Monthly Update (June 20)
Liquid Staking Report, Polkadot validators, Celo stablecoins, and more!
In June, we released the Liquid Staking Report, a 88-page deep dive into an emerging trend in Proof-of-Stake that is expected to bring staked assets to the decentralized finance ecosystem. Read about the top 5 themes of the report in this blog post. As a follow-up to the report, Brian joined the Liquid Staking Roundtable organized by Cosmos, and Felix was interviewed by Staking Rewards.
We onboarded a new platforms engineer - Mikolaj, who brings experience from companies like Facebook and Amazon and will help us scale and secure our infrastructure!
Network Data
Snapshot data from July 1, 2020 (already quite outdated when this went out, apologies):
Polkadot started going permissionless and already sports 197 validators. There is one Chorus One validator in the active set and 3 on stand-by awaiting nominations. If you are a DOT holder looking to delegate, find out more here.
In coming weeks, the “Sudo” module will be removed making Polkadot completely permissionless. Then, transfers will be enabled via on-chain governance. Check out the roadmap here.
The Oasis mainnet release candidate Amber came online after a successful completion of the Questnet incentivized testnet competition.
We went live with support for Oasis on Anthem for Amber. Oasis token holders can now view their account and transaction history on the network - try it out here.
The Cosmos Hub is getting ready for activation of the IBC interoperability protocol and various other improvements to the Cosmos codebase, which are bundled together in the “Stargate” upgrade that will soon be proposed to governance. Learn more about it here.
Celo governance activated the reserve that holds various assets backing the Celo stablecoin cUSD. cUSD also went live after a successful governance vote. There are already a bunch of projects integrating cUSD, learn more here.
Reserve holdings (currently over $70m) and other Celo network statistics can be observed on the TheCelo block explorer.
Staking is live on Solana mainnet. Rewards are not activated yet, as the initial parameters are still being finalized. This will happen once enough stake has “warmed up”. Solana restricts how much stake can enter and exit the network every epoch to guard against attacks based on sudden stake deposits or withdrawals. Follow along the warm up process here.
The Solana Foundation, which is tasked with supporting and growing the ecosystem, was announced.
Terra unveiled Anchor, a savings protocol that seeks to provide stable returns to Terra stablecoin holders by incorporating staking rewards from major Proof-of-Stake blockchains (such as Cosmos and Polkadot). An exciting and ambitious project that cleverly combines decentralized finance and liquid staking concepts.
Other Content
#40 - Staking is DeFi