Monthly Roundup (Dec 19)
Our 2019 milestones, Cosmos year in review, as well as Kava and Terra updates.
Happy New Year Subscribers!
2019 was our first year of operating validator nodes, so I wanted to start this update by providing a summary of some of last years’ milestones:
January: Battletested our validator setup in the first incentivized testnet of its kind - Cosmos Game of Stakes
February: Launch of our first production validator on the Loom Network
March: Cosmos Hub launch
April: Terra launch
May: First audit and start of our infrastructure documentation
June: Developed a staking derivatives prototype with Sikka (Delegation Vouchers) during the Cosmos Berlin hackathon
July: Launch of the Chorus One Podcast
October: Became a lead validator to guide Regen Network to mainnet launch
November: Launch on Kava and start of Solana StrongGate high-availability validation development
We have worked on multiple projects internally and aim to continue to support the staking ecosystem on various fronts. In 2020 we will launch Anthem, our front-end product for staking networks, spin up further validators on new blockchains, as well as increase our research and development efforts on the networks we support.
December was a rather quiet month as we went into the holiday season and started to prepare for 2020:
We joined the Celo testnet for their competition “The Great Stake Off”, which got postponed to this month.
We started looking for an additional software engineer to help us improve our data pipeline and to onboard new networks. In case you or someone you know might be interested in this opening, find the job description here.
Network Data
Year in Review: An awesome video showcasing Cosmos community members and what they have achieved in 2019.
Community Pool: The first proposals requesting funding from the community pool are being drafted and discussed here.
Development Update: Kava’s CDP code is in review and a testnet with CDP functionality is targeted for this month.
Staking incentive update: With the upgrade to Columbus-3, validators on Terra now need to operate price feed oracles to avoid slashings. Additionally, the network increased the tax on transactions in stablecoins by a factor of 4 and retired block rewards in LUNA introduced earlier through Project Santa. For stakers the change already comes out as a net positive: the reward rate increased by ~2% and is paid out in stable KRT instead of LUNA.
Terra released a 2019 review post that contains insights on milestones and data, e.g. around CHAI’s growth to $135m in processed transactions across 850k+ users.
Other Content
If you’re a data enthusiast I highly recommend checking out Coinmetric’s State of the Network 2019 summary post. While it doesn’t feature any networks we support (yet), the Coinmetrics team provides valuable insights by aggregating relevant on-chain data for major blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tezos.
Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and please leave a review! Last month’s episodes: