Welcome to our August issue!
Institutional adoption continues with big players such as Visa now tipping their toes into NFTs, too. Visa recently bought a notorious CryptoPunk (#7610) for 49.5 ETH - that's a whopping $150k at the time of the purchase. 'Punks Not Dead', just digital now. But it's not just institutional players that are slowly waking up to the potential of blockchain technology, more and more retail traders are entering the space, too. This is exemplified by RobinHoods' Q2 report: 41% of their total net revenue stems from trading cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, it is reported that 60% of their customers traded crypto in the second quarter of 2021. We hope that it's only a matter of time until these traders discover the fascinating world of DeFi and non-custodial solutions. Let's make sure to welcome them with open arms once they do. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this month’s issue of our newsletter despite the bad puns!
Composition of USD amount staked at Staking Facilities
While the whole market is in the greens, Solana hit a massive growth spurt and rallied into the top ten on CoinMarketCap. No surprise, therefore, that Solana continues to make up the biggest share of USD amount staked with us, followed by Ethereum 2.0. We currently record a total USD value of 1,8 billion of assets staked with us - big thank you to all of our delegators!
Percentage staked across the whole network
Except for Polkadot and Kusama, whose stakeholders probably have their funds ready for crowdloans, the percentage of staked assets across the whole networks increasing for most of our portfolio networks. Solana, The Graph, as well as Ethereum 2.0 could record the biggest gains here.
Nominal vs. Real APY of each network
This chart compares 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.
There's a new whale in town!
The London upgraded successfully took place on August 5th and since then close to 150k ETH have been burnt - you can track this yourself here. With London now live, users can experience better transaction fee estimation, quicker transaction inclusion, and offsetting the ETH issuance through token burns with every transaction. All eyes are now on Eth2 and with the Eth2 staking contract now being the single-biggest ETH holder (more than 7 Million ETH), the market’s confidence in Ethereum 2.0 is at an all-time high. As a founding member of Lido, we are quite excited and stoked about the fact that over 1 Million of those staked ETH has been staked through Lido, that's almost 15% of all staked ETH!
While other Layer 1s such as Solana, Avalanche, and Polkadot are establishing themselves as nurtures grounds for their very own DeFi & NFT ecosystems, Ethereum remains the top dog. While Ethereums' share of TVL ('Total Value Locked') in DeFi across smart contract platforms is down 20% compared to just five months ago, Ethereum still accounts for 77% of the $110 billion USD locked within DeFi (as of a July Messari Blog post).
Picking up on the introduction to this issue, MetaMask, a non-custodial wallet solution for Ethereum, recently reported an 1800% annual growth in their monthly active users (MAU) - yes, 1800%! The MAUs went from 545000 in July 2020 to 10354279 in July 2021. That is impressive.
Solana Season continues
On that note, two popular, non-custodial wallet solutions for Solana were also able to record impressive growth. Solflare, which recently did a massive upgrade, can boast that over $7 Billion worth of SOL has been staked through their wallet. If you haven't done so already, check our Solflare staking guides (Ledger Guide; Mnemonic Guide). Phantom, another non-custodial wallet for Solana, stated in an interview with Blockworks that they are close to 100000 MAUs and were able to record 1 million transactions that were initiated through their wallet.
After becoming the go-to liquid staking solution for Ethereum, Lido quickly expanded its' offering to the Terra ecosystem and is expected to launch on Solana soon, too. We're honored to be amongst the initial set of validators and multisig administrators.
The Pyth Network, a decentralized oracle solution on Solana, went live on August 26th. Pyth partnered with several TradFi powerhouses such as the Chicago Trading Company, Jump Trading, or Jane Street as well as DeFi/Blockchain native entities such as FTX or CMS. These provide traditional as well as crypto market data, which is then aggregated and brought on-chain to be used by other parties, ultimately bringing more reliable, readily available, and accessible data to the ecosystem.
Mark your calendars, fellow Solana stakeholders: Solana is having an in-person conference dubbed 'Breakpoint' taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 7th through 10th, 2021. We will be there and would love to meet some of you during the conference, so hit us up if you plan to stop by! Since you have your calendars out already, might as well mark the Solana Ignition Hackathon that commenced yesterday and lasts until October 31st.
History was made at The Graph
The Graph's arbitration process has been put to test as the community came together to discuss an official dispute outlining malicious behavior by a fellow indexer, MinatoFund. The disputed indexer gained a financial advantage by exploiting a version of the Arbitration Charter's rules where they were able to launch multiple self-deployed fake subgraphs that were designed to fail quickly after they themselves allocated to said subgraph. Graph disputes are initiated by so-called "fishermen", who closely monitor the network for malicious behavior in return for a reward as a way to limit and deter bad actors. Our blockchain node engineer, Jeff, took on the role of the fisherman for said incident. The dispute led to the first-ever slash on The Graph protocol. While we are extremely proud to have such highly qualified and attentive Graph community members such as Jeff in our ranks, this isn't about pointing fingers, but about our commitment to ethics and the well-being of the projects we contribute to. The MinatoFund indexer has shown great remorse, cooperated during the arbitration process, and apologized for their behavior. You can learn more about the whole incident on The Graph forum.
FYI, slashing only affects an indexer's own staked funds, not his/her delegators’ GRT - not that we plan on getting slashed, we just do not want to freak out anyone delegating on The Graph network!
Continuously bringing the (auction) hammer
The second round of parachain auctions started today at 2 PM CET with sixteen projects competing for five parachain slots. Each week, one slot is auctioned and over 400k KSM (~3.6% of KSM total issuance) have been locked for this rounds' crowdloans. You can learn more about how these auctions and crowdloans work as well as timetables and FAQs here.
The winners of the first round of parachain auctions, which we reported in in our July issue have been making a lot of progress in the last four weeks. Moonriver, a fully Ethereum-Compatible smart contract platform, is now live and fully functional. Karura, the first-ever parachain slot winner launched their liquid staking solution for KSM today. You can read more about the progress of each project in this blog post.
One of the sixteen projects currently competing for a parachain slot is HydraDX, a portfolio project of Staking Facilities. The team recently published part one of their blog post in which they outline their plans to continuously decentralize themselves in order to form a 'tribe'. The post makes a good read as it covers some fundamental concepts of the next evolution of the internet, namely Web 3.0. We wish the HydraDX community all the best for the second round of auctions and would love to see them securing a spot!
Hub, hub, hooray!
As most of you know, Cosmos is the originator of the 'Internet of Blockchains' narrative, with the Cosmos hub functioning as its' 'port city' - if you haven't read the Interchain Foundations' blog post about this analogy, make sure to do so. Just yesterday, Billy Rennekamp published another blog post about 'Interchain Security' in which he further explains the role of the Cosmos hub, its' value proposition, and why many new projects decided to build upon the Cosmos ecosystem.
Emeris beta, a user-friendly UI for the Gravity DEX, which we wrote about in our last issue, is now live. With an average transaction fee of $0.08 as well as subsecond 'swap speed', Emeris beta further nurtures the Cosmos DeFi ecosystem. This very ecosystem is currently having a field day as the Gravity Bridge is 'coming to fruition and 'Bitcoin coming to Cosmos'. The Gravity Bridge plans to connect Cosmos with Ethereum (and eventually other Layer 1s) in a non-custodial, trustless manner. It is currently being audited by Informal Systems and runs an incentivized code audit campaign. You can learn more about Gravity here.
Skale it up!
Skales' 'elastic blockchain network' is coming along nicely. Currently, there are 35 chains that are being tested as CEO and Co-Founder Jack O'Holleran mentioned in a recent AMA. With the upcoming ETHglobal hackathon, which is partially sponsored by Skale, we expect even more projects to utilize Skales' scaling solution in the near future. We also expect an influx of new Skale stakeholders as $SKL is now listed on Revolut. Besides trading, holding, or staking, you can now also donate some of your $SKL to charity via The Giving Block.
Dfintiy continues to grow, that's grant(ed)
The ICP ecosystem is picking up speed with more than 5000 smart contracts now running on the 'Internet Computer'. We believe this number to increase even more and expect a number of high-quality projects to join the ecosystem. This belief is reinforced by the fact that the Dfinity Foundation recently awarded their first round of developer grants to 60 grantees, totaling $1 Million in grants. Furthermore, the Foundation is sponsoring the 'Reimagining the Internet' Hackathon for European Students and Developers - hackathon season is upon us, awesome!
As an ICP stakeholder, you can share your thoughts and vote on contributions to Dfinitys' technical roadmap - find an overview of all discussions here.
Welcome aboard, Victor!
Not only the blockchain industry is growing, we do as well! Join us in welcoming Victor on board with us. Victor is taking on the role Chief-Financial-Officer at Staking Facilities. Before helping to build and scale a single burger joint into a restaurant chain, Victor explored various fields of traditional finance, from financial service consulting through investment banking to private equity. We're excited to have Victors' skill set and experience in our ranks - if you want to learn more about Victor or our other team members, check out this blog post.
Our Infrastructure Lead, Garyaired on GRTiQ
Our infrastructure lead and The Graph council member, Gary, sat together with fellow indexer and council member, Jim from WaveFive for another episode of the GRTiQ podcast. In this episode, Jim, Gary, and the host cover a lot of ground. They discuss the current indexer landscape, the collaboration between indexers and the core development teams, measures of how the network can push for decentralization at the delegation-level, and much more. The GRTiQ produces a lot of informative content about The Graph network, so we highly suggest following them closely for insights into web 3.0s' indexing and querying layer. Also, if you haven’t done so already, check out episode #7, which is also with Gary on the show.
Getting started with staking? Julius got you covered!
Julius, our Co-Founder and chairman of the Staking Infrastructure Working Group within the European Blockchain Association went on 'Blockchain Mondays' by the Hanseatic Blockchain Institute to provide listeners with an introduction to Proof-of-Stake, staking, and DeFi. Julius went on to demo several tools such as block explorers or Staking Rewards overview of different staking providers. While in German, the video is a great share with anyone looking to get started on their staking and DeFi journey. Thanks again for having us!
Goodbyes are never easy
Friendly reminder to all of our Tezos delegators:
After three exciting and fun years, we are shutting down our Tezos bakery. October 15th, 2021 will mark the final day of our Tezos validator, but we kindly ask all of our delegators to switch to a new bakery as soon as possible in order to not miss out on any rewards. Please note that we will stop paying out rewards for any cycles past October 15th, 2021!
Bullish Deloitte survey about the future of blockchain technology & digital assets
Deloitte, a big four auditing and consulting firm, published their annual blockchain survey in which more than 1000 finance professionals from across the globe were interviewed in the months of March and April 2021. Three-quarters of the respondents believe digital assets will serve as a strong alternative to, or outright replacement for, fiat currencies in the next 5–10 years' - this at the latest should make clear that crypto is here to stay. 81% of the respondents also believe that blockchain is now 'broadly scalable, and has achieved mainstream adoption with about the same amount of respondents seeing blockchain, digital assets, and/or cryptocurrency solutions as a source for new streams of revenue.