A Note From Our Co-Founders
Past milestones, announcements, and future plans
To our community supporters, Happy Lunar New Year everyone! We hope that 2019 has been an enriching year for you — because it certainly kept us busy! We’ve much to share about our thoughts on the staking market and our journey on all things related to StakeWith.Us. Read on!
The launch of Cosmos kickstarted the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economy, allowing for new networks to launch at an accelerating pace. For the first time in history, blockchain projects can focus on their application as the consensus and networking layers are now under the care of Tendermint Core. The modular aspect of the Cosmos SDK also gives developers the flexibility to implement any sort of business logic that their application requires. Given the simplicity of launching a new network, StakeWith.Us is of the view that this trend of launching application-specific blockchains will continue to grow. Anticipated launches of new networks will also contribute to the growth of the PoS economy.
While it is without a doubt that staking had been immensely successful in 2019, we’ve uncovered new challenges that can potentially derail business models that are highly dependent on staking. The greatest challenge, in our view, is the centralization of voting power to large entities who do not depend on staking returns to survive (i.e. exchanges and custodians). Very often, such entities undercut on pricing, upsell on convenience, and provide a workaround against in-protocol restrictions like unbonding and lockup periods.
The growth of the PoS market and staking interest are also highly correlated to the performance of the broader crypto market. Valuations for the majority of the PoS networks have declined in recent times as more tokens are supplying to the market (selling inflationary block rewards) as compared to purchases (buying to stake, building a position for pricing speculation, or using as fees/other forms of utility).
While we’re optimistic about the future of staking, it remains unclear if business models revolving around PoS networks are sustainable. Decentralized networks have to find innovative ways to adjust in-protocol designs, discourage centralization, and create sustainable business models for network participants. This will take time.
Past Milestones
At StakeWith.Us, we pride ourselves in provisioning secured blockchain infrastructure so that anyone can participate to bootstrap these PoS networks with peace of mind. We started the company with a single validator on Loom Network. By the end of the year, we’re supporting eight validators across various Tendermint-based networks — such as Cosmos, Terra, Kava, IOV, and Persistence, securing more than 9 million USD (15 million USD if Whitelabel clients included) of assets altogether. We’re very grateful for the support coming from our community and project teams — we couldn’t have done it without you.
2019 was indeed a year of #BUIDLing and learning for the StakeWith.Us team. We spent a lot of quality time hardening our infrastructure, automating our operations, and building out in-house monitoring tools. As educating the community is important to us, we published online articles regarding our validation architecture and on setting policies for hardware security modules. We held meetups locally to bring about awareness on staking and various projects building on Cosmos and Ethereum — the most vibrant and fastest-growing communities, in our opinion. We launched the Loom Network Explorer on our Atlas dashboard because it was hard to monitor validator specific metrics. We’ve also open-sourced our Terra Oracle Voter to provide validators more options to do on-chain price voting.
In July 2019, we announced our seed round funding from SGInnovate, the Singapore Government’s deep-tech fund and LuneX Ventures, which is Golden Gate Ventures’ blockchain fund. This investment is a significant milestone for us as we are the first PoS infrastructure provider backed by a government entity in the world!
We’re incredibly thankful to our investors for believing in our team’s vision. To us, StakeWith.Us is more than just a PoS infrastructure provider — staking is only one way to trustlessly earn yield on your assets within the DeFi space.
Announcements & Future Plans
Moving forward, the focus for StakeWith.Us in 2020 is two-pronged. We’ll be concentrating our resources on providing a trustless yet hassle-free solution to earn yield, and also continue support of high-quality PoS projects on the infrastructure level. Capital is hungry for return in traditional markets, and as huge supporters of the DeFi movement, we’re hard at work on exciting new developments. Do stay tuned!
For our ardent supporters, you can expect a refreshed newsletter that’ll be coming to your inbox very soon — from a monthly Staker Digest to a weekly TL;DR of the top news and hot takes in the DeFi space.
Lastly, in support of major developments this year, we’ve expanded our team to a total of 8 core members. We’ve been quiet about our team composition for a while as we sought to fill core roles, but we’re now happy to announce our stellar new crew:
Poh Yong Hwang — Head of Infrastructure
Poh is our leading infrastructure guru. He has more than 16 incredible years of experience in public/private cloud service offering and physical hosting business. He’ll be setting up our infrastructure and internal policies based on SS584 (similar to ISO 27001) best practices, reviewing BCP and DR practices, and ensuring all internal and cloud systems are appropriately maintained and secured. Poh joins us from ReadySpace Pte Ltd, a managed cloud hosting company he co-founded as CTO in Singapore.
Gabrielle Chia — Growth & Marketing Lead
Gabrielle is our latest addition to our all-star team. She’ll be leading Marketing efforts for growth and bringing our products to market globally. She has run a gamut of B2B and B2C initiatives to date. Her experience covers Marketing and Business Development roles at several early-stage startups (DeFi and P2P Lending), and in Advertising servicing leading regional and global clients on Banking (Credit Cards), Tech (PC Computing), Automotive, and Media products.
Do Ngoc Tan — Backend Developer
Tan is our team’s backend developer. He has previously scaled and optimized backend systems for IQ-Trivia, an interactive live stream game, and for integrated payment gateways to support live stream asset purchases. He’ll be building and maintaining our products backend, and integrating 3rd party services to our products alongside Phuc. Tan joins us from Catcha Group, a leading Internet group of companies in Southeast Asia.
Nguyen Xuan Phuc — Full Stack Developer
Phuc hops on as our full-stack developer, working alongside Tan on frontend and backend developments to our products. Previously, he wrote microservices to integrate 3rd party services and had built a code base for frontend and backend platform test cases. Phuc joins us from BicycleBlueRock, a startup focused on bicycle value reporting and trade-ins.
Tran Hoang Quan — Smart Contract Developer
Quan is our resident blockchain engineer who’ll be working closely with Oliver in developing on Ethereum. He had previously designed and implemented a blockchain traceability solution with Truffle and OpenZeppelin and had developed iOS applications via Swift. He joins us from Infinity Blockchain Lab, a blockchain R&D company focusing on RegTech services.
DeFi in 2020
The DeFi economy has shown tremendous traction the past year. Volumes on DEXs, lending/borrowing, and collateralization protocols are picking up (789 million USD locked up as of writing).
Here are five predictions we have for the year:
- Fungible, trustless staking derivatives will become the foundation for money legos. Centralized entities will no longer be the only ones able to offer you liquidity while you are staking. Also, we expect the introduction of yield enhancement products for staked tokens.
- Under collateralized loans will bring about real adoption for the crypto market. We think it will come in 2 forms: i) Solving via credit scoring (which means solving for proof of income or asset), or ii) solving via a DAO. The race to solve for readily available under collateralized loans is on.
- Yield enhancing products for stablecoins (such as Curve.fi) will be very appealing for stablecoin holders. USDC -> Compound (swap USDC to cUSDC) -> Curve.fi (swap ½ cUSDC to cDAI at low slippage) -> earn blended average of 6% on cDAI and ~3–5% on cUSDC + fees on Curve.fi.
- The team that manages to bring Bitcoin to Ethereum in a truly trustless manner will be a big winner. While tBTC, renBTC, and wBTC are not entirely trustless, we’re curious to see what the market is willing to accept.
- There is a non-zero chance that a smart contract bug appears on the base levels of the DeFi stack, which might potentially cascade into an industry-wide black swan event.
The pace of innovation within the crypto space is what keeps all of us at StakeWith.Us excited every day. We’re cautiously optimistic in the industry for 2020, and with the right building blocks in place, the masses might finally find an appealing, non-speculative use case to embrace cryptocurrency.
We’re wishing everyone an awesome 2020!
- Michael, Mervyn, and Oliver
