SF Newsletter September Issue
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake is here; Cosmos š¤ Solana; ATOM to reinvent itself & much more!
TL;DR
Meet our team at several conferences
The Merge finally happened
How to access your ETHW Airdrop
Whatās next for Ethereum?
Helium to come to Solana
Cosmos 2.0 whitepaper up for review
Native USDC coming to Cosmos
Vitalik busting rhymes (keep reading to the end)
Welcome to our September issue,
man itsā been a busy couple of weeks since our last issue. Letās briefly go over a few more general headlines before we dive into our company and network updates, shall we?
The white house released a fact sheet containing a ācomprehensive framework for the responsible development of digital assetsā to balance support for āresponsible innovationā and consumer protection.
US Congress is considering a temporary ban on āendogenously collateralized stablecoinsā - Terra, anyone? Hereās a brief refresher on all things stablecoins.
While the US is bringing the hammer i.t.o stablecoins, the EU is taking a smoother approach: a new draft of the markets in crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation suggests that previously planned limitations on the use of USD-pegged stables within the EU are being lifted.
Binance takes one for the team by setting up the Binance Global Advisory Board to āsupport regulators as they seek to establish a global regulatory and compliance framework for the industry.ā
While regulators around the globe are still in a self-discovery mode regarding crypto, adoption is further in advance. Starbucks is going on-chain with a sort of NFT loyalty card; the digital bank, FV Bank, allows direct USDC deposits to their customersā accounts; Fintech superstar, Robinhood released a beta version of their non-custodial (you read that right), polygon-based wallet to 10.000 users - which allows them fee-less trading of 20 tokens via the 0x DEX; finally, Meta allows their US users on Instagram & Facebook to connect their wallets so that they can showcase their NFTs.
Still with me?
Well then, time to jump into our updates:
Eat, sleep, company retreat
For the first time ever the whole Staking Facilities crew met at the picturesque lake āChiemseeā for an in-person team retreat in September. We were joined by our colleagues from Solana Beach to share a beer and a pretzel while enjoying the beautiful view of the mountains as well as several team activities.
During the retreat, we spend time taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture: What are our Vision and Mission? How do we contribute to making web3 a better place? What are the values we are standing for? How do we work together as a team going forward?
Our aim is to set ourselves up even stronger during this bear market and make sure we spend time on the right things as we believe in a long-term future. We are happy to share more details soon, so stay tuned!
One of the projects we support is āSolana Beachā, an explorer for Solana, which was built and incubated inside Staking Facilities. The team is currently working on a relaunch and we are proud to support them on their mission to bring additional value to the Solana ecosystem and its users.
Meet the team
There are several occasions to meet our team in real life during the last quarter of 2022:
Our SF Ventures team is attending ETH Bogota as well as DevCon VI in Bogota, always happy to chat. They will also attend the WebSummit 2022 from Nov. 1st - 4th in Lisbon.
Our whole team as well as the Solana Beach crew will attend Solanasā Breakpoint Conference, which takes place from Nov. 4th - 7th in Lisbon - letās meet up if youāre around.
Right after Breakpoint, a good chunk of our team will attend the Staking Summit Lisbon on Nov. 8th, which is organized by the awesome folks from Staking Rewards. Our very own, Julius Schmidt will give a presentation during the event, if you want to chat or tune in to his talk, let us know.
If you want to give us a heads up or plan a meeting during any of the events, let us know by shooting us a mail at info@stakingfacilities.com
Join the team
Weāre still looking for support - currently, we have a job posting for a part-time/working student in our HR/Ops team. Also always feel free to send us an initiative application and keep an eye on our careers page for new job postings - weād appreciate it if you share these with anyone you see fit.
Ethereum
The Merge finally happened
History was made on September 15th when the Beacon Chain successfully merged with Ethereum mainnet, ultimately putting an end to the networksā Proof-of-Work era. This event was dubbed āThe Mergeā and has been on Ethereumsā roadmap almost since its inception. The fork went extremely well without any hiccups whatsoever. You can learn what āThe Mergeā means for Eth holders here.
Ethereum is now a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, which - according to Ethereum researcher, Justin Drake - reduces global energy consumption by 0.2%.
While not quite deflationary yet, inflation decreased significantly after The Merge with ETH total supply peaking at ~120.7M ETH right at the upgrade. You can find more stats on this here.
We run one of the most diverse client setups for our Eth-validators within Lido and are proud that it successfully produced our first ever PoS Ethereum block on mainnet shortly after The Merge.
Recently, we also proposed our first block using the Flashbots relayer, which helps to alleviate the negative externalities that Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) might have by democratizing access to it. MEV blocks are more profitable (~20.30% higher rewards), which is ultimately beneficial to our/Lidosā delegators.
How to access your ETHW airdrop
If you held ETH prior to The Merge, you most likely received an EthereumPoW (ETHW) airdrop. EthereumPoW is yet another fork of Ethereum, that continues to rely on Proof-of-Work for itsā consensus layer. Note that this is a community effort and not endorsed by the Ethereum foundation. You can learn how to access your airdrop via Metamask in this tutorial.
After āThe Mergeā is before āThe Surgeā: whatās next for Eth?
During Messarisā Mainnet event in NYC, Vitalik Buterin emphasized that Ethereum is far from being completed. Several upgrades are planned to take place in the coming 24 months, all carrying funky names such as āThe Surgeā, āThe Vergeā, āThe Purgeā as well as āThe Splurgeā. The immediate focus now is āThe Surgeā, which will introduce sharding and hence increase the networksā scalability. Check out this thread to learn more about the upgrades.
Solana
Ready for mass adoption?
Helium, a project that set out to bootstrap a decentralized, wireless IoT network through crypto-incentives is moving over from itsā native blockchain to Solana - eta for this towards the end of the year. Additionally, Helium recently struck a five-year deal with T-Mobile to provide coverage of 5G ādead spotsā in the US by introducing Helium Mobile. While details of the partnership have not yet been released, a pilot is expected for Q1 2023. There is some interesting mobile momentum building with Helium coming to Solana, SMS, and Saga.
Glass, a video NFT marketplace/decentralized YouTube, is following suit and recently moved to Solana as well.
Welcome aboard, fellow validators
Despite the bad PR during Q1/Q2, Solana was able to outperform Ethereum in daily (non-vote) transactions as shown in the Solana Quarterly Report by Nansen. These transactions are now being processed by more than 2000 validators on Mainnet Beta, with 30 entities making up the āSuperminorityā (i.e. the smallest number of validators that collectively control more than 1/3 of the networksā stake and therefore could, theoretically, halt the network.) The superminority is a better metric than the total amount of validators to measure the decentralization of a network. Solana is among the most decentralized networks according to this metric (credit to Chainflow for regularly reporting it across networks).
Moā nodes, moā problems?
The growth in the validator set as well as increased adoption also means an increase in the networksā overall carbon emission. The Solana Foundation is committed to reducing the ecosystemsā carbon footprint and is taking several steps to do so: regularly publishing their āEnergy Reportā, offsetting emissions, as well as providing grants for projects that help to make Solana carbon positive. You can learn more here.
Summer(camp) is over
The winners of Solanasā biggest hackathon yet, the Solana Summer Camp, have been announced on September 14th - you can learn more about the winners here. Congratulations to everybody who made the list and shoutout to all participants for building on Solana!
Cosmos
Hub, Hub, Hoooray pt. 2.0
Ever since its inception, the Cosmos ecosystem set out to establish an internet of blockchains. First, they shipped the technology (Tendermint & Cosmos SDK) for anyone to spin up a sovereign chain. Then they built IBC (Inter-Blockchain-Communication) so that these chains can communicate and exchange value. Finally, Interchain Accounts brought unprecedented composability between these chains.
Now, more than 3.5 after the launch of the Cosmos Hub, big changes are on the horizon: the vision for the next evolution of the Hub and Atom was released on Sept. 26th.
The new Cosmos Whitepaper lays out plans to make ATOM the āindex token for the Internet of Blockchainsā (credit Youssef Amrani) and establish the hub as a āself-propagating economic system that drives the expansion and integration of an ATOM Economic Zoneāā. The latter will be achieved through four primitives:
Interchain Security (ICS):
āapp/consumerchainsā can lease security from the Hub by paying it in their native token, ultimately constituting a revenue stream for the Hub itself + itsā validators, delegators as well as the ATOM community pool.
adjusted ATOM issuance & liquid staking (vendor agnostic):
the former happens in two phases - exponential (running for 36 months; funds partially used for IC Allocator) and constant (after 36 months; issuance of 300k/month, translating to a <1% annual. inflation). The latter is expected to increase the staking ratio as delegators enjoy staking rewards w/o forgoing liquidity.
the Interchain Scheduler (IS):
leverages interchain security and IBC to create a marketplace for the āexecution, clearance, and settlement of interchain block spaceā, thus bringing MEV on-chain. Charlie Morris from CMCC Global offers a simple explanation of how this works:
the Interchain Allocator:
āa system for capital allocation & incentive alignmentā by managing and collecting (part of) the different rev. streams (issuance, ICS, IS, tx fees). The hubsā treasury holds tokens from each appchain and vice versa, thus establishing ATOM as a reserve and a settlement asset together with the IS.
There is a lot more to unpack, which weāll do in a future blog post, but since going into full detail would go beyond the scope of this newspaper, only the biggest caveats were listed. Quotes are taken from the whitepaper. The proposal for this is expected to be moved on-chain at the beginning of October.
If you prefer video over text, check out this interview with Zaki Manian right after the reveal of the whitepaper.
USDC coming to the Cosmos
During the recent Comsoverse conference, it was announced that native USDC is coming to Cosmos in early 2023. It will run on itsā own appchain so no more bridging or wrapping will be needed, ultimately providing an on-ramp for the whole IBC ecosystem.
Cosmos š¤Ā Solana
Sei Labs is building a gateway for two of the industriesā most thriving ecosystems, Cosmos and Solana. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) came to be a development standard that helped to establish an ecosystem of itsā own (think of āEVM compatible blockchainsā). The EVM can be thought of as a set of rules that define how state (~ the status quo of the Ledger) can change from one block to another.
What EVM is for Ethereum, Sealevel is to Solana - with one major difference: it can process in parallel whereas the EVM processes sequentially. Hence, the increased throughput of Solana. Sei Labs now sets out to build Nitro, a Layer-2 for Solana that leverages the SVM, the Sealevel Virtual Machine, as well as natively supports Cosmosā IBC standard.
Network - Quick Takes
Polkadot
Tether, the biggest stablecoin i.t.o. market cap is now live on Polkadot. USDC by Circle, the second largest stablecoin by the same metric, is following suit and unveiled plans to expand to five more blockchains, amongst others, Polkadot.
Developers: you can now sign up for the āPolkadot Fellowshipā which is an on-chain body to represent core developers in the wake of Polkadot Governance 2.0. Furthermore, you can also register for DevCamp Intake #2, a three-week online developer bootcamp around the Substrate tech stack that kicks off Nov. 1st.
On November 28th & 29th, you can meet up with your fellow Substrate developers during the Sub0 conference in Lisbon.
The Graph
More than 1.000 indexers & soon to be indexers have signed up for the Multi-chain Incentivized Program (MIP). Since we talk milestones: there are now more than 10.000 delegators backing more than 200 indexers on The Graphsā decentralized network.
Watch Ćrjan Auestad, a contributor to The Graph protocol, an excellent presentation on building decentralized, serverless applications if you need a refresher on all things The Graph. (Watch now)
The Graph and crypto market intelligence company, Messari join forces to build out subgraphs and standardized data. (More)
Skale
DEVs, creators & creatives listen up: Skale is committing 10.000.000 SKL to their NFT Visionaries Grant Program. Grantees will receive educational, networking, as well as marketing support in addition to a share of the grant pool.
Wormhole
Once live, Aptos will be added to the Wormhole network to allow generic message passing between Aptos and all connected chains.
Recently added to the Wormhole network: Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain that provides interoperability between Ethereum & Polkadot.
Aptos
We successfully participated in the Aptos Incentivized testnet 3 (AIT3), which concluded in mid-September. We are now ready for the longevity testnet, which
Stride
Congratulations to Stride and itsā community for launching mainnet on September 6th.
Word on the block is that there will be an STRD airdrop for ATOM delegators - learn more here.
Did you like our newsletter? Any feedback youād like to share with us? Let us know via info@stakingfacilities.com
Oh yeah, we promised you Vitalik busting rhymes, didnāt we - well, here you go:
(itās a bit old, but since The Merge was such a historic moment, we thought itās time to bring out this gem again)