Hi there,

      Along with the general market recovery, the last week was monumental for the Proof of Stake industry. Officials in the U.S. have now officially declared rewards from Staking as property instead of income, which makes them untaxable at receipt. The staking market reacted positively with a +15.68% increase in Global Staked Value.

      Avalanche saw the biggest increase with over $1.25bn net staking inflow, thus reaching its highest staked balance since May last year.

      Polkadot got a new title as the PoS chain with the least carbon footprint and accounted for almost $200M net staking inflow. It may seem irrelevant since Proof of Stake blockchains are generally low in footprint, but big corporations do take this topic very seriously looking at the latest purchase of BTC and ETH by KPMG Canada, who also bought carbon offset alongside their crypto investment.

      Following our last week’s Staking Mondays episode with Harmony, the network saw the biggest percentage increase in net staking inflow with over 19%.

      While general net staking flow was positive, Terra, Solana, and Flow accounted for small net staking outflows in the last week. More data and news are below.

      All the best,

      Mirko


      Staking at a Glance


      Staking Intelligence

      Global Staking Research

      Big 4 Accounting Firm adds BTC and ETH to balance sheet

      KPMG in Canada has completed an allocation of cryptoassets to its corporate treasury, the firm’s first direct investment in cryptoassets. We expect that KPMG will soon stake their ETH as well. Read more.

      Crypto Stakers’ IRS Tax Refund Marks Milestone for U.S. Staking Tax Treatment.

      Joshua and Jessica Jarrett on Dec. 20 received a letter from the Department of Justice saying that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had approved a full refund of their 2019 taxes against the tokens they earned through staking in the Tezos network, plus statutory interest, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Read the Court Order. [Read Blockworks Article.](https://blockworks.co/in-win-for-crypto-stakers-irs-offers-refund-on-untraded-token-rewards/](https://blockworks.co/in-win-for-crypto-stakers-irs-offers-refund-on-untraded-token-rewards/))

      Dune Analytics raises massive Meme Round of $69,420,000

      One of Ethereum’s most popular analytics platforms is looking to expand cross-chain after nabbing a $1 billion valuation. Read more.

      Staking Assets

      Polygon raises $450M from Sequoia Capital.

      Tiger Global and SoftBank as well as Galaxy Digital, and Alameda Research joined the investment round at $13bn valuation. It’s the first time one of the major global VC making a bet on Layer 2 Scaling Solutions. Read more.

      Polkadot has least carbon footprint, crypto researcher says

      Researcher CCRI looked at Proof of Stake Blockchains to analyze carbon footprint. Cardano uses the least energy per node. Solana per transaction. Read more.

      Dock Updates Automatic Staking Payout After Each Era

      Validators and stakers will no longer have to manually request a rewards payout. Stake DOCK Reward payouts will generate automatically after each era, thanks to our new update. Read more

      Testnets Coming to Cosmos in H1 2022

      Beyond the names, you may already know, like Secret Network, Terra, Cosmos Hub, or Osmosis, there’s a whole lot more to come in H1, 2022. Many up-and-coming projects are running testnets and incentivized testnets that will precede their debuts to mainnet this year. Read more

      Curve Finance Hit Record Volume as Investors Scrambled To Trade Out of MIM

      Curve Finance, an automated market maker and DeFi’s second-largest protocol, had a record-breaking day on Jan. 27 with $3.2B in volume, according to the project’s stats page. Read more

      SushiSwap Struggles to Overcome Lack of Management and Nixed Frog Nation Deal

      SushiSwap is going through this challenge right now in the wake of the exits of its top leaders and an apparently failed union with Frog Nation, the newly formed collective from Daniele Sestagalli and his allies. Read more

      Aave V3 is live on seven testnets, MiniMice spotlight, and more community updates.

      The first cross-chain governance proposal has successfully updated the Aave Polygon Market. Read more

      Jump Crypto Replaces Over $320M of Wormhole Wrapped ETH in DeFi Bailout.

      Jump replaced 120k ETH to make community members whole and support Wormhole now as it continues to develop. [Read more](https://twitter.com/jumpcryptohq/status/1489301013408497666?s=21](https://twitter.com/jumpcryptohq/status/1489301013408497666?s=21)

      Axie Infinity Revamps Rewards Structure for PVPs

      Leading the popular metaverse-blockchain game, Axie Infinity announced that it would be revamping its player-vs-player (PVP) reward structure for players while reducing the supply of SLP tokens. ****Read more

      Teams Building on Polygon Set New Record

      The number of teams building decentralized apps (dApps) on Polygon almost tripled every two months since mid-last year and stood at 11,400 in January, according to Moralis data. Read more

      LooksRare Hits $307M in Protocol Revenue in 30 Days and Leapfrogs OpenSea

      LooksRare, the newly launched NFT marketplace, pulled ahead of the centralized market leader, OpenSea

      Staking Providers

      1inch launches Earn

      At the time of launch users’ earnings from 1inch Earn are estimated to be in the range of 5–10% APY on stablecoins. Read more.

      Stader labs announced adding $SD token incentives on Terra.

      1% of $SD tokens set in the Luna <> LunaX LP have been farmed. Read more

      Anchor’s proposal to increase revenue and promote decentralization rejected due to lack of governance participation

      By whitelisting all validators to Anchor with 10% commissions or less the would have reduce Anchor’s average protocol costs from 8.69% to 6.94% (roughly $6.2M UST savings/year). It remains open if the proposal will be proposed again. Read more


      Staking Rewards Insights

      Latest Asset Integrations:

      Decimal ($DEL)

      Decimal is a blockchain and constructor of all types of tokens, including NFT/SFT. The basic cryptocurrency of the DecimalChain blockchain is – DEL, which is also a reserve for each token created. DecimalChain implies DPoS consensus, which makes it possible for any user to receive daily rewards in DEL due to staking.

      Currently, 84.12% of the total eligible supply is being staked and stakers earn around 69.33% annualized while delegating their assets. Run a validator and you could earn as much as 75% APR.

      $DEL Staking Stats as of Feb 8th. Visit the asset profile for more info.

      For the full list of assets on Staking Rewards, visit our Cryptoassets Page.

      Staking Mondays

      This week we were joined by Josh Lee who is the co-founder of Keplr and Osmosis Labs. Keplr is the leading wallet for the Cosmos ecosystem, allowing users to manage assets, stake, and use applications.

      We dived into:

      • Josh’s inspirations to build Keplr
      • How they make money with Keplr
      • The possibility of a Keplr coin
      • Cosmos vs Bitcoin and Ethereum
      • Osmosis
      • Airdrops
      • Social wallets
      • and more!

      Watch the full episode here!

      For all Staking Monday’s episodes, watch on YouTube and listen on Spotify. Make sure to subscribe to keep up to date on the latest trends in the staking industry.

      Recent Articles in our Journal

      Current Vacancies at Staking Rewards:

      • Director of Marketing & Community
      • Research Director, Content
      • Head of Finance (Switzerland)
      • Backend Engineer
      • Senior Cryptoasset Research Analyst
      • Senior Data Engineer
      • In-House Recruiter (Sourcing Specialist)

      And more..

      Apply here!

      We are looking for proactive, intelligent, and determined people to join our team across all functions.

      The positions are all fully remote but restricted to CET +/- 6.

      About The Author

      Staking Rewards Research

      is a team of analysts dedicated to analyzing the economics, profitability, risks, and yield potential of various cryptocurrencies.