State of Stake is a series of curated news, research, updates, and events in the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem. Stay informed with the biggest PoS networks and all things Staking. This is our 22nd report and we are happy to release it in collaboration with Staking Rewards! Staking Rewards provides trusted access to all passive income opportunities with regard to digital assets. They are curating knowledge and data to build a healthy staking and DeFi ecosystem. Staking Rewards’ core focus are Proof-of-Stake Protocols which enable passive returns through staking. They also cover Masternode Coins, Dividend Tokens, and Lending Protocols.
In this update, we examine the period from 30th May – 13th June with a general overview of the market, highlighted research in the space, news on all launched staking networks, updates on all the upcoming PoS networks, the latest developments from staking infrastructure providers and a handful of staking-related events.
Global Market Overview
The current Staking Market Cap is gradually growing, now comprising more than 15% of the Global Market Cap.
The PoS dominance rate peaked in the period of 8th-10th June, reaching a high of 19,68.
Tezos and EOS remain in positions of the absolute leaders by locked in staking.
Current Value in Staking by Asset
Staking Overview by CryptoDiffer
Think & Stake
The working group is an interdisciplinary forum supporting the adoption of “Proof of Stake blockchain consensus protocols” in all their variations. This includes comprehensive educational work and lobbying efforts directed towards political decision-makers within the European Union and other European states. The working group will also seek to improve the state of the industry as a whole through self-regulation, standards-setting, and the development of best practices within the industry. You can download the working group charter to learn more about working group governance here.
Among the objectives, plans, policies, and strategies are:
- Lobby on behalf of the staking community including staking infrastructure providers, PoS protocols, and community members for sensible regulation which enables the growth of the overall Proof of Stake ecosystem.
- Provide educational materials regarding staking to increase awareness about the importance of the industry targeting policymakers and the legal community in particular.
- Provide educational materials regarding staking to the general public via the EBA website and via meetings, events, and other digital media.
- Standards-setting and the development of industry best practices.
The impending transition to Ethereum 2.0 has put staking in the spotlight, with both exchanges and standalone staking platforms offering institutional players and retail investors alike the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of staking, without actually having to run a node. In total, over $10 billion of the total $19 billion proof-of-stake coin market cap now locked in staking contracts. Much of this popularity stems from the appeal of staking as a way to earn additional passive income—akin to earning interest on fiat in a bank account by depositing funds and then receiving a small percentage back each year. But the investment case for staking extends beyond just regular returns, and those willing to dive deeper into this new crypto-economic model will discover a multitude of different reasons for investing.
“While staking makes a strong investment case, token holders should remember that the primary purpose of staking is not to create an income or generate ‘yield’, but to put ‘skin in the game’ — increasing network participation and ensuring the blockchain remains resistant to censorship. This makes for a unique investment proposition that is unparalleled in the world of legacy finance.”
Intro to Staking Rewards – Earn Passive Income with Crypto
A video on exploring ways how to utilize the trend towards productive crypto assets. This year alone there are over 20 multi-billion Dollar networks launching their mainnet. Almost every new network is utilizing the benefits that come along Proof of Stake. Right now there are already 109 assets that generate over $150 million dollar rewards per year. With Ethereum 2.0 , Polkadot and Cardano, just to name a few of them it is expected that this annual rewards value to skyrocket in the coming months. Feel free to check it out!
Someone Just Anonymously Dropped an ETH 2.0 Scaling Solution on Medium
As the world awaits Ethereum 2.0 staking implementation, someone operating under the pseudonym “heyheeyheeey” posted a Medium article with a solution based on the protocol.
The concept is a “design for an ETH2 staking solution on top of Argent, that is fast and simple to use so that users with less time, knowledge or skills can join from the beginning,” the author wrote on June 2. Argent is a crypto wallet solution with elements of decentralized finance or DeFi compatibility.
Live Networks Updates
IoTeX Mainnet GA Machina is LIVE
With MainnetGA, they have established independence from Ethereum and are now a fully native blockchain. For more info, check IoTeX Mainnet GA — FAQs. What’s more, the recent IoTeX Mainnet introduced Native Staking. For those that have stake/voted via IOTX-E (ERC20) and MetaMask in the past, you will now use native IOTX and ioPay, the official IoTeX wallet for both Desktop and Mobile (iOS, Android). In this blog, they share details about the purpose and benefits of staking on the IoTeX Network, as well as how to stake/vote using ioPay.
Kava-3 Mainnet Upgrade complete
The Kava decentralized finance project has launched on the Cosmos blockchain, giving users the ability to put BNB for collateral to receive its stablecoin, USDX. Kava works in a similar way to MakerDAO, allowing users to deposit crypto assets and borrow Kava’s stablecoin, USDX. The project focuses on providing interoperability to DeFi, and promises to onboard collateral from other chains including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The initial collateral form is BNB, which gives Binance’s token a DeFi use case. It is no secret that the exchange sought to introduce its token to DeFi, previously being involved with the EOS-based Equilibrium. Kava was incubated by the Binance Launchpad, which likely weighed in on the decision to only accept BNB at launch.
Kava’s DeFi lending platform is offering users who use BNB and other major crypto assets as collateral, a total of 3,848,000 KAVA over the course of 52 weeks when minting USDX.
In Polkadot’s governance system all DOT holders have a say. Proposals can be suggested either by a DOT holder or by the Council. Both need to be agreed upon by a stake-weighted referendum. All DOT holders can register to be considered for the Council. The Council consists of 23 members, with a fixed term of one month. Let’s give a brief overview!
A Technical Committee (consisting of teams that implemented or formally specified the protocol in Polkadot) exists with the sole purpose of detecting issues such as bugs in the code and to fast-track emergency upgrades or changes to the chain. Teams may be added or removed by a majority vote from the Council.
Nominated proof of stake (NPoS) is an adaptation of proof of stake (PoS) in which an unlimited number of token holders can back a large but limited number of validators (expected to be in the order of hundreds at genesis). The elected validators are responsible for running the relay chain. This allows for a massive amount of stake to back validators, much higher than any single user’s holding. As the nominators share possible slashings as well as economic rewards with the validators they back, they are economically incentivized to choose validators with a strong record of performance and security practices. For a more detailed description of NPoS in Polkadot see the Medium post How Nominated Proof-of-Stake will work in Polkadot.
The validators elected using NPoS are responsible for receiving, validating and republishing blocks on the relay chain using a hybrid consensus protocol that splits the finality gadget (GRANDPA) from the block production mechanism (BABE). This combination allows:
1) probabilistic finality by BABE due to its chain selection rule, where after a certain time the block will be finalized with a probability close to one
2) provable and deterministic finality by GRANDPA, where finalized blocks stay final forever.
Polkadot has a three-level validity check:
- First, when the PoV block is verified by the parachain validators they sign and distribute the erasure codes of the parachain blob to each validator.
- Second, it is expected that nodes acting as fishermen (which could primarily be functioning as collators) would report invalidity.
- Third, a few randomly assigned validators check validity. If a major problem occurs and the block is not made available to them they can reconstruct the PoV block with a sufficient number of the erasure code pieces that were distributed in the first level.
For more detailed information on Polkadot, check the article above!
Our Network: Issue #24 – Polkadot&Kusama coverage by Bill Laboon, Technical Education Lead at Web3 Foundation
While the launch of the Polkadot mainnet has been in the limelight, Kusama has continued to grow and evolve. This evolution has included 57 referenda (on-chain votes that indicate the future technical direction of the protocol), 25 runtime upgrades (which modify the logic of the blockchain without requiring a hard fork), an increase in the size of the democratically-elected Kusama Council to 13 members, and 25 proposals to spend money from the Kusama Treasury (of which 12 were approved).
Kusama’s economic security (the fundamental force behind proof of stake systems) has continued to improve. Out of approximately 9.27 million KSM outstanding (spread among 27,366 accounts), 5.53 million KSM are being used for staking, for a staking rate of 59.68%. There are algorithms and incentives to make the distribution of stake among validators as equal as possible, which increases the cost of attacking the network. For example, consider a set of validators with the following stake {1, 1, 1, 48, 49}. Validators are chosen by the amount of stake allocated to them, so an attacker would only need to stake 6 KSM to replace over half the validator set – {2, 2, 2, 48, 49}. A perfectly even stake allocation – {20, 20, 20, 20, 20} – would require an attacker to stake over 60 KSM to take over 3 of 5 slots, ten times as much KSM as the poorly-allocated set earlier. Looking only at maximum and minimum stake behind validators, it appears that there is a very high divergence in the current validator set. The lowest-staked validator has 12,488 KSM staked; the highest has 57,513 KSM. However, a closer look reveals that this last validator is an outlier; the second-highest amount of stake is only 38,006 KSM. The current median stake for a validator is 18,171 KSM, the current mean 20,116, and the standard deviation is 4,782.
IOST has inked an alliance with Japanese Medical Health Tech Venture “Pracs”
The main goal of the alliance is to develop a secure, transparent, and tamper-proof on-chain medical record platform.
The first version of the Tezos FA1.2 token creation website is ready
The dapp allows people to create Tezos FA1.2 tokens on Carthagenet and easily explore their different functionalities. As the underlying smart-contract is deployed on Carthagenet, you are free to create and update your own token or use other people’s tokens to buy or transfer their tokens. Each functionality comes with a little description of what it does. The dapp is created for demo purposes with users who are less familiar with fungible tokens in mind, some functionalities have been (extremely) simplified. An example token is here.
Magic Passwordless Authentication Now On Tezos
Fortmatic recently launched the new passwordless SDK — Magic, which received lots of love on Product Hunt. Recently, they shared that it now supports Tezos as its first live non-EVM blockchain integration. With the Magic SDK, developers can easily build applications on top of the Tezos blockchain via Magic’s Tezos Extension. With this extension, every new user that signs up via Magic will be given a Tezos key pair managed by the blockchain-agnostic Delegated Key Management System.
Cosmos Unchained – Cosmos vs Tezos
Cosmos Unchained is a virtual meetup series that explores the opportunities of the different blockchain that exist and how they’ll make an impact. In this episode, they explore the design architecture, key features, and the vision of Cosmos and Tezos.
Daily cosmos Outpost Jun 11 – Inflation 7.0% Bonded 71.0%
Delegations:
- Delegate: 407,861
- Redelegate: 1,809
- Undelegate: 19,120
Rewards: 202,093
Terra May 2020 Community Update
- 5 new integrations on CHAI
- Smart contracts on Terra
- Grant program live
- Chai analytics live
- HBR feature
Livepeer Explorer New Features Roundup
Over the past few months, they’ve added a bunch of new features and improvements to The Livepeer Explorer. Tokenholders can now stake, vote, and explore orchestrator campaigns directly from their mobile device. The new voting feature allows tokenholders to create polls for proposed LIPs, discover active and past polls, and cast staked-weighted votes. Read more about Livepeer’s first governance poll here. And a lot more in the article above!
Orbs State of the Network in their latest update
There are 19 registered Guardians and 16 Validators running in production. There are now over 1700 Delegators participating in the Orbs PoS ecosystem, and over 200 of them are already staking through Tetra, the new staking wallet! Note that the locking period has been decided to change to 14 days.
There are 2 applications running on the Orbs Network:
COTI Coin One Year Anniversary
- During the year, COTI was listed on 10 exchanges
- The total amount of staked in April 2019 was 5M COTI and in May 2020 the number is about 70M COTI.
- By now COTI has two full nodes controlled by COTI and eight additional full nodes operated by community members. One more node will be added to the Mainnet on July 1st.
- COTI also had a peak (3rd place in March 2020) on all social metrics and remains in the list of most discussed in Twitter.
Upcoming Networks Updates
The Full List of Major Upcoming Events in Crypto by CryptoDiffer
BandChain Phase 0 Mainnet Genesis Ceremony: Stage 1 Completed
BandChain is an independent blockchain built specifically for fulfilling cross-chain data oracle requests including settlement, sourcing and aggregation on a decentralized oracle network. Secured by Delegated Proof-of-Stake, staking enables validators to participate in consensus and data provision while being economically incentivized to uphold security and integrity of the system. The BandChain mainnet launch is LIVE and fully functional with 17 professional genesis validators onboarded consisting of the top blockchain infrastructure, DevOps/security firms and industry-leading validator services.
As discussed in the token swap guide, only the BandChain native token will be used for staking and must be swapped from ERC20 BAND. They will also enable the process of swapping BandChain native tokens back to ERC20 to maintain the integration with DeFi and other dApps on Ethereum.
You can also read about the recent milestones and planned events in the Band Protocol May 2020 Community Update.
The start of the public Shelley testnet
The Incentivized Testnet phase of Cardano’s Shelley era has begun, marking the very first steps towards the network’s decentralization. This testnet is designed to test incentivization in a real-world context and allow you – the ada holder – to earn real rewards by either delegating your stake or running a stake pool. From right now, any operator who wants to run a Cardano pool can start getting ready for mainnet staking & delegation later this summer.
Introducing the Amber Network (a release candidate for Oasis Mainnet)
As the Oasis Quest, the Oasis incentivized testnet, comes to an end, they’re excited to announce the next major milestone on the Oasis Network — the Amber Network. The Amber Network is the Oasis Network’s release candidate for Mainnet and will launch in mid-June.
They are thrilled to get one step closer to this vision with the end of the Quest and beginning of the Oasis Network’s first Mainnet release candidate, Amber. The Oasis Network is a proof-of-stake, decentralized blockchain network built with one goal in mind — to create a better internet; an internet where the benefits of data at scale are realized, while user privacy and control remain at the core of any network usage. The Network seeks to do this by unlocking a new paradigm for blockchain technology, extending the concept of tokenization to the underlying data itself.
Elrond Battle of Nodes: Onchained — Prize Pool Increased to $60k
- $20k added to the prize pool
- 1700 nodes connected to the network & 3 Attacks foiled by the protocol
- 6.689 peak TPS with 1M transactions in dry-run test
- Latest patch is a Mainnet Release Candidate
Phase 3 of Coda Testnet Launched
There are weekly challenges for the community to interact with the testnet and contribute to Coda’s development. Each week features a new competition to recognize and reward top contributors with testnet points. By participating in the testnet, you’ll be helping advance the first cryptocurrency that utilizes recursive zk-SNARKs and production-scale Ouroboros proof of stake consensus.
[Tour de SOL] Stage 5 – Details
The key area features enabled in Stage 5 are:
- Cross program invocation – The ability for different smart contracts to interact with each other
- Optimistic confirmation – Read more about this feature here
As a result key areas we’d like to invite hackers to explore are:
- Cross-program invocation attacks
- Optimistic confirmation attacks
[Release Details]
- Start Date/Time: Wednesday, 10th of June, ~10:00am PT
- Estimated duration: 4 weeks
- Malicious behavior will be incentivized
- The focus of Stage 5 will be Smart Contracts and Optimistic Confirmations
Announcing the Formation of the Solana Foundation
On April 8th, 2020 Solana Labs transferred all IP related to the protocol and 167m SOLs to the Solana Foundation. Solana Labs plans to transfer more SOLs to the Foundation. Solana Labs expects to retain a small number of SOL tokens to support operations (estimated to be 50m, but this is subject to change). The Solana Foundation was founded with a mission to advance the adoption of decentralized technologies as a public good. The vision of a world where individuals are empowered to retain ownership of their data and can access networks through which they transfer value without being reliant on third-parties. The Solana Foundation’s initial focus is expanding and developing the ecosystem of the Solana protocol.
Apart from the Foundation, You can check a highlight of the independent validators that make Soland blockchain decentralized.
May was a month of new milestones for Kyber as it reached its highest number of unique and new user addresses while also surpassing $1 billion cumulative trades since launch. They also introduced new KyberDAO staking partners who join to serve stakers and pool masters with new tools and UIs and they can’t wait to launch Katalyst. And of course they continue to have a great cohort of new projects integrate Kyber and for them, seeing this constant inflow of new teams working on Etheruem is the clearest signal they are on the right and healthy path towards mainstream adoption.
Announcing Filecoin’s Testnet Incentives
The testnet incentives program is a collaborative competition intended to stress-test the network, encourage participation all over the world, and help miners get ready to run the world’s biggest decentralized storage network. The competition’s basic structure is simple: for three weeks, miners will compete to onboard as much storage capacity as possible to the network. The top 100 miners globally, as well as the top 50 miners from each continent, will earn Filecoin rewards based on how much storage they and the network achieve during the test period. The competition will run for a total of three weeks. The exact start date will be announced when they fix a launch date, but the competition may begin as soon as early July.
Introducing RiveX League of Stakes #LOS
League of Stakes (#LOS) allows participants to stake their assets — RVX (WRC-20 version) and earn rewards. The #LOS model comes with a unique mechanism called the Stake-to-Burn mechanism.
Below are some of the quick key takeaway points for #LOS
- Stake-to-Burn % Ratio
- 46.8% to 62.4% APR
- No bonding period — unstake anytime
- No minimum or maximum staking amount
- Dedicated #LOS dashboard
Staking Providers Update
Lunie Rolls Out Staking For Kusama Ahead Of Polkadot NPoS Launch
This integration is part of the first milestone associated with a grant received from Web3 Foundation to build out a staking interface for both Kusama and Polkadot.
Polkadot Nomination Guide by Staking Rewards
If you have already created an account and successfully claimed DOT tokens you can follow this simple guide to nominate validators.
Another Polkadot nomination guide was shared by Everstake
Cosmos’ Game of Zones Phase 3: Double Spend via a Double Sign by P2P
P2P Validator team shows how malicious validators (or validator keys thieves) can double-spend via IBC transfers using vanilla Tendermint, cosmos-sdk and relayer software. For an experiment, they have two chains: p2p-org-3 and responsible-3. On p2p-org-3 there are 1000, no more and no less, of very valuable tokens with scarce denom. Using the trick it is possible to make responsible-3 accept a total sum of 2000scarce via a channel.
- They helped launch Band Protocol’s mainnet, a decentralized oracle network built on the Cosmos SDK. Find them on their block explorer here.
- They became part of the first wave of Terra ecosystem grantees and will add reward insights and staking for Terra in Anthem.
PoS Round-Up is their focused biweekly report on the major news in and around the Proof of Stake ecosystem. Over the past month, crypto world seen an explosion of mainnet releases for Proof of Stake projects. In their previous edition, they covered the launches of Polkadot, NEAR, and Celo. This time, those networks are joined by Centrifuge and Matic, and Band Protocol.
They’ve also got updates on Game of Zones, plus a couple of surprises they’ve been working on here at stakefish.
An Introduction to SKALE Testnet by Stakin
The SKALE Mainnet is expected to launch soon. Stakin team, therefore, thought it was time to give you an introduction to this Elastic Blockchain Network. In this article, they take you through everything you need to know about SKALE.
Another article by Stakin highlighted ICON BPT 1.0 and Network Stabilization
Recently, the ICON BTP 1.0 launch was announced. In this article, Stakin team takes you through the ins and outs of BTP 1.0 and why it’s so great. But first, what is the reason behind implementing a Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP)? The ICON Network’s goal is to “hyper connect the world” through blockchain technology. And with doing so, the concept of interoperability arizes. This is where the Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) comes in. As the ICON Foundation puts it: “To realize blockchain’s full potential, they want distinct protocols to have compatible ways to interact and communicate with each other, and the ability to interoperate at the protocol level.”. Which is why they have developed BTP.
Chainflow joins Matic Network as a validator
Chainflow will be operating a validator node for Matic Network, enabling MATIC holders to delegate their tokens to their node to generate a passive income.
Upcoming Staking Events
- 14th June 2020 – Cardano UnConference Online June 2020
- 15th June 2020 – Code with us online workshop: Debug a Cosmos-SDK application: first steps (GDB, Delve, GDBGui, gdlv)
- 16th June 2020 – Cosmos Unchained: Cosmos vs Ethereum 2.0
- 17th June 2020 – Cardano Shelley Upcoming Release Virtual Meetup
- 24th June 2020 – Webinar: Building Crypto Baskets. Join Christian Arita, Product Lead at StakerDAO, to a great session on “building algorithms to select PoS tokens into a synthetic, liquid staking index.’
- TBA – Liquid Staking Working Group Call. Join their Telegram not to miss the announcement.
Citadel Updates
Citadel is a multi-asset non-custodial platform for the management and storage of crypto assets established by Paradigm Fund. One of the main functions of the service is participating in the PoS consensus. The platform allows you to delegate crypto assets, analyze market conditions and transaction status, as well as create several cryptocurrency wallets using a single seed phrase. Moreover, the software part is configured so that all private keys are stored encrypted on your device. Currently, the Citadel project is under development.
According to the last biweekly update:
The Citadel development team is operating extremely hard on the major releases as a very significant milestone is about to happen. The launch of the stable version of Citadel 1.0 coming soon! The good news is, these weeks, the team was replenished with a quality assurance specialist to improve the quality of the product, and a new developer joined the team to create mobile applications!
We never cease to wonder at the progress the team has made in recent days! According to the report on ‘ETH / USDT’ sprint, over the past two weeks, the Citadel developers has made a number of additions to the product. The team completed the preparatory work and began to add ETH and USDT. Getting ready to add BTC! As for front-end tasks, the team optimized the algorithm for working with Ledger wallets for all networks presented in Citadel, integrated several token exchange partners, added a limit for adding network addresses, and updated the interface, made it more fancy and understandable. Furthermore, the team discussed design for the main tasks of the following sprint, including token exchange, import of a third-party wallet using a private key or a mnemonic phrase, private key export, and import from Ledger and Trezor wallets.
As for the social side, these weeks, the Citadel team attended Consensus: Distributed Virtual Conference hosted by CoinDesk. They also took part in ETH2 Staking Community Calls #5 with Jim McDonald, creator of ETH2 key management software ethdo, and co-founder of institutional staking service Attestant joined the discussion on ETH2 keys, how they work, and how to keep them secure, and in ETH2 Staking Community Calls #6 featured Afri Schoedon, the Ethereum 2 Multiclient Testnet Coordinator, with Ethereum 2 Multiclient Testnets. On May 19th, the Citadel team joined The State of Staking live webinar. In this webinar brought by ConsenSys, the Codefi Activate team discussed the industry-leading trends, economics, and importance of staking-based protocols. The Citadel Founders was glad to take part in the discussion on IISS 3.0 on the last ICON P-Rep community meeting. Moreover, they joined the ICON P-Rep Governance Meeting #4 to talk about CPS Paper, P-Rep Commission Rate, IISS3.0 Implementation, and much more!
And last but not least, the Citadel team collabs with Staking Rewards on State of Stake series, a series of curated news, research, updates, and events in the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem.
Learn more about Citadel:
- Check the recent biweekly updates on PoS Networks, created by Paradigm Fund: