What happened in the Staking Space from 31st October to 9th November?

      What a wild week for Crypto. BTC reached new highs and Ethereum finally announced the launch of ETH 2.0. With that in mind, we are glad to present you with the 7th 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.

      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

      • ETH 2.0 going live on 01.12.2020
      • Why PoS is superior to PoW by Vitalik Buterin
      • Audius partly moving to Solana
      • Staking Rewards Portfolio Feature
      • World’s first digital asset bank (Sygnum) launched staking service
      • Avalanche claimed Top 5 Spot of Pos Networks

      …And many more!


      Staking Market Overview

      Total Value Participating in Staking (24h change): 

      $15,387,392,711 (+2.51%)

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

      Avalanche is now Top-5!

      • Polkadot: $2,840,301,511 (+6.87%)
      • Cardano: $1,744,978,769 (+10.11%)
      • Tezos: $1,401,158,077 (+9.45%)
      • Avalanche: $967,857,556 (-6.29%)
      • Algorand: $911,180,297 (+8.13%)
      • Cosmos: $892,803,272 (+3.16%)
      • Tron: $532,986,719 (+6.75%)

      Staking Research

      To Stake or No? That’s the Eth 2.0 Question

      Now that Ethereum 2.0 is finally set to go live, people face a crucial decision: whether or not to stake. It comes down to balancing the age-old calculus of risk and reward. Ethereum 2.0 holds out the promise of steady if not “moon”-like staking returns – but the network upgrade also creates illiquidity through lockups and real risks in running infrastructure. Learn more in the article.

      Why Proof of Stake (Nov 2020) by Vitalik Buterin 

      Vitalik Buterin elaborates three key reasons why PoS is a superior blockchain security mechanism compared to PoW: “But even if the risks do turn out to be significant, they seem to me to be much lower than the immense gains that PoS systems get from their far greater efficiency and their better ability to handle and recover from attacks.”

      A Look into DeFi On Tezos with Harbinger

      In this Session, TQ Tezos ’s Co-founder Jacob Arluck led an in-depth discussion about the architecture of DeFi platforms with Luke Youngblood, Founder, and CEO of Blockscale, and Keefer Taylor, CEO of Tessellated Geometry. Luke mentioned that the current DeFi landscape on Tezos is years ahead of the other networks because of its Proof of Stake consensus layer. Keefer gave a detailed presentation of Harbinger, a self-sustaining price oracle that generates accurate on-chain pricing data. The highlight of this Session is the very first glimpse of a new stablecoin on Tezos, Kolibri (or kUSD), which is secured by the Harbinger price oracle and can be minted by any XTZ holder or staker. Users can even use baking rewards to mint kUSD, so, according to Luke “you never lose the value of your underlying Tezos that you’re still holding.”

      Introduction To StaFi Protocol

      Read an article by Stakin team that gives you a quick introduction to the StaFi Protocol, the first-ever decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol focused on unlocking liquidity of staked assets.


      Live Networks Updates

      Audius, the ‘Decentralized Spotify,’ Is Moving Part of Its Service to Solana Blockchain

      Decentralized music app Audius announced it will migrate its content management system over to Solana’s high-speed blockchain from an Ethereum sidechain operated by the POA Network that runs on a set of trusted validators.

      E-Money Mainnet Upgrade Successful

      The upgrade occurred at 13:00 UTC time on 4 November at block height 630964 and took 38 minutes all in all. All features operated exactly as expected. The headline features are as follows:

      1. NGM tokens are now transferrable
      2. Updated token model, including a buyback and burn on NGM tokens
      3. DEX update allowing market orders: Good Until Cancel (GTC), Immediate or Cancel (IOC) and Fill or Kill (FOK).

      Learn more about E-Money on Staking Rewards

      Secret Network Ecosystem Update: October 2020

      Read a comprehensive update on what is happening across the Secret Network ecosystem, including product and technical updates, 5 episodes of Sharing Secrets, potential community-spend proposals, and new charters by leaders of the various committees!

      Also read Secret Network Decentralization Ecosystem Update. 

      Overview
      With the current setup, the top 7/34 active validators collectively own 51% of delegation on the Secret Network. This is an increase from September by 1 additional validator to reach greater than 50% — signs of continued progress towards decentralization.

      Orbs PoS V2.5: The Age of Guardians is here

      V2.5 contains a variety of crucial improvements:  

      1. automating reward distribution on the protocol
      2. Guardians will be able to  determine the level of distribution to Delegators 
      3. Delegators will collect their rewards on their own schedule
      4. streamlining validator node operations
      5. additional parts of the PoS system will be moved to Ethereum
      6. a minimum self-delegation requirement imposing
      7. a more sustainable reward rate 
      8. adopting a new architecture for reducing gas prices based on the state of the art contract design patterns that are gaining popularity in yield farming contracts

      The official launch date is set for the 30th of November 2020.

      The Road to Ethermint

      Ethermint is an implementation of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), built using the Cosmos SDK, that runs on top of Tendermint Core’s BFT Proof-of-Stake consensus engine. ChainSafe is currently wrapping up work on all of the pre-testnet deliverables outlined above. They have run an initial benchmark on Ethermint which yielded some impressive results, finished work on the Web3 Personal API and will release an article on this work shortly. The Ethermint team is also working on upgrading the SDK to Stargate, its largest and most important update since Cosmos went live! More info to follow.

      NuCypher proposal #0 – Unused Sub-stake Removal

      It’s NuCypher’s first official DAO-driven upgrade. Everyone currently staking NU is eligible to participate in the inaugural validation process. This upgrade will reduce the daily costs of node operation, and more specifically, sub-stake management. Currently, configuring or editing your sub-stakes can lead to inactive, or ‘unused’ sub-stakes remaining in your sub-stake array.

      RiveX roadmap for Q4 2020 – Q1 2021

      Terra October 2020 Community Update

      1. CHAI hit a major milestone this month, reaching 2 million users, adding as many as 11K new users in a day — making it the most used dapp.
      2. The Terra network is now entirely secured by validators from the community.
      3. Upbit exchange now supports $LUNA staking.
      4. Houston was launched in beta – it is a development environment, testing framework, and smart contract pipeline designed to make life easier for Terra developers.

      Balancer’s DeFi Protocol is bringing Programmable Liquidity to NEAR

      One of the aspects of Balancer is giving liquidity providers an opportunity to earn passive income from swap fees when they stake their assets into liquidity pools. This gives token holders across a variety of assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and NEAR (soon!) the ability to earn a return by holding their tokens in order to provide liquidity in the market. 


      Upcoming Networks Updates

      $5M staked in eight hours as community cautiously backs ETH 2.0

      In the recent eth2 quick update no. 19, Danny Ryan reported that the team released v1.0 of the eth2 specs, including the mainnet deposit contract address – 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa. 

      The launch of the deposit contract introduced the ability for users to deposit 32 Ether required to participate in staking. ETH 2.0’s beacon chain genesis will take place on Dec. 1 if at least 16,384 deposits of 32 ETH each are received. That’s a total of 524,288 ETH, worth about $200 million. Now deposits began in earnest, with over $1 million in ETH landing in the contract within the first half hour, according to observer The Crypto Cactus.

      Introducing The Graph Council

      The mandate of The Graph Council will be to make sure The Graph continues to be a stable foundation for applications that are designed to run forever, while also fulfilling The Graph’s vision of becoming a global open API layer for decentralized data. In addition to technical governance, The Graph Council will govern over The Graph Foundation community grants from the foundation’s GRT allocation. 


      Staking Providers Update

      10 most anticipated Proof of Stake networks based on the number of staking providers ready to support the launch 

      The data is from the publicly available lists on staking providers websites. 40 staking providers were analyzed. PoS networks with not listed coins were analyzed.

      Sunsetting Lunie.io

      After 3 years of designing, building and supporting the Lunie product suite, the team decided to fundamentally change course. At the end of November, they’ll be shutting down the web app, mobile apps, and the browser extension. Learn more in the detailed article. 

      Licensed Swiss Crypto Bank Launches Tezos Trading and Staking

      Sygnum Bank, a digital assets company licensed in Switzerland, has launched services for Tezos, its first listing of a proof-of-stake blockchain token. The company is regulated as a bank by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), and offers a range of digital asset services with a focus on the B2B market.


      Upcoming Staking Events


      Staking Rewards Update

      Create your Passive Income Portfolio and earn HEARTS

      You can now add assets to your portfolio from the main ranking by clicking the “eye” on the right. Go to the portfolio page, toggle the “Calculate” button, enter your amounts, and get the total estimated earnings for your passive income portfolio.

      The Staking Rewards team adds HEARTS for each daily eligible visit on the website. HEARTS are not a crypto token – they are more of loyalty points that are being given out to supporters of Staking Rewards.  Learn more via the link above.

      Registered Staking Rewards Users get additional XPRT tokens in the Persistence StakeDrop

      As Cosmos Network StakeDrop campaign is quickly gaining momentum, the Persistence team welcomed Staking Rewards as a partner to accelerate their progress. Together we will giveaway up to 20,000 XPRT to Staking Rewards users. You simply have to submit your ERC-address of the StakeDrop “magic transaction” in the Staking Rewards Dashboard (after signing up). If you have not yet participated in the StakeDrop, feel free to do so via the Citadel wallet according to this guide: Learn more in the detailed guide on how to earn XPRT in StakeDrop with Citadel. 

      Avalanche had been fully integrated on Staking Rewards

      Delegators earn around 12% annually when staking their AVAX and almost 77% of the eligible token supply are already participating, which marks a great success for the recently launched Proof of Stake Network. 

      About The Authors

      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

      Mirko Schmiedl

      is the CEO & Co-Founder at Staking Rewards. He was included in the Forbes 30 under 30 class and raised over $4M to advance Staking Rewards on its mission to make Staking easy for everyone.