#49: Developers, Developers, Developers
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Last week, we hosted a 2h event to memorate the launch of the Ethereum beacon chain — the first step of the migration to Proof-of-Stake of the largest platform for decentralized applications. We had speakers covering various topics related to Eth2 — including economics ( Collin Myers), a study on UX ( EMPIRE), clients ( Prysm), as well as staking pools ( Lido and Rocket Pool). We’d like to thank all speakers and attendees for a great first virtual Staking Economy event!
A recording of the event that provides context on the launch and serves as an introduction to ETH holders looking to stake can be found here.
🌐 Ecosystem
Crypto Developer Report
Electric Capital published a 126 slide report that analyzes 89m code commits across 270k crypto-related Github repositories. The main takeaways show that 2020 saw consistent growth in developer activity, especially relating to Bitcoin and Ethereum, decentralized finance, and on some other layer-1 projects — most notably Polkadot, Tezos, and Cosmos. Some newer projects like NEAR, The Graph, and many others we are reporting on with this newsletter have seen new developers coming in. Overall, 80% of all active developers joined the space in the last two years!
Cosmos Interchain Conversations
This weekend, Dystopia Labs is organizing an event focused on the Cosmos ecosystem. Interchain conversations features speakers from various projects including Cosmos zones, validators, investors, and other builders.
Felix will present on the challenges and opportunities of liquid staking on Sunday, 10:30am PT. There is a big focus on interoperability and its implications, specifically interesting: minimizing MEV + thwarting front running (Sikka, Dec 12, 2pm PT) and a fireside chat on security, DeFi composability, and interop (Dec 13, 12pm PT). Get your free ticket and register here.
The Rise of the Activist Validator
Chris wrote and shared this post recently about activist validators. In part 1 of this two part post, he explained the general premise that staking networks and their communities may be better served if at least some validators expressed dissenting opinions, in the form of constructive criticism, on a more regular basis. It’s Chris’ opinion that those voices are largely silent right now, to the potential detriment of these networks.
⛓️ Network Updates
SKALE Staking
‘Three makes a whole’ — after Staking Facilities joined the SKALE network as a validator and node operator on Dec 1st, all three companies that the authors of the Staking Economy work for, are helping to secure the network. Felix did an analysis on how SKL token holders have engaged with the network. The core insights:
Read the full analysis here.
Solana Downtime and Bridges
On its road to a full-fledged mainnet, Solana’s mainnet beta earned its’ “beta” title on Dec 4. The network halted and in the time between ~ 1:46pm UTC and 7:32pm UTC no blocks were produced. Roughly half of the 6 hour outage was spent waiting for validators to upgrade and come back online. After 80% of active stake was prepared for a restart by the global validator community, the network was able to reinstate and continue its block production.The Solana team was very responsive and transparent throughout the process. According to the Solana team, a detailed post mortem is currently being worked on and will be released shortly.
On a brighter note Solana announced the SOLAR bridge on Dec 8, which connects mainnet beta and Arweave — a dedicated, decentralized, and permanent storage network. Arweave will provide a censorship-resistant, permanent availability of Solana’s entire ledger history. Just a day earlier Certus One tweeted the successful test of their bi-directional Ethereum-Solana bridge, called Wormhole. Tokens were successfully swapped back and forth between the Ethereum Görli testnet and Solana’s Tour de SOL testnet.
Polkadot Decoded
The Web3 Foundation is supporting new validators on Polkadot through the 1,000 Validator Program. Gavin Wood went on Unchained to talk about Polkadot and the upcoming launch of parachain functionality. For more re-listen to last week’s Polkadot Decoded event recordings here.
First Eth2 Slashing
Validator 20,075 has made history and can claim to have suffered from the first slash of Eth2. The event took place on Dec 2nd and was due to a proposer violation, most likely because the operator was running a second instance of their validator.
Right on time for the genesis of the Beacon Chain, Messari published their in-depth, 70-page Eth2 report on the first of December. Ryan Watkins and Wilson Withiam, two senior research analysts at Messari and the authors of the report, joined Laura Shin for an episode of her Unchained podcast. The 70-minute episode covers the main insights of the report and provides a good intro to Eth2.
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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 December 11, 2020.
