#51: New Frontiers
💰 Economics
Ethereum 2.0 Slashings
The 10th Bison Trails Eth2 update dives into three recent slashing incidents that “…now account for 81% of all slashings on eth2 and roughly estimated total losses of $600k between slashing penalties and missed rewards.”
One of these mass slashings can safely be attributed to Staked, one of the largest staking providers that accounts for upwards of 5% of all current validators, who published a post-mortem on the incident.
🌐 Ecosystem
Shapeshift New Frontiers
Shapeshift released this report comparing and contrasting Cosmos, Polkadot and NEAR. It provides a useful primer on the three networks, while the comparison chart on p.36 provides further beneficial framing.
Written in a largely unbiased way, one of the report’s key takeaways is that “2021 is Cosmos’ time to shine”.
Lido Call for Validators
Lido, the largest staking pool solution validating over 5% of the staked ETH supply, plans to expand its node operator set to improve decentralization. A sub governance group for node operators has been formed that plans to provide recommendations to the Lido DAO for 3–5 new node operating entities that should be onboarded. To apply, fill out this form until EOD Feb 28. Check out this Dune Analytics dashboard to learn more about the growth Lido has experienced over the past few weeks.
Cryptium Shutdown
On February 17th, we were saddened to find out that fellow independent validator and node operator, Cryptium Labs is shutting down their services by March 15th. Based in Switzerland, they offered validation services for Tezos, Cosmos, Iris Network, Polkadot, Kusama, Near, and eMoney. The team behind Cryptium did amazing community work as well as protocol research and core development for Tezos and Cosmos. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors.
⛓️ Network Updates
Cosmos Stargate
Cosmos successfully completed the much anticipated Stargate upgrades on Thursday, 18 Feb. The release brings inter-blockchain-communication (IBC) to the Cosmos Hub.
The network stopped as planned at 0600 UTC. It came back online about 5.5 hours later. This is quite a bit longer than previous upgrades. Chris is curious about what contributed to this longer upgrade window and plans to take a look into it. He did mention on Twitter that the upgrades seemed to happen faster before some of the bigger exchanges started operating large validators.
Avalanche Invalid Mint
The Avalanche mainnet experienced issues on February 11 after an increase in network traffic due to the Pangolin (automated market maker) exchange launch. Some nodes accepted invalid mint transactions, while others refused to honor them, which led to a stalling of the network’s EVM-based “contract chain (C-chain)” for multiple hours.
The invalid transactions were not rolled back; instead, developers issued a patch that had all nodes accept the invalid blocks. Since these blocks contained an additional 790.2160157 AVAX, the Avalanche Foundation decided to burn an equal amount from their treasury to honor the 720m AVAX supply cap.
The official preliminary analysis and Emin Gun Sirer’s initial twitter thread on the issue contain more information.
Solana Staking Rewards
On February 10th, the Solana community passed a vote to enable inflation on Mainnet Beta. Delegators are now rewarded for their contribution to the security of the network and receive staking rewards at the beginning of every epoch (~2.5 days). The initial inflation rate is set to 8% but will decrease by 15% year-over-year until it settles at 1.5% annually. With roughly 35% of the total supply staked, the current APY is 23% (not including validator commission). There are more than 500 validators to choose from, so stake wisely and help to #KeepStakeDecentralized. Check out this piece by Felix about the staking economics and make sure to read the official Solana staking FAQs.
Tezos Edo Upgrade
On February 13th, the fifth Tezos upgrade, Edo, was successfully implemented at block 1,343,489. Besides minor bug fixes and improvements to the performance and gas consumption, Edo also included the addition of an additional period to the upgrade process as well as two new features, namely Sapling and Tickets. Sapling and Tickets beef up the capabilities and development of Tezos smart contracts. For more, please refer to this post by Nomadic Labs on Agora.
The Graph Multichain Support
Just two months after the launch of mainnet, The Graph announced plans to add support for four additional Layer-1 blockchains, namely Celo, Near, Polkadot, and Solana. The team emphasized that the support for these chains should not be considered exclusive but rather a major step towards The Graphs’ mission of becoming the indexing and query layer for the whole Web 3.0 ecosystem. Support for other chains such as Avalanche, Bitcoin, BSC, Cosmos, and Flow is currently being explored.
Injective Protocol Equinox Staking
Injective, a layer-2 order book-style derivatives DEX built on the Cosmos SDK, announced their initial validator set that will participate in their incentivized testnet before the decentralized mainnet launch follows later in Q1 2021.
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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.
Looking to break into the staking industry? Chorus One is hiring for multiple roles on the operations and engineering side.
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on February 21, 2021.
