Announcing Tezos Capital powered by Polychain Labs

Jonas Lamis
Tezos Capital
Published in
4 min readMar 21, 2019

As the Tezos ecosystem moves into a new growth phase, Tezos Capital and Polychain Labs are pleased to announce our new collaborative delegation service to support every sized delegator with superior security and virtually unlimited bond coverage.

Our new delegation service is available at: tz2PdGc7U5tiyqPgTSgqCDct94qd6ovQwP6u

Since launch 9 months ago, the Tezos mainnet has grown from a handful of upstart bakers to a thriving community of hundreds of block producers. The increasingly decentralized network has performed admirably, approaching 98% efficiency on block production and endorsement. With the first on-chain governance upgrade underway, Tezos is moving into uncharted territory for 3rd generation blockchains by having the ecosystem nominate, test, approve and fund protocol upgrades that automatically deploy — keeping the entire Commonwealth moving in the same direction.

The business world is taking note with most major exchanges and custody services signaling their plans for Tezos. Large scale projects for bringing high value assets to Tezos are underway at Elevated Returns, VIAZ, Tezsure, Kalhatti, Chorus Mobility and with many others. The Tezos Foundation is increasing its support for new and innovative Tezos-based solutions, funding geographic-based foundations around the world and designating Tocqueville Group as a tentpole service provider for coordinating the ecosystem.

The professionalism of Tezos demands that Tezos Capital ups its offerings to the community as well. We have been providing delegation services since Day 1 and have consistently ranked among the highest performing services. In fact, our delegation offerings proved so successful that we have been unable to take on any new delegators since Cycle 27 in September of 2018 as we have been constantly bond constrained. To solve our bond needs, we went searching for forward thinking XTZ holders that had an extensive background in securely handling large amounts of cryptocurrency who would consider partnering to further unlock the value of their holdings by providing bond to the ecosystem. We found Polychain Labs.

The Polychain Labs team is the most experienced staking engineering and security team in the industry. Previously from Google, JPL, Coinbase and Cruise Automation, the team has been running the largest Tezos baking operation outside of the Tezos Foundation since Tezos launch, and is also operating the largest Cosmos validator.

When we began to discuss collaboration, it became obvious that the combination of Tezos Capital’s community support with Polychain’s technical competency and XTZ holdings could deliver a superior delegation offering that could accommodate the largest delegators with superior infrastructure, security and customer service.

The New Tezos Capital Delegation Address

With this partnership brings a new Delegation Address: tz2PdGc7U5tiyqPgTSgqCDct94qd6ovQwP6u

What you can expect from Tezos Capital + Polychain Labs

  • An experienced, professional team — The same faces from Tezos Capital, Jonas, Lotika and Luke will be there to make sure our delegators have an exceptional customer experience. Joining us are the Polychain Labs technical and business teams — all crypto veterans.
  • A high performance, low risk delegation service — The infrastructure and security protocols provided by Polychain Labs are world-class. Unlike any other current top 25+ Tezos baker, we are using the most secure tz2 address backed by the Secp256k1 curve also used by Bitcoin. This key type shares many of the same security properties of the Bitcoin network and allow us to use Amazon’s CloudHSMs to protect our keys. Our multi-region AWS setup paired with the CloudHSM service provides the highest level of bond and rewards security in the industry. In developing this, Polychain labs has open sourced a key-encoder to work with keys generated inside an HSM and a secure HSM backed signer.
  • Bond coverage to ensure we are never over-delegated — With the funds available to Polychain Labs, delegators can rest assured that we’ve solved our problem of posting bond. We can handle any size delegation. For delegations larger than 10M XTZ, please contact jonas@tezos.capital to coordinate posting bond.
  • A long term outlook on the future of Tezos and PoS blockchains — The teams at Tezos Capital and Polychain Labs have a long term perspective on the future of proof of stake blockchain ecosystems. Both teams have invested heavily in infrastructure to take advantage of societal moves towards decentralized systems, and both have the patience to wait out market gyrations as this transition happens over the coming decade.
  • A fee structure that reflects our best-in-class services — Delegators to our new Tezos Capital service will receive 80% of all rewards generated by the operation and Tezos Capital will retain 20% of the rewards for operations expenses. We split all fees collected as well as all rewards received so you benefit from the long term growth of the network. Additional terms and conditions should be reviewed by delegators before they select Tezos Capital as their delegation service.

Current Tezos Capital Delegators continue with our ‘Legacy’ service

If you are a current Tezos Capital delegator, delegating to our tz1TDSmoZXwVevLTEvKCTHWpomG76oC9S2fJ wallet, your relationship with Tezos Capital continues uninterrupted at your current 15% fee structure. We are however rebranding your staking wallet to “Tezos Capital Legacy”. Our new wallet will take the name “Tezos Capital”. Existing bond pool members will likewise be unaffected by this change. However, we are stopping the growth of our bond pool associated with the Tezos Capital Legacy wallet and therefore do not anticipate that this wallet will be opened to new delegations beyond its current capacity.

Thank you to all who have supported us and the overall Tezos ecosystem. If you have any questions or concerns, please connect with us at support@tezos.capital, or on twitter @tezoscommunity.

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