Spotlight on Staked — Institutional Staking for Wanchain Coming in 2019
Overview
Research from Staked predicts that ~25% of the total cryptocurrency market will use proof-of-stake (PoS) as a security model by the end of 2019. Founded in April 2018, Staked operates highly available and highly secure, institutional grade staking infrastructure for leading proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Upon release of Wanchain’s PoS solution later this year, as described in the recently released 2019 roadmap, Staked will offer staking of Wanchain’s native token (WAN) to institutional and retail customers.
“The recurring theme in crypto over the years has been the promise of ‘institutional investment’ coming to the industry,” said Jack Lu, Founder and CEO of Wanchain. “Staked is an excellent example of an innovative approach to solve problems of complexity, security, accessibility, and reporting for institutional investors and retail investors alike. This is the innovation that the broader industry needs in order to reach true adoption with major players globally. We look forward to working closely with Staked as we roll out our own PoS solution for WAN later this year.”
Funding
Staked recently raised a $4,500,000 seed round from a group of leading cryptocurrency investors. Pantera Capital led the round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Global Brain, Digital Currency Group, Winklevoss Capital, Fabric Ventures, Applied Crypto Ventures, and Blocktree Capital, among others.
Currencies and Customers
Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending, depending on the currency’s reward and mining protocol. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency.
Holders of proof-of-stake currencies are paid block rewards by “staking” their assets and running the server software that secures the blockchain. Staked provides the secure infrastructure required for staking and the company’s services currently support six cryptocurrencies including Tezos, Dash, Decred, Livepeer, Factom, and EOS. Customers include top-tier crypto funds, venture capital funds, family offices and hedge funds. Staked also offers a white-labeled staking platform that enables exchanges, custodians, and wallets to offer staking rewards to their customers without an expensive and complex technology build out.
Technology
The Staked infrastructure is deployed in a multi-tier signing and listening cloud configuration that combines geographic diversity and redundancy across on premise data centers and cloud providers. Staked uses Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration to achieve near-infinite scale, self-healing and hardware decentralization.
Security
Staked takes extreme measures to ensure malicious actors can’t impact its block production and validation operations. Signing servers responsible for producing and signing blocks are firewalled and only able to communicate with listening servers, and secured in geographically distributed data centers with full-time physical security, monitoring and access controls. Hardware signing modules are used for key management wherever possible, otherwise secure vaults are used. In the event of a server hack or someone obtaining physical access, hardware signing modules prevent key loss.
Non-Custodial: Additionally, Staking is a non-custodial process whereby stakeholders are able to delegate their tokens to validators while retaining control of their private keys. Staked does not custody customer holdings ensuring that in the unlikely event of a hack, customers funds are never at risk of being stolen.
Internal Controls: Staked employs industry best practices around internal controls to guard against abuse. Their offices do not store keys, and all private keys are secured offsite. All remote access by employees uses public-key authentication. No passwords or other susceptible credentials are used. Multi-sig technology is used to secure against attacks and prevent internal abuse.
Source: https://staked.us/
About Staked
Founded in 2018, Staked Securely, Inc provides institutional investors of digital currencies with secure infrastructure enabling them to compound their crypto holdings through staking and lending. Staked supports staking and lending across six proof-of-stake currencies, which have gained in popularity because they use dramatically less electricity than Bitcoin’s Proof of work security model. To get started, visit https://staked.us/yields/ to understand the available opportunities and delegate to Staked.
Media Contact:
For additional details, please contact Staked CEO, Tim Ogilvie, at togilvie@staked.us.
About Wanchain
Wanchain is a public blockchain platform that enables decentralized transfer of value between isolated blockchain networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Wanchain’s live cross-chain solution is EVM-based, includes optional private transactions, and provides a decentralized, permissionless, and secure approach. Wanchain has employees globally with teams in Beijing (China), Austin (USA), London (UK), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Paris (France), and Madrid (Spain).
You can find more information about Wanchain on our website. Additionally, you can reach us through Telegram, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit.
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