#46: Curate and Cultivate
This newsletter is supported by Chorus One, a provider of staking services in decentralized networks.
Welcome to this network update heavy issue:
The Graph Community Sale & Curator Kick-Off
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, e.g. adding projects to the Everest registry (like we did). In addition, the GRT community token sale is ongoing and saw over 20,000 registrants.
Ethereum Deposit Contract and Lido
Eth2 appears very close, many people estimate the launch of the beacon chain to happen within the coming 4–8 weeks. In light of this, a new liquid staking solution that resolves some of the issues for potential ETH stakers called Lido was announced. We plan to do some special coverage around staking on ETH2 when the launch is imminent, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, check out this data analysis covering the latest Medalla testnet.
Cosmos Ecosystem Update
The biggest Cosmos SDK upgrade introducing IBC interoperability functionality, titled Stargate, is being finalized and 7 teams are working towards bringing it to Cosmos SDK mainnets near you. Learn more about them here. In addition, blockchains built on the Cosmos SDK stack haven’t been sleeping: Kava recently introduced Harvest, a money market application, Band upgraded to introduce oracle functionality, and Akash, a decentralized cloud solution, launched its mainnet!
Solana Wormhole
A decentralized bi-directional token bridge between Ethereum and Solana developed by Certus One. Wormhole works through a set of decentralized cross-chain oracles, called guardians, which certify token lockups and burns on one chain in order to mint/release new tokens on the other, and vice versa. Certification of token mints/burns is achieved through guardians signing the Validator Action Approval (VAA), a 2/3+ majority multisig. Guardians are operated by professional validators and other stakeholders from within the ecosystem in a leaderless fashion.
To learn more about using Wormhole, we suggest registering for the Wormhole Hackathon which will commence on October 28th, with $200.000 in prizes. Technical details of Wormhole and a technical demonstration, check out Certus One’s blog post.
NEAR Transfers and Rewards
NEAR is now completely permissionless and successfully upgraded after a first governance vote to activate transfers and rewards. Learn more here and via the current validator set here.
NuCypher Launch
The NuCypher mainnet went live on October 15th. As of today and according to these stats, over 1700 nodes are active and over 526 million NU are staked. Staking returns in the network depend on multiple variables. Both Bison Trails and Figment Networks published guides suggesting various staking strategies based on different variable configurations.
Cultivate Oasis’ ROSEgarden
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.
Persistence StakeDrop
Persistence, a Cosmos SDK project looking to bring real-world assets like invoices to DeFi, announced its StakeDrop; another interesting token distribution that grants XPRT tokens to users already staking on other chains (e.g. Cosmos). This pattern, already deployed in a similar form e.g. by Stafi, seems to become a popular way of incentivizing existing stakers to join other projects.
Follow Staking Economy on Twitter or subscribe to the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss an issue.
Staking Economy is written by Felix Lutsch from Chorus One with contributions by Chris Remus (Chainflow), and Robert Dörzbach (Staking Facilties). Join us in the Staking Economy Telegram to discuss staking. Opinions expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our companies. All content is for informational purposes only and not intended as investment advice.
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on October 23, 2020.
