What happened in the Staking Space from 9th October to 15th October?

      What a week for Proof of Stake! Fully loaded with new networks and exciting developments, we are glad to present you with the 4th Staking Rewards Report. Here we will provide a weekly update on all things Staking. A general overview of the market, highlighted research in the space, news on all launched staking networks, updates on upcoming Staking networks, the latest developments from Staking infrastructure providers and a handful of Staking-Related events. The news is being curated by Mirko Schmiedl, Co-Founder at Staking Rewards, and Rina Spasenkova, Marketing Lead at Citadel.One.

      Citadel.One is the sponsor of the Staking Rewards Report.

      Citadel is a multi-asset non-custodial platform to manage and store crypto assets. Stake multiple tokens all within a single interface and seed phrase.

      Staking Rewards Report TL/DR

      • NuCypher is going live
      • NEAR Mainnet Release
      • Zilliqa launches non-custodial Staking
      • Cosmos Stargate Upgrade on track
      • The Graph Token Sale
      • ETH 2.0 on track for 2020 release

      …And many more!


      Staking Market Overview

      Total Value Participating in Staking (7d change): 

      $13,959,050,279 (+3.42%)

      Top 7 Coins by Value participating in Staking (7d change):

      • Polkadot: $2,635,320,010 (-4.66%)
      • Cardano: $1,975,017,063 (+13.96%)
      • Tezos: $1,532,630,310 (+1.87%)
      • EOS: $1,490,302,286 (-2.73%)
      • Algorand: $1,093,655,837 (-4.34%)
      • Cosmos: $1,051,139,779 (+6.15%)
      • Tron: $542,981,951 (-0.85%)
      • Band Protocol: $520,525,246 (-2.82%)

      Staking Research

      Interview with Kyber Founder Loi Luu

      Check out a talk between Staking Rewards and Loi Luu, who is the Founder and CEO of Kyber Network. Kyber Network is an on-chain liquidity protocol that aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token swaps in any decentralized application. They are diving into DeFi’s Key-Value Proposition, Challenges, Competition, Composability, and the role of Bitcoin in DeFi.

      Everything you need to know about Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake

      Switching to PoS will enable developers on Ethereum to build much more scalable applications. A lot of use cases that weren’t viable on Ethereum 1 because of the limited throughput, will be possible to build on Ethereum 2. Economically speaking, ETH the asset will be more valuable as it will transform into a capital asset generating regular cash flows to its holders. The lock up of ETH required to stake will make the asset more scarce. Most importantly however, the nature of PoS allows to reduce the inflation, thereby reducing the amount of new ETH being added to the network. Furthermore there are other interesting developments to introduce “fee burning”. The majority of the transaction fees paid by users however will be burned. 

      A Short History of the Solana Ecosystem

      Solana has developed from an initial idea of how one could timestamp events in a distributed setting into a full-fledged, scalable smart contract platform that is able to host high throughput applications supported by an ever-growing ecosystem of validators and developers. Check out a quick recap of projects’ growth milestones. 

      State of the Staking

      CryptoDiffer published an infographic with Staking Rewards Data on the biggest Proof of Stake Networks.


      Live Networks Updates

      NuCypher is going live!

      Check out the guide that defines some options available to node operators and details a few scenarios to help participants understand how they might set up their stake in accordance with the rules determined by the network. 

      The NEAR MainNet is now Unrestricted and Decentralized

      The transition to Phase II occurred because NEAR Protocol’s validators indicated via an on-chain voting mechanism that they believe the network is sufficiently secure, reliable and decentralized to remove transfer restrictions and officially allow it to operate at full functionality.  You can now delegate and earn staking rewards. 

      Learn more about NEAR on Staking Rewards

      Zilliqa non-custodial seed node staking went live

      What’s new is that with non-custodial staking, Zilliqa token holders no longer have to stake their funds through an intermediary. They can deposit funds directly into the smart contract and receive rewards from the roster of seed node providers.

      Kava 4 Gateway Launch on October 15th

      1. Kava validators production setups are Go
      2. Optimized Binance USD and BTC bridges are Go
      3. Harvest cross-chain money markets are Go

      Learn more about KAVA on Staking Rewards

      How Seven Teams Collaborated To Deliver The Biggest Software Upgrade In The Cosmos Universe

      Stargate is a set of upgrades that complete the original roadmap laid out in the Cosmos Whitepaper. For the first time ever, Cosmos blockchains will be able to connect with each other using the first standardized protocol for inter-blockchain communication (IBC). The teams which contributed to the Cosmos Stargate release included the Cosmos SDK team, the IBC and Tendermint Core teams at Interchain GmbH, Tendermint Inc Team, the Relayer team, the Informal Systems team, as well as Iqlusion. 

      By the way, the Stargate-based Agoric testnet-3 is up-and-running

      Wormhole — Solana/Ethereum Bridge

      Wormhole is a secure, decentralized bridge connecting Ethereum to Solana. Wormhole allows existing projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost. In addition, the Solana foundation invites developers from around the world to use Wormhole in the upcoming hackathon commencing on October 28th. 

      Kusama And Polkadot Now Reward Curators Helping To Scale Councils Functions

      The new Bounty Extension on both networks allows curators to autonomously allocate funds to projects that bring value. With everything happening on-chain, this is an efficient way to administer Treasury funds, boosting the Polkadot ecosystem and giving more autonomy to those curating their development. The new extension works as a budget mechanism aiming to help the Councils scale their tasks.

      StaFi Validator Incentive Program: The first batch of nomination and rules

      The StaFi team launched a nomination incentive program to motivate validators who have made significant contributions.

      IRISnet Delegation Campaign

      IRIS Foundation made a distribution to delegators with an amount equal to their delegation rewards in September, distributed 600,469 IRIS in total. Additionally, according to the Token Burn Plan, IRIS Foundation burned delegation rewards of Eco-Development Fund on September 30, totally 2,217,938 IRIS. For those unaware, the foundation set up the “Rainbow Validator” award, which will continually receive application forms. 

      Learn more about IRIS on Staking Rewards

      Omm: A New Fair-Launch DeFi project to enter ICON Ecosystem

      The Omm (Open Money Market) protocol will create both a frictionless and permissionless money market meant not only for avid DeFi users and yield farmers, but also traditional non-crypto users looking to earn extra yield. The Bridge widget will provide a seamless user experience when withdrawing or depositing stablecoins directly to and from a user’s bank account, enabling the first of its kind DeFi user experience.

      Livepeer Update to reduce staking earnings claiming gas cost

      The Livepeer community recently accepted LIP-36 and LIP-52, two Livepeer Improvement Proposals (LIPs) that drastically reduce the gas cost of earnings claiming for tokenholders, allowing them to access staked LPT and perform staking actions that would otherwise be too expensive due to high gas prices on Ethereum. LPT that was staked for a long time that would have cost hundreds or thousands of dollars of Ethereum transaction fees to access can now be accessed for a few dollars.

      Learn more about Livepeer Staking on Staking Rewards

      Orion Protocol’s Decentralized Staking is Here

      Orion Protocol’s ORN will be launching its first official liquidity mining program via Uniswap on October 16th. The program will reward ORN Liquidity Providers (LPs) on Uniswap with 30,000 ORN per week for ORN/ETH. This reward amount will be distributed proportionally to the amount of liquidity each person provides, therefore the APR per person will depend on how many LPs participate.  Exactly one month after the official start of the LP Reward Program, Orion Protocol will implement a time-based reward system for LPs beginning on November 16th to further incentivize long term liquidity providing.

      Rivex League of Stakes v2

      League of Stakes has been moved over to Ethereum, allowing to stake ERC-20 RVX and earn rewards. You’ll need to stake RVX in order to get the representation token rRVX, this is the yield-bearing token which will be used to farm for YRX. 


      To-Be-Launched Networks’ Updates

      Persistence announced start of their StakeDrop for 26th October

      • StakeDrop is a distribution mechanism which allows holders of PoS network tokens to acquire XPRT simply by staking on their favorite networks.
      • Networks included in the StakeDrop campaigns are: Cosmos Network, Terra, Kava Labs, IRISnet, Polkadot, Matic Network and Tezos.
      • 1% of the total XPRT token supply (1,000,000 XPRT) is allocated for StakeDrop rewards.
      • The first Campaign for Cosmos Delegators will start on the 26th October

      Second Ethereum 2.0 launch rehearsal puts it on track for 2020 release

      Both Medalla and Spadina Testnets  had issues with validators being offline at launch and minor client bugs. The developer community decided that it’s important to have an ideal testnet launch before moving to Mainnet launch. 

      ETH2 Bounty Program

      The Eth2 Bounty Program provides bounties for Eth2 (a major upgrade to Ethereum’s core consensus) bugs. The community is and all bug bounty hunters are called  to help identify bugs in the protocols and clients. Earn rewards for finding a vulnerability and get a place on the leaderboard.

      Announcing The Graph’s GRT Sale for 22nd October

      This year The Graph Foundation will be launching The Graph Network, a decentralized network of Indexers, Curators, and Delegators working together to organize the world’s blockchain data, serve applications, and accelerate the transition to a decentralized future. Over 200 Indexers have deployed Graph Nodes in The Graph’s testnet and over 1,000 Curators have registered for the Curator Program. The team is now selling 32% of the initial circulating supply in a token sale event.

      Desmos Network Testnet Phase 6 is LiVE

      The team implemented the possibility for users of doing some new things:

      1. editing polls and attachments of a post;
      2. adding a relationship towards users;
      3. blocking and unblocking users;
      4. changing your DTag;
      5. transferring your DTag to another user.

      Dusk Network Economic Model Paper Release

      The Economic Model Paper presents a host of data, including the emission schedule for block rewards, the allocation of development funds among predetermined segments, the expected block times, the Mainnet Staking requirements, and Mainnet Return on Investment (ROI) estimations. Above all, it contains a lot of math and details the network assumptions behind our tokenomics.

      Learn more about the current Dusk Network Staking here


      Staking Providers Update

      Chorus One Partners with Finoa to Bring Optimized Staking to Institutional Investors

      This integration will enable retail and institutional customers that use Finoa’s custody solution to utilize Chorus One’s staking services starting with support for Polkadot. Other networks that are part of the portfolio of both companies such as Oasis, NEAR, Centrifuge, and others will follow shortly after.


      Upcoming Staking Events


      Staking Rewards Updates

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      About The Author

      Rina Spasenkova

      is the CMO, and blockchain analyst at Citadel.one. Being in crypto since the age of 17, she mainly focused on the topics related to PoS systems of passive yield, smart contracts, and social construction of cryptocurrency