Monthly Update (May 20)

Jun 5, 2020

Welcome to our recap of this month in the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem.

We helped launch Band Protocol’s mainnet, a decentralized oracle network built on the Cosmos SDK. Find us on their block explorer here.
We became part of the first wave of Terra ecosystem grantees and will add reward insights and staking for Terra in Anthem.
We are hiring a Platforms Engineer, who will help us secure and expand our infrastructure. If you know someone with relevant DevOps experience, please reach out to us!

Network Data

Snapshot data from June 3, 2020:

The first phase of Polkadot’s mainnet launched, in which validator nodes are run by the Web3 Foundation. Currently, external node operators are able to signal their intent to become a validator and at some point in the coming weeks Proof-of-Stake will be activated, from which point on rewards on DOT can be earned.
We are currently setting up our Polkadot validator node and will have a post ready soon on how to stake with us and what to expect. In the meantime, please refer to the official nomination guide if you are interested in staking DOT.

The community funding proposal to develop governance-gated CosmWasm smart contract for the Cosmos Hub passed. 25,000 ATOM (~$75k at the time of writing) from the community pool were distributed to the team to enable smart contracts to be controlled by Cosmos’ governance module. Learn about the rationale and potential here.
The Game of Zones competition entered its final third phase and will conclude soon. The competition saw over 100 million cross-chain transfers in total, check it out yourself on the Map of Zones dashboard!

Payment app CHAI that is using Terra as the back-end is currently the #2 Finance app in South Korea. There’s now also a dashboard showing details about CHAI transactions.
Furthermore, CosmWasm smart contracts will also come to Terra and the blockchain continues to be the one with the third highest fee volume after Bitcoin and Ethereum - find some more data in the most recent community update.

Kava is gearing up for the launch of their CDP system which will be introduced through a hard fork to kava-3 that is currently being coordinated through governance.
In addition, a few other governance proposals have passed in preparation of this launch:
1. A first proposal established that the Binance token BNB will be the first collateral that can be used to mint USDX.
2. Another proposals determined 10 oracle node providers (including us), who will be responsible to provide Chainlink price data for Kava’s system and the wider Cosmos ecosystem.
3. Two further proposals established a governance committees that will hold special powers within the network. The stability committee, which consists of 5 member organizations, will set and adjust parameters of the CDP system.
4. The security committee will be able to halt the Kava network at a specific height in case of an emergency situation. We had voted YES on all proposals except this one, since Kava Labs is the sole member of the security committee, which we felt isn’t sufficient for a decentralized network. The proposal passed nevertheless; the committee may expand in the future with another governance vote.

The first Free TON contests, which serve to develop the ecosystem and distribute 85% of the token supply (Free TON Crystals), went live and in total saw 56 submissions so far.