Monthly Roundup (Mar 20)
Anthem for Celo, Cosmos Game of Zones, Solana beta mainnet, "Black Thursday" and DeFi oracles.
Dear readers,
We hope you are safely sheltered in place and ready for a staking update. This month was largely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated market collapses that also hit the crypto ecosystem heavily.
We got accepted in the first cohort of grants from the Celo Foundation and will bring Anthem functionality to Celo Gold stakers. There are two other exciting software development projects in the works, so stay tuned for more!
We will join the Band Protocol oracle network built on the Cosmos SDK to bring off-chain data feeds to the interchain. Read our announcement here.
The Liquid Staking Working Group is putting more focus on practical staking-related decentralized finance products, last week we had Terra and Unslashed present principal protected staking and slashing insurance respectively (recording here). Next week (Apr 8, 4pm CET) we will have UMA present on synthetic tokens and StakerDAO will introduce their DAO and Proof-of-Stake network reward tracking token design (BLEND). Details for the call here.
Network Data
Prices for most of our supported assets roughly halved, impacting total assets staked with us significantly:
The OG of incentivized testnets “Game of Stakes” is making a return on May 1st in the form of “Game of Zones”, a competition designed to test the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). Registration and rules here.
If you are a developer, make sure to check out CosmWasm - the project bringing Web Assembly smart contracts to the Cosmos SDK!
The Coinlist auction was successful with more than 1,000 participants clearing at $0.22 per SOL token placing the network at a market capitalization of roughly $110m at launch.
Mainnet beta launched with us and 40 other validators, follow along on Staking Facilities new explorer Solana Beach.
We carried out a coordinated attack with Certus One and managed to steal a large amount of SOL in Solana’s incentivized testnet “Tour de Sol”. The Solana team fixed the bug we exploited in the meantime. Read the full story here.
The major hit for markets around the world following the global coronavirus epidemic also shook the Ethereum decentralized finance ecosystem. Many outstanding liquidations and trades clogged the Ethereum network and made it hard for Chainlink node operators to update their price feeds. We ended up spending hundreds of dollars in transaction fees during “Black Thursday” to ensure our price updates are accurate for Chainlink data users like Aave and Synthetix.
MakerDAO, arguably the biggest DeFi project, suffered a failure of their oracle and liquidation process costing the protocol around $6m, more details and a breakdown of the events here.
In other news, Chainlink and another one of our portfolio projects Kava announced their partnership to utilize Chainlink price reference data for Kava CDPs and plans to bring this data to the Cosmos ecosystem via IBC.
Other Content
Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and please leave a review! Last month’s episodes:
#33 - Oasis: Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts with Andrew Miller and Vishwanath Raman
#34 - Flow: A Blockchain by and for Smart Contract Developers with Dieter Shirley