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. Now weekly! This is our 27th report that 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 6th August – 14th August 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
According to the Staking Rewards USD value locked in staking almost 22 billion USD, while the Staking Market Cap (valuation of all projects that have staking mechanism) is currently at 40 billion USD.
PoS Dominance is now about 25,5%, while by the time of our last update it was nearly 22%.
Algorand surpassed EOS and Polkadot by locked in staking, becoming a new Top-2. Tezos stably remains the first place. The tops are Tezos, Algorand, EOS, Polkadot and Cardano accordingly.
Current Value in Staking by Asset
State of the Staking by CryptoDIffer
They have prepared the list of projects sorted by the USD value of the staked tokens. According to the list, top 5: Tezos, EOS, Cardano, Band Protocol and Cosmos. 15 projects have at least 100M value of USD locked in Staking each. These projects in total have 12.2 Billion value of USD staked which is approximately 67% of all USD value locked in staking. They calculated the ratio of staked coins to the circulating supply as well. The leaders are THORChain (85.4%), Band Protocol (81.2%), Tezos (80.3%), Kava (78.6%), Synthetix Network (75.2%)..
Think & Stake
The Basics of Staking by Felix Lutsch
In recent months and years, blockchain networks have evolved to use different incentive models to maintain their infrastructure without requiring a central authority. A clear emerging trend is the migration to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Networks that use Proof-of-Stake rely on participants providing monetary collateral instead of expending energy, as is the case with Proof-of-Work.Be it staking, providing liquidity, or lending out tokens in decentralized finance; holders of cryptocurrencies need to figure out how they want to deploy their assets in the emerging decentralized economy. Read more on the key staking metrics, the emergence of staking economy, and staking industry.
Episode 2 of the Staking Defense podcast features the SKALE Labs and Consensys Activate program collaboration. The Activate program provides a number of benefits to smaller validator operators. Done well, the program can help level the playing field between larger and smaller validator operators. In Episode 2, Chris Remus discusses these benefits with Jack O’Holleran, CEO of SKALE Labs, Ebru Engwall, Director of Solutions Engineering at SKALE labs, and Collin Myers from Consensys.
They also cover these topics:
1 – Collin describing the Activate program
2 – Jack explaining why SKALE decided to use Activate
3 – Ebru and Jack discussing how SKALE views smaller operators and how they can start validating on the SKALE network
Live Networks Updates
Introducing Rococo: Polkadot’s Parachain Testnet
The Rococo testnet integrates Polkadot with Cumulus and HRMP (Horizontal Relay-chain Message Passing). With Rococo, parachain developers can:
- Register a Substrate-based chain as a parachain and message the Relay Chain.
- Write logic for parachains to send messages to other parachains through the Relay Chain.
Rococo is designed strictly for testing parachain functionality. They also intend for Rococo to be a testbed for developing the Cross-Consensus Message (XCM) format, and are looking forward to gathering feedback from the community of parachain builders. Rococo will launch as a Proof of Authority (PoA) network, with a Sudo key controlled by the parachain development leads at Parity Technologies. Rococo will include three parachains that support sending messages to the Relay Chain, and messages between each other through the relay chain.
A new DeFi protocol YAM offered yields of over 5,000% until crashed
Having only launched Tuesday, YAM was a yield farming protocol where tokens were intended to keep parity with the U.S. dollar through loosening or contracting supply. Its relative newness, though, meant the code hadn’t been properly audited; a bug was soon discovered that effectively meant the protocol would keep printing “dud” YAM tokens that would prevent token holders from making any governance decisions. A last-minute attempt to save the protocol ultimately failed and co-founder Brock Elmore pronounced the project dead at 08:01 UTC.
Yield Farmers were able to stake ETH, COMP, LINK, YFI, LEND, SNX, and MKR and crop yields up to 5,000% annualized within the first day. However the DeFi experiment failed within just 2 days after launch. The project announced a plan to migrate to YAM 2.0.
CosmWasm Launches Its First Public Permissionless Testnet, Coral Network
CosmWasm, multi-chain smart contract platform for Cosmos ecosystem, has launched its first public test network, Coral, on August 11th 2020. Validators can practice how to set up and operate nodes here and if they are beginners, they can see how others are running a node.
Validators can build up their engagement points as a reward of operating the nodes and these points will not disappear even when Coral network ends, it will be passed on to the next testnet or mainnet if they decide to launch it.
Daily Cosmos Outpost – Inflation 7.0% Bonded 71.2%
DELEGATIONS:
Delegate: 464,458
Redelegate: 4,102
Undelegate: 490,412
REWARDS: 30,590
Upcoming Networks Updates
Major upcoming events by CryptoDIffer
Secret Network Phase II Incentivized Testnet
Phase II of testnet started on August 10, 2020 and will be running for 4 weeks. In Phase II, there will be 270,000 SCRT available for rewards out to the participants for completing the tasks and challenges described above, for network attacks and documentation. The breakdown of the rewards are:
- Network operation tasks: 75,000 SCRT
- Secret contract tasks: 25,000 SCRT
- Challenges: 50,000 SCRT
- Network attacks: (up to) 115,000 SCRT
- Documentation: 5,000 SCRT
Learn more in the doc above.
Bluzelle aims to be the go-to data layer for Web 3.0 by providing a decentralized data network that is tamper-proof and has greater privacy, scalability and availability than traditional solutions. Bluzelle is fully decentralized and stores data across thousands of nodes around the world. Each node provides storage space and earns a fee. Bluzelle is the AirBnB of Databases. Powered by Cosmos, Bluzelle handles 10,000 TPS and is a delegated proof of stake network. Any laptop, desktop, mobile device, and gaming console can become a node on Bluzelle. Bluzelle’s Defi solutions are being developed to enhance Defi with historical price feeds, provide data analytics, 360 degree views, and more. As Defi grows, decentralized infrastructure plays a big role.
Bluzelle has allocated an annual BLZ rewards pools that will decrease over time. This will kickstart the network. Over four years as transaction fees grow, they expect the staking rewards component to lower year over year.
No matter what day of the year, it is better to stake today than tomorrow.
Those that stake with Bluzelle can retrieve up to 25% APY, depending on the time they come in, and the ratio of tokens staked in the whole ecosystem.
SKALE Network Announces over 40 Partners in its Ethereum Scaling Ecosystem
SKALE Labs, the core team behind the SKALE Network, an open source elastic blockchain platform designed specifically for scaling Ethereum, announced over 40 integration partners and validators, in addition to the Dapps that joined the SKALE Innovator program and are currently building on the platform. This collection is one of the most significant ecosystem announcements as part of the network launch in recent years and signifies the importance and strength of the Ethereum Developer Ecosystem which SKALE is proud to be a part of.
Over $100M USD is now participating in Stafi StakingDrop Campaign
Stakingdrop is a unique form of airdrop taken by Stafi targeted at token holders who are actively staking POS tokens. Users who want to claim FIS can Stake their own tokens and submit proof.
Source: ICO Analytics
Stafi Protocol has started StakingDrops for Cosmos, Matic, Harmony, KAVA and Kusama on August 6
Users will be able to get both staking rewards and $FIS token. Stafi will be distributing 2% of the total supply via StakingDrops activities. It was also recently announced that Liquid Stakingis now available for Elrond PoS Participants via Stafi Integration.
The Stake-A-Thon offers a first-look at Qtum offline staking protocol, currently running on testnet and coming to Qtum mainnet approximately 7:15 pm GMT on August 28 with a hard fork at block 680,000. Mainnet staking wallets should update now to version 0.19.1: don’t be left behind by the hard fork!
Announcement of NerveNetwork Main-Net Opening Nodes and Staking
The NerveNetwork Main-Net was successfully launched one month ago, with close to zero issues found since then. Recently it was announced that Phase 2 was launched on August 7th, with staking & ETH cross-chain operations enabled, ahead of schedule. NerveNetwork generates 43,200 blocks per day, and each block initially generates 2 NVT rewards. This is called the Block Reward. (After the first block reward, the block reward will be reduced by 0.822% every 100 days). To ensure fairness, NerveNetwork will give the community users time to prepare. The first block reward will be generated at NerveNetwork block height 1,350,000.
Binance Presents Stake Wars – Stake BNB on Binance Chain Testnet with 3,000 BNB in Prizes
To prepare for the upcoming launch of BNB staking on Binance Chain, Binance is sponsoring “Stake Wars” with a total of 3,000 BNB in prizes as an opportunity for users and the larger Binance Chain community to practice cross-chain communication between Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Rewards will be given based on two types of measurements:
- Validator Performance: The top 10 validators measured by a combination of collected rewards and uptime will win from a pool of 2,000 BNB, with the top validator winning 800 BNB.
- Validator Delegation: The top 10 delegating validators measured by delegator reward rate will win from a pool of 1,000 BNB, with the top delegating validator winning 350 BNB.
The Althea Peggy Ethereum dev update #1
75% of the cost of your transfer across the bridge is a simple state update in an ERC20 contract. They manage to fit all the hashing and verifications for 125 signatures into 25% of the cost! At the heart of Althea’s design for a Cosmos <-> Ethereum bridge is an ultra efficient Ethereum contract. Built for the dual challenge of high fees and the large validator set of the Cosmos hub. The Althea Peggy Ethereum contract can validate a weighted powers vote from the complete set of 125 validators on the Cosmos hub for a cost of $1.20 per Cosmos -> Ethereum ERC20 transfer @ 300gwei.
Orion Terminal’s Orbit Test Net is currently being rolled out to beta testers
Orion Terminal’s Orbit Test Net was rolled out to beta testers from 12th June, ahead of private main net launch in Q3. Those who have applied for beta access to Orion Terminal are being invited to test the terminal in phases. Beta testers will be invited to take part in Orion’s Bug Hunter Program – an initiative launching with a $10,000 USDT reward pool to be distributed across users who discover the most intricate bugs. The goal of this program is both to demonstrate the initial functionality and potential of the terminal, while utilizing the power of the Orion community to ensure a market-ready product for main net launch in Q3 of this year.
Orion Protocol Launches Pre-Staking Initiative with 39% APR
Orion Protocol has developed an initiative to facilitate and incentivize staking of its ORN token prior to public Main Net launch in Q4. Through a lucrative multi-exchange pre-staking program, Orion Protocol’s ORN token can now be staked on BitMax, KuCoin, and Biki for staking rewards at a 39% est. APR. The team worked with staking and DeFi expert Bonna Zhu of BitMax to form this incredibly profitable pre-staking program.
Dusk Network’s staking campaign is set to go live on the 17th of August
Pre-registration is now open. It gives you a headstart on receiving all staking information to stay ahead of the curve and be well prepared for launch day staking. It also allows you to benefit from early staking rewards.
- To become a Block Generator requires a lock-up commitment of 100.000 (100K) $DUSK.
- There is a minimum 30-day staking lock-up period. You will receive rewards during this period, but cannot initiate a withdrawal, or the cooldown period (see below).
- If you wish to withdraw your stake, a 7-day cooldown period applies during which you do not earn rewards. The cooldown period cannot be initiated until the 30-day staking lock-up period has ended.
- Rewards are calculated on a daily basis, thus it can take up to a full-day before you become eligible for any reward.
Staking Providers Update
Staking Economy #42: Scaling Strategies by Felix Lutsch of Chorus.One
Read about the great Reddit scaling bake-off, competition and trade-offs, some other PoS networks updates including Medalla testnet launch, the Graph Mission Control release, and more!
CoinDCX Becomes First India Exchange to Offer Users Crypto Staking
The Indian crypto community now has the opportunity to earn passive income with staking. Mumbai-based cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX launched its new product, allowing its users to stake three cryptocurrencies: harmony (ONE), qtum (QTUM) and Tron (TRX). Users with a minimum balance of 100 ONE tokens, one QTUM token and five TRON tokens will be eligible for staking. CoinDCX said it will pool the holdings of multiple customers as a way to increase their chances of receiving rewards.The exchange will aggregate staking rewards via partner exchanges such as Binance, and also stake natively on blockchains, according to the announcement.
DeFiPie Staking Programme Details
DeFiPie staking will be delivered through the Ferrum Network’s flexible staking program. Through a recent partnership with the Ferrum Network, DeFiPie will be able to make a large pool of staking rewards available to PIE holders while also giving them loose staking terms. 2.7 million of PIE token rewards will be available to participants of the staking initiative. Token holders can choose between three different staking pools when they’re locking their tokens. Holders will gradually accumulate rewards over the staking timeframe with the full percentage being realized at the end of the specified timeframe. Users can reclaim their tokens and accumulated rewards at full maturity, but also have the option to withdraw early if they want to unstake some or all of their principal. However, bear in mind that those who stake until full maturity will get an equal share of bonus rewards based on the rewards that were forfeited by people who unstaked early.
Ankr and Waves partner for one-click node infrastructure integrations
Ankr has concluded a partnership agreement with Waves, an open blockchain protocol and development toolset for Web3.0 applications and decentralized solutions. The key element of the collaboration will be to work on lowering the entrance threshold for miners in the Waves network. This collaboration will enable Waves users to deploy their own node in minutes, using Ankr’s secure and simple solutions.
Figment Networks Partners with Anchorage
Anchorage will provide a custody solution to Figment Networks’ customers. Now, you can take advantage of the enterprise grade staking and node infrastructure, while safely and seamlessly securing your tokens in a compliant way.
Stake Solana Using Keystore With Solflare by Stakin team
A step-by-step guide on how to stake Solana with the SolFlare wallet.
Also read a guide by Stakin highlighting How To Nominate Validators on Polkadot
In this article, they will tell you all about choosing and nominating a validator to participate in the Polkadot network and get rewarded for staking DOT tokens.
How to stake Cardano (ADA) via the AdaLite wallet by Everstake team
After switching to the main Shelley network, users can delegate coins to the ADA instead of running their own node. In this guide, they will tell you how to stake Cardano via AdaLite wallet.
Also read Everstake’s article on How to stake Cardano (ADA) in Daedalus Wallet
Got ETH? What do you need to do as we approach Eth 2.0 in a presentation by Stake.fish’s very own JK
Upcoming Staking Events
- 13th August 2020 — TezTalks Live #9 — Elevated Returns
- 13th August 2020 – AMA with Akash Network by CryptoDiffer
- Until 14th August 2020 – Hackusama, Hack on Polkadot’s Wild Cousin. Feel free to join right now!
- August 22nd – 23rd, 2020 – #FutureProof Technical Summit
- 24th August 2020 — TezTalks Radio #8 — Cryptonomic
- 27th August 2020 — TezTalks Live #10 — Payzos
- 28th–29th August 2020 — Chainlink’s Smart Contract Virtual Summit
- 2nd-30th October 2020 — EthOnline hackathon
- 6th–7th November — virtual Trufflecon
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:
As part of the latest development report, the Citadel team has shared what they’ve been working on at this stage. Firstly, they set up a gateway to buy cryptocurrency for fiat, optimized sending transactions and displaying data for different networks, and updated documentation for application structure and API. As for frontend tasks, the team renewed design of the navigation menu and messages after the operation, adapted the interface for the networks, and updated the landing page and optimized its loading. Currently, the Citadel developers actively work with the feedback they are getting from the first Citadel.One users. They push out builds on a regular basis to satisfy all the needs of the Citadel community. Furthermore, in a fresh-published article, Dmitriy Shekhovtsov, Citadel Lead Analyst describes how Citadel.One can improve staking experience for the users. A must-read!
As for the social side, the team attended EDCON (Community Ethereum Development Conference) and Ethereal Session 003, they participated in 11th CosmWasm biweekly community call, and presented the freshly released Citadel public beta to TokenPocket, Metanyx, and NEOPLY/EOSeoul teams. Forby, the Citadel founders and developers answered all the community questions associated with the product and just chatted for fun during the second community gathering in the official Citadel Telegram chat.
On top of that, the first-ever video-interview with Anton Pavlutsky, CEO of Citadel.One, appeared! During the conversation, Anton, an experienced developer and crypto skeptic, spoke about his role in the Citadel project, the current crypto weaknesses, and possible ways of market development. Additionally, Anton disclosed some features to come to the Citadel, so make sure to check it out! Find the full interview on the Citadel Youtube channel.
As you have gleaned, the biggest event from July was the long anticipated launch of Citadel beta! We welcome you to test Citadel out as much as possible and give the team feedback so that they could make you experience much better!
Learn more about Citadel:
- Citadel Telegram chat
- Citadel Twitter page
- Citadel Facebook
- Citadel Reddit
- Citadel Medium
- Citadel Instagram
- Check the recent biweekly updates on PoS Networks, created by Paradigm Fund: