Week in Review #1 — Simply Staking
Hello! This series will be a weekly recap of what went on in the networks we participate in and any updates from our team.
Simply Staking
Simply Staking is a blockchain service provider operating out of Malta, which is one out of various teams in Simply VC. The Simply Staking team within the group operates validators on 33+ Proof of Stake networks, these include validating on the Cosmos Hub from genesis, Oasis, Emoney, Akash, Kusama, Polkadot, and more. We provide support to both startups and major Web3 players, and power DeFi as a Chainlink oracle node operator across most EVM chains. We operate infrastructure out of our own Tier 3 datacentre, with various backup sites across the globe, and a policy against the use of cloud providers.
Updates
REStake
Akash is now authz enabled. Our Simply Staking validator has REStake enabled and has been set up for auto-compounding!
Check it out here: https://restake.app/akash
We now have a total of 15 chains that have the auto-compounding service enabled for our delegators. These are Akash, Agoric, Bitsong, Cosmos hub, Crescent, Gravity Bridge, Juno, Lum Network, Osmosis, Persistence, Regen Network, Stargaze, Dig Chain, Desmos, and Umee.
Our Simply Staking Community Discord is now available!
We have a new community Discord server, conversations pertaining to different topics can now be split into separate channels. The Telegram channel will run in parallel.
Come chat with us: https://discord.gg/Kpzc58Gu9a
PANIC — New Release v1.1.0
We are happy to announce that Cosmos node monitoring and alerting has been released within PANIC. Node operators can now see alerts and problems with their setup in real-time in our tailor made PANIC-UI
Find the latest release here: https://github.com/SimplyVC/panic/releases/tag/v1.1.0
Evmos network relaunch
The Evmos network relaunch was a success. Since the network was relaunched there have been way over 6 million transactions on-chain, which is significant!
The mainnet launch was purposely delayed one day as the team wanted to make sure that the launch would be 100% rock solid. The dry run was important for the mainnet release as this gave validators some time to prepare the genesis and their machines, so much so the test run succeeded and all went well. This served as a reassurance that the network was stable, all the proposals required were able to be created and that the EVM functions.
Moreover, despite a fully functioning chain, many participants eligible for the airdrop still cannot claim their tokens yet, due to the IBC channel between Evmos and Osmosis needing to be unfrozen. This was scheduled to happen on May 3rd, however, due to unforeseen circumstances, it requires additional steps in order to be accomplished.
A network upgrade will be scheduled soon in order to expedite a fix for this issue. Three more proposals have been pushed out since.
Note: Staking rewards will only be enabled once everyone is able to claim
Stargaze
The team has announced that the Marketplace Beta will be launching as early as next week.
The marketplace will have incentivized operations that governance-selected operators can run. Some of these include:
- monitoring and reporting when NFTs are transferred
- identifying stale bids
More details on this will be communicated shortly by the Stargaze team.
Osmosis
The Osmosis community has chosen its canonical bridge, Axelar has won the vote and will be integrated into app.osmosis.zone. What this means is you will be able to deposit Ethereum assets from the Osmosis frontend itself, by means of the Axelar bridge.
Several listings on Osmosis: Galaxy (GLX), Block (BLOCK), Fetch.ai (FET), AssetMantle (MNTL), Injective Protocol (INJ), Racoon (RAC).
Juno
Juno: Proposal #21 — Veritas Proposal Upgrade launched after it was found that the Unity Upgrade sent the ‘gamed’ funds to an alternate inactive address. Proposal #21 aims move those funds to the originally designated smart contract address. If motion passes will take place at Block 3035000 (May 10th ~18:58 GMT)
Pylons
Pylons are preparing for Testnet and have conducted their first round of Validator onboarding. We are proud to be one of the 70 that are currently helping with the Testnet.
https://www.pylons.tech/monday-update-6/
Dig
The team behind Dig has released a new Whitepaper in which they share their visions and aims for their project and how it benefits the future of the Real Estate market. For a comprehensive view, the Whitepaper(in pdf format)has been made available on a recent Twitter post: https://twitter.com/dig_chain/status/1521769901400412160
Bitsong
Bitsong’s Sinfonia which is a Music Fan Token Marketplace, has officially launched on a testnet basis. Users are encouraged to register — Bitsong have offered prizes for those participating — https://testnet.sinfonia.zone/
Moonbeam
Moonbeam — Following the XCM release to Polkadot, Moonbeam has added xcDOT, an XC-20 representation of DOT on its parachain. XCM introduces new cross-chain token capabilities to the Polkadot ecosystem and opens the doors for bridgeless token movement and interconnectedness between parachains.
Oasis
Oasis Network pushed out a Security notice informing users to be wary of the risks of EvoDefi Bridge and the DApps that connect to the bridge such as ValleySwap and RimSwap after it was found that there are potential exploits including an ‘Admin backdoor take function aside, critical parts of the bridge are NOT open source and NOT decentralized, which allows the operator to take funds from the bridge.’ https://hackmd.io/@verilog/evo-defi-analysis
Upgrades
Akash
At block height #5629650, the network was successfully upgraded. This was not an easy task this time round, as the upgrade resulted in a Consensus failure due to a bug in the Cosmos SDK upgrade module. The core team worked on a patch that was released a few hours later. The chain remained halted until the validators upgraded to the patched version.
This upgrade (v0.16) introduced enterprise-grade features like persistent storage, necessary for running all high-resource workloads. This enables developers greater flexibility for running real-world applications, like deploying validators and nodes and expanding applications for the mining community.
Key features that are now available through the v0.16 upgrade include:
- Persistent Storage
- Fractional uAKT
- Authorized Spend
On our end, all 6 Akash nodes have been updated to v0.16.3. Furthermore, in the process, they have been moved over to run using Cosmovisor.
Cosmovisor is a process manager for Cosmos SDK application binaries that monitors the governance module for incoming chain upgrade proposals.
The upgrade process was very hectic and involved multiple binary changes v0.16.0 -> .1 -> .2 -> .3 over a long period of time, which involved closely monitoring the status of things.
Even when the chain resumed, most of the sentries had their database corrupted, which meant a snapshot had to be used to restore them. Most importantly, despite all of this we experienced zero downtime on our validator.
The provider was also updated, which includes the new hostname operator service and adding some reconfiguration which made the bidding service more robust and versatile. (https://docs.akash.network/operations/provider#step8-start-the-provider).
Juno
Juno — v.4.0.0 Unity Upgrade. Proposal #20 for Unity had passed at block #2951100 without any issues and halts to the network.
A follow-up proposal #21 has since been pushed on-chain, which if it passes an upgrade will follow on 2022–05–10.
Stargaze
On May 3rd Stargaze carried out its V5 Upgrade. The upgrade was essential for the upcoming marketplace deployment and contained the following:
- Latest security patch for CosmWasm which has low impact for Stargaze due to permissioned setup.
- wasmd fixes including a hardcoded limit in contract size (lower limit) not respecting on-chain limit size param.
The process was swift and took not more than 7 minutes in total!
Gravity Bridge
Gravity Bridge Mercury part 2 Upgrade was completed. This implemented fixes for the Ethereum -> Destination IBC forwarder + Extensive hand and automated testing.
This, therefore improved single tx ETH>DESTINATION IBC auto-forwarded. Coordinated efforts by the Gravity Bridge validator community and the team made this one a successful and rapid chain upgrade.
Stay tuned to Simply Staking for more weekly newsletters, guides, and documentation:
- Website: https://simply-vc.com.mt
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimplyStaking
- Discord: https://discord.gg/Kpzc58Gu9a
- Telegram: https://t.me/SimplyVC
