SF Newsletter - April Issue
We're hiring; quarter-million ETH staked via Lido; oracles coming to Solana; more Subgraphs moving over from the hosted service, and much, much more!
Hey there,
and welcome to our April issue. With the bull market still in full swing, a lot was happening in the last few weeks - there's never a dull moment in crypto.
Ready?
Let's jump right in!
Composition of USD amount staked at Staking Facilities
We saw quite an increase in the USD value staked at Staking Facilities. This is a clear indicator of a continuing bull market. On April 26th, we hit a big milestone with more than 1 billion dollars worth of digital assets staked with us. With today's prices (April 30th, 2021), the total USD amount of assets staked with us is at ~ $990 million. We know that these values are subject to quite a bit of volatility, however, with increasing institutional adoption and more users joining the space by the day, we are convinced that the general trend is clear: upwards. With Solana having a bull market on its' own, $SOL now makes up the biggest chunk of assets staked with us valued in USD. Also, note that we did not include HydraDX yet since transfers are still disabled during Snakenet and price discovery has yet to happen for HDX tokens.
Percentage staked across the whole network
The share of staked tokens (in % of the Circulating Supply) across the whole network for each of our portfolio projects remains largely unchanged. For some networks, we see a slight decrease, which might be due to a few people realizing profits. For Solana, we saw quite an increase as more people enter the ecosystem and put their tokens to work.
Nominal vs. Real APY of each network
With this chart, you can compare the Nominal & Real APYs across our portfolio networks as well as how these figures have changed since the last issue. For most of the networks, we provide you with a precise reward calculator, which you find on the subpage of the respective network on our homepage. Please note that the calculator is not available on mobile devices.
Ethereum 2.0 & Lido on the rise
There are now more than 250.000 ETH staked via Lido, which roughly marks 6% of all staked ETH. Today, there are more than 4500 stETH holders earning a current APY of ~6%. In addition to these numbers, the Lido ecosystem is also growing by the day and users have a wide array of wallets they can choose from to interact with Lido (e.g. Argent, MetaMask, ImToken, or Trust Wallet - just to name a few!). And there is even more good news: Lido bought additional insurance from Unslashed Finance to cover another ~200.000 staked ETH.
Graph - Subgraphs are coming
The time for indexers to show what they're made of is finally here. The Graph Foundation recently announced that nine more subgraphs are migrating from the hosted service over to the decentralized mainnet. These 'Mainnet Migration Partners' are a mix of DeFi, NFT, and entertainment projects such as Enzyme, Gnosis, or Audius. The migration will not happen overnight, but rather through a process with multiple phases in the course of the next months. Our infrastructure team is working tirelessly to make our Indexer as effective and performant as possible in order to serve an ever-increasing amount of queries - web 3.0 is coming in full force now and we couldn't be more excited!
Solana - Bringing real-world data on chain via Pyth
The Pyth network had its' "Hello World" moment on April 7th when it was announced on Twitter. It is set out on a mission to provide a reliable and fast oracle solution for financial market data through an open and accessible marketplace composed of different participants - think of a The Graph-Chainlink mix running on top of the Solana blockchain. Pyth will enable smart contracts to have precise market data injected into them with very low latency, which is absolutely key in financial markets. Everyone is invited to tinker with Pyth (amongst other things) in the upcoming Solana Season Hackathon, which takes place online between May 15th and June 7th.
Skale - Denali Mainnet Launch
The Skale mainnet has successfully implemented the Denali upgrade so that dApps can now run their 'own', individual blockchains aka. Skale Chains, which are natively connected to Ethereum. This not only means lower cost and more throughput but also more flexibility for developers as they do not need to rely on network-wide releases. In this blog post, Skale Co-Founder Jack O'Holleran sheds some more light on Denali, its' features as well as what it means for Skale and the overall Ethereum ecosystem.
Cosmos - Gravity DEX competition
The 'Internet of Blockchains' vision is coming along nicely for Cosmos as more and more chains enable 'IBC' transfers. IBC is the Interblockchain-Communication protocol that enables sovereign blockchains to communicate and transfer value between each other. Josh Lee also known as 'dogemos' compiled a comprehensive overview of projects that already implemented IBC as well as projects looking to do so soon. Currently, the Gravity DEX testnet competition lets traders test the waters of swapping and pooling digital assets between any two blockchains within the Cosmos ecosystem or beyond.
Polkadot Runtime Upgrade
The Polkadot Technical Committee has fast-tracked a proposal that aims to upgrade Polakdot to runtime v30 and is currently voted on. If passed (which is very likely), DOT holders and especially nominators will be quite happy to hear that the minimum amount needed to actually earn staking rewards will drop significantly. Currently, this amount is around 290 DOT - you can always check for yourself here. Let's wait and see what number we're going to find on Monday, which is the day the proposal is expected to be enacted.
Hydra - Staking is now live on Snakenet
Staking rewards went live on HydraDXs' incentivized testnet, Snakenet, on April 21st. We successfully upgraded our nodes to version 5.0.0 in time so that we were among the initial set of validators and successfully produced blocks ever since. Furthermore, we set an on-chain ID so that anyone looking to learn more about our operations before nominating us is able to find the relevant info quickly on Polkadot JS.
Tezos welcomes a new 'Corporate Baker'
The Tezos Baker (= validator) community recently welcomed a prominent new member, namely UbiSoft, a well-known gaming company that gave birth to video game franchise behemoths such as Assassin's Creed or Far Cry. Their 'corporate baker' is probably also quite excited about contract operation size improvements, gas optimizations, and inter-contract calls, which are currently in the adoption phase in the wake of the Florence upgrade.
We are hiring!
To best serve an ever-increasing demand for our web 3.0 infrastructure and services, we are looking to grow our team. If you're ready to take the leap and want to work with a team of motivated, ambitious, and dedicated individuals, or know someone who does, please reach out to us! We have several open positions such as Web Developer, Senior Systems Engineer, Security-focused Systems Engineer as well as someone to help out with our Content Marketing & Customer Support. On our careers page, you can learn more about us and our open positions.
The people behind Staking Facilities
We grew quite a bit in 2020, so we figured it's time for you to meet the people behind Staking Facilities. In this medium post, we featured a team member each week for you to get to know them better. Now that we are hiring, this is also a great resource for anyone interested to join our ranks to get a feeling for what s/he is getting into ;)
Taking you on a ride to Solana Beach
We are committed to building out Solana Beach into the go-to blockexplorer for the Solana ecosystem, which is not an easy task given Solanas' high performance and the literal Cambrian explosion happening right now with new projects popping up by the day. We are therefore super excited to join forces with the amazing team over at VGNG to act upon that mission - more news on that front will follow. In case you have any feedback, feature requests, want to list a token, or report a bug, please reach out to us via info@stakingfacilities.com.
As a special goodie for you, a subscriber to our newsletter, we'd like to give you an exclusive first look at our Solana Beach promo video. We kindly ask you to not share this publicly yet :)
'The Merge' - Eth2
'The Merge' is probably one of the most anticipated events in the blockchain space as it marks the end of Ethereums' Proof-of-Work chain and finalizes Ethereums' transition to Proof-of-Stake. In this comprehensive Twitter thread, you can learn more about what 'The Merge' is in detail and what it means for you as a user as well as the overall ecosystem.
Polkadot Parachains
Parachains are what make Polkadot and Kusama so-called 'Multi-chain Networks' next to e.g. Cosmos or Skale. Parachains are connected to the Relay Chain, which is the main chain of the Polkadot ecosystem on which transactions are finalized. Parachains are 'application-specific data structures' that run in parallel to the Relay Chain. They do not necessarily need their own token, since they share the Relay Chains' security. Hence, Parachains need to be connected to the Relay Chain - either constantly or from time to time. This connection is also known as a 'Parachain Slot'. You can learn how these slots are distributed and what they have to do with 16th-century ship auctions in this blog post by Kraken.
Anchor Guide
In our last issue, we wrote about Anchor, the 'Stripe for savings' protocol running on Terra. Do Kwon, Forbes 30under30 and Co-founder of Terraform Labs, the company behind Terra, was recently hosted in The Defiant podcast. The episode is packed with insights about Terra, Mirror, as well as Anchor - definitely worth your time! For those of you eager to put your money where your mouth is, our friends over at Chorus One wrote this step-by-step guide on how you can participate in the Anchor protocol. In case you feel uncomfortable with taking out loans for that, get some UST and directly jump to 'step 22' to earn 20% APY.
'Internet Bonds: Bridging the Gap Between Proof of Stake and Traditional Finance' Blog post by Mara Schmiedt for The Defiant
Mastercard & ConsenSys join forces to further push enterprise adoption, read more here.
'Germany Opens Up to Institutional Crypto Funds' by Adriana Hamacher from Decrypt, read now.