Introducing StakeWith.Us and a Peek into Loom Network’s BaseChain
MW Partners is dedicated to supporting projects that truly make a difference in accelerating blockchain adoption. We prefer to have an active, hands-on approach in providing value to projects that we have invested in — which is why we decided to launch StakeWith.Us, a secure Staking-as-a-Service provider, to bootstrap their networks.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that StakeWith.Us is the first validator to officially launch on Loom Network’s BaseChain!
Loom Network is a Platform as a Service built on top of Ethereum that allows developers to run large-scale decentralized applications. This lets developers build DApps with the trust and security of the world’s most secure public blockchain, along with the computing resources necessary to run commercial-scale services. Loom aims to be the tokenized application protocol of the new decentralized web. Recently, Loom Network announced that they will be supporting an integration with Cosmos Network, which marks the start of their multi-chain integration with other blockchains through BaseChain — We are so excited for this!
While Loom Network has been focusing a lot on educational, gaming and social applications, such as DelegateCall (a Quora-like forum), CryptoZombies (an interactive Solidity coding school) and Zombie Battleground (the first online trading card game to run completely on the blockchain), we firmly believe that they have a far bigger addressable market. In fact, the recent publication by Lee Bailey (from Shipchain) showcased a potential use case for a traditional industry— deploying a fully integrated supply chain solution on Loom Network.
We are very thankful for the support we have received from delegators over the past months after the initial set of validators for Loom Network was announced. We have been busy at work for the past few months getting our validation setup as secure as possible.
If you are a fellow Loom Network fan like us (yay!) and have Loom tokens for delegation, please pledge your support here and we will be in touch with you shortly.
For clarity, delegation refers to the act of assigning authority to others. In the context of the DPoS BaseChain, delegators are important stakeholders who are able to delegate their voting rights to any validators. Validators are nodes on the BaseChain that propose blocks, verify transactions and participate in network governance — each validator node is responsible for keeping the network honest. The requirements and responsibilities of a validator node can be found here.
How BaseChain Works
Without further ado, let’s take a look at how Loom Network’s BaseChain works!
Overview Architecture
We can break down the overall architecture of BaseChain into several sections:
- Depositing ERC20 Loom tokens into BaseChain Contract on Ethereum Mainnet:
As validation will be taking place on Loom Network’s BaseChain, ERC20 Loom tokens has to be transferred from the Ethereum Mainnet onto the BaseChain (which is based on Tendermint) before you can vote and delegate. As such, you will be required to create a Tendermint account and map it with an existing Ethereum address via Loom Network’s BaseChain Dashboard which will be launching soon.
The BaseChain Contract serves as a gatekeeper to ensure that the right amount of Loom tokens are available for delegators to utilize on the BaseChain.
- Transfer Gateway picks up deposit event and pushes instruction for Coin Contract to mint Loom tokens on BaseChain:
A deposit event will be emitted after ERC20 Loom tokens are deposited into the BaseChain Contract. The Transfer Gateway Oracle will pick up the deposit event and push new instructions for the Coin Contract to mint the exact amount of ERC20 Loom tokens that have been deposited into the BaseChain Contract. These Base Loom tokens will be stored in the Tendermint account you created through Loom Network’s BaseChain Dashboard.
- Delegators interacting with DPOS contract on BaseChain to delegate with a validator:
Through Loom Network’s BaseChain Dashboard, delegators will be able to search for the list of validator nodes and select their choice of validator. Once confirmed on the amount of Base Loom tokens to delegate and the delegation period, the delegate will query the Coin Contract to approve the desired delegate amount for use by the DPoS contract.
The delegator will be required to sign twice — firstly, to allow the DPoS contract to deduct Base Looms from your wallet on the Coin Contract; secondly, to allow the DPoS contract to transfer the stated amount of Base Loom tokens from your wallet to the validator’s address.
Once the transactions goes through, you will be officially delegating and playing your part to bootstrap Loom Network’s BaseChain!
- Validating transactions and proposing blocks:
Validators verify transactions and take turns proposing blocks in order to keep the network honest. The responsibilities of the validators are immense — In the unlikely event of a validator trying to sign invalid transactions or going offline, stakes under the validator (including the tokens that are delegated) will be slashed.
In return for their efforts to secure the BaseChain network and to uphold their responsibilities, validators earn transactional fees from the following sources:
- dApp deployment on BaseChain;
- Transaction fees from utilization of the ERC721 marketplace;
- Fees earned from Base Cash transfers between BaseChain and Ethereum (or any other layer 1 platform in the future); plus other sources to be announced in the future!
Validators can then choose to share a portion of the transaction fees with delegators who have voted for them. The delegation rewards will be automatically distributed by the DPoS smart contract based on the amount of Base Loom tokens you delegated, amount of transaction fees on BaseChain and your overall delegation time period. You can check out these dope articles from James Martin Duffy to learn more about BaseChain delegation and BaseChain staking economics.
Ending Note
We hope that this post has been helpful in assisting all Loom delegators to understand how BaseChain works. We are very excited on our journey to kick-start this validation initiative with the setup of StakeWith.Us and going live on Loom Network’s BaseChain.
We will also be preparing a separate Medium post that will outline a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) on how to delegate and vote for your favorite validator (choose StakeWith.Us, by MW Partners)!
If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on Twitter/Telegram, or contact the Loom Team directly on their Telegram channel.
Please stay tuned!
MW Partners is an early stage investment firm focused on Blockchain-enabled projects. Follow MW Partners on Twitter.
StakeWith.Us is a secure Staking-as-a-Service provider for leading blockchain projects. Put Your Crypto to Work — Hassle Free.
We are currently preparing a simple dashboard that is free for everyone to use.
To get more updates on our validation updates, please follow StakeWith.Us on Twitter, Telegram and Medium. If you are interested to join our WeChat group, kindly approach gobigordietrying or mcry89 on WeChat.
Alternatively, reach out to Earn@StakeWith.Us if:
- you have any burning queries for us;
- if you are a project looking for a professional validator;
- you are looking into investment and partnership opportunities with StakeWith.Us.
Credits to Oliver Wee for the breakdown on the BaseChain architecture. For the Mandarin version of the post, kindly view it here.
