Using The Elrond Blockchain: PlotX & Elrond are exploring the deployment of PlotX DeFi Prediction Markets on Elrond. PlotX is a non-custodial prediction protocol that enables users to earn rewards on high-yield prediction markets.
eGold Is Now Available For The 5 Million Users Of TrustWallet, The Official Binance Crypto Wallet
eGold Listed on Binance-Powered Tokocrypto, The Leading Regulated Digital Assets Platform In Indonesia
eGold Now Listed On Crypto.com’s Exchange

Icon

Gangnam Testnet Opens (ICON 2.0): Gangnam testnet is powered by Goloop (ICON 2.0) and supports Java SCORE. Additionally, ICON 2.0 includes a Java virtual machine that enables Java SCORE, eliminating the need for audits by the Foundation.

ICON Newsletter #34 — Get Out and VOTE:

60%+ of the circulating supply remains staked vs. 38.4% at the end of 2019. This continues to show long-term confidence in $ICX.
Weekly wallet growth remains consistent but we believe this will increase as many new use-cases for $ICX go live in the coming months.
ZenSports, the mobile peer-to-peer sports betting marketplace announced the launch of funding, betting, and trading in $ICX.
BalancedDAO releases 3Q report including releasing smart contracts on testnet.
Project Nebula pre-sale starts soon. Follow the project here.
ICONLOOP developed MyID ‘Zzeung’ was the #2 financial app and #5 app overall for iOS in Korea within one month of launching.
KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) introduced ‘Jeju Relief Code’, a Jeju tourism quarantine system created by ICONLOOP and Jeju.
Attention Community: Join in the governance discussions on the forum where the team is discussing IISS 3.1 among other important topics regarding the future of the ecosystem.

NuCypher

The NuCypher mainnet went live on October 15th. As of today and according to these stats,> 1700 nodes are active and > 530 million NU are staked. Staking returns in the network depend on multiple variables.
Bison Trails and Figment Networks published guides suggesting various staking strategies based on different variable configurations.

COTI

IOST

Orbs

Locking the team tokens into staking contract without receiving staking rewards: The team has voluntarily elected to place the entire team pool under the same locking mechanism that applies to all staking participants in the Orbs Proof-of-Stake Universe. The team pool will be transferred from the current address to the same or an identical staking smart contract as used by all Guardians and Delegators. In order to maintain decentralization, alignment of economic interests and fair distribution, the team tokens will not be participating in any PoS elections and will not share in the PoS staking rewards divided among Delegators and Guardians. If any individual Orbs team member (current or former) decides to exercise its right to use or sell part of their personal token allocation in the future, they will be subject to the same two-week cooldown period as all Guardians and Delegators. All movements of tokens to “cooldown” will be visible in the staking smart contract.

Mina Protocol (formerly Coda Protocol)

Mina Protocol developer O(1) Labs raises $10.9 million in new funding: O(1) Labs, the team behind the development of Mina Protocol (formerly Coda Protocol), has raised $10.9 million in fresh capital. With this funding in place, O(1) Labs plans to build a developer community for Mina in Asia prior to its mainnet launch.

Filecoin

Filecoin Liftoff Week is over and you can now access all the presentations and talks on the official Youtube page.
The Filecoin Network is now LIVE
The Filecoin network represents a new way to store and retrieve data peer-to-peer — secured by cryptographic proofs to verify data is uniquely stored and replicated over time. With Filecoin, anyone can participate as a storage provider, monetize their open hard drive space, and help store humanity’s most important information.
How Filecoin Supports Video Storage
Filecoin launches film and audiobooks from Internet Archive: When Filecoin, their cryptocurrency-fueled decentralized storage network launched recently, it was no surprise they called it Filecoin Liftoff. In the payload of that Filecoin rocket are treasures from the Internet Archive:

14,613 Free Audiobooks from LibriVox (20 terabytes worth)

17,000+ Films from the Prelinger Archive (17 terabytes worth)

The Graph:

The Graph token sale is live: The Graph, an indexing and query network for public blockchains has been in the making for nearly three years. Their mission is to make Web3 data accessible and searchable through open APIs, called subgraphs.

After proving product-market fit already with over 7 billion queries across popular Ethereum projects such as Uniswap, Aave and others in September alone; The Graph is now in the process of conducting an incentivized testnet with around 200 node operators called indexers, and over 1,000 curators, which signal high quality subgraphs to indexers in order to earn rewards. There is a curator program that you can find here which requires carrying out minor fun tasks. In addition, the GRT community token sale is ongoing and saw over 20,000 registrants.