SF Newsletter - February Issue
Hello world from the SF newsletter - IBC, SOL staking rewards, Graph multichain support and more!
Hi and welcome to the first issue of the Staking Facilities monthly Newsletter. We'd like to start by thanking all of our delegators as well as subscribers for their support - we very much appreciate having you on board with us!
The past weeks have been quite turbulent and a lot was happening, so let's jump right into it!
Cosmos Stargate Upgrade
On February 18th, the Stargate upgrade for Cosmos was successfully executed and brought forth the Cosmos Hub 4. This marks the completion of the Cosmos whitepaper after five years of hard work. All three layers of the Cosmos stack are now complete: IBC, the Cosmos SDK, and Tendermint Core. Stargate brings Inter-Blockchain-Communication (IBC) to the Cosmos Hub and paves the way for cross-chain interoperability. IBC enables compatible chains to exchange transactions of value and data and is often called the TCP/IP of blockchains. To dive deeper into Stargate, make sure to check out this comprehensive article by Johnnie Red.
Solana Staking Rewards
Delegators on Solanas' Mainnet Beta are now earning staking rewards after inflation was successfully enabled on February 10th. Rewards are paid out automatically to the delegators' Stake Account at the beginning of every epoch with one epoch lasting ~2,5 days. You can track the progress of the current epoch on Solanabeach. The inflation rate is initially set to 8% annually but will decrease by 15% year-over-year until it settles at 1.5%. You can find the current staking APR (validator commission fee not included) under the 'Validator' tab on Solanabeach.
The Graph Multichain Support
The Graph announced plans to add support for four additional Layer-1 blockchains, namely Celo, Near, Polkadot, and Solana. As a developer, researcher, or community member of any of these chains, you can now apply for The Graph Foundation grants to built tooling or support with the integrations. Avalanche, Bitcoin, BSC, Cosmos, and Flow are currently explored for future integrations. It really excites us to see this kind of cross-pollination between our portfolio projects.
Lido Call for more Node Operators
Lido is currently the largest staking pool solution for Ethereum 2.0 with more than 5% of ETH being staked through Lido. Ever since its launch in December, Lido has seen tremendous growth and there are now more than 3370 unique stakers using Lido as their Eth2 staking solution. To foster decentralization, a sub governance group was formed to assist the LidoDAO with finding and onboarding 3-5 new node operators. The current set of node operators for Lido consists of P2P, Certus One, Chorus One, Stake Fish, and Staking Facilities.
Tezos Edo Upgrade
Edo, the fifth Tezos upgrade, was implemented on February 13th at block 1,343,489. Edo fixed several minor bugs, improved gas consumption, and performance, but most notably also included the addition of a fifth voting period ('Adoption Period') as well as 'Sapling' and Tickets'. The former enables privacy-preserving transactions on Tezos, while the latter enables composable permissions and token contracts. Both will bring improvements to the development and capabilities of smart contracts on Tezos.
Polkadot and HydraDX
The xHDX token sale for HydraDX, a Substrate-based cross-chain liquidity protocol for the Polkadot ecosystem successfully commenced on February 10th. The final price of xHDX is $0.08059 and 22.9m DAI have been raised by 5491 buyers during the three-day sale, also referred to as the Hydra Liquidity-Bootstrapping-Event. Holders will soon be able to swap their xHDX (ERC 20) for HDX and stake via Stakenet.
Skale Integrations & Partnerships
Skale has seen a very good start to the new year and already announced 13 dApp integrations/partnerships. SKL is now supported by Coinbase custody and listed on Crxpto.com as well Coinlist. Furthermore, the Fuji Testnet launched to test the waters for Skale chains.
Regulation & Taxation event
On Tuesday, March 2nd at 06:15 PM CET we are co-hosting a panel discussion together with the European Blockchain Association about the "Regulation & Taxation of Digital Assets". We are thrilled to have Dr. Markus Kaulartz (Lawyer at CMS Hasche Sigle), Florian Wimmer (CEO & Co-Founder of Blockpit) as well as Werner Hoffmann (CEO & Co-Founder of Pekuna) as panelists for the event.
Registration is free of charge and you are more than welcome to stick around in the digital event lobby for some networking.
2020 Round-up
Last year has been different, to say the least. While there were troubled times, we look back with gratitude and are excited for the times ahead. In our 2020 Round-up post, we summarized our company highlights of last year.
Website Relaunch
We kicked off the month of February with a re-launch of our website, which not only serves the purpose of showing ourselves to the world, but also to help any token-holder to find the right information needed to make decisions quickly in this dynamic world of crypto. The project subpages for which we offer non-custodial staking services now include:
live data
a reward calculator
comprehensive FAQs
general info about the project
We have included several other subpages so that you can learn more about us, our vision & mission, our services for institutional clients, our top-notch security setup and so much more. Come check it out and let us know what you think!
‘The Future of DeFi’ Explainer Video
We very much enjoyed this video by Finematics about DeFi. It is well suited for anyone starting out their DeFi-journey and as well as veterans looking for a source of inspiration and motivation.
Grayscale Research Report
The research team behind Grayscales' Phil Bonello published a comprehensive research paper named 'Valuing Ethereum'. The 16-page PDF helps investors understand the investment case behind Ethereum.
‘Bankless’ Interview with Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban, Entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor, and Dallas Mavericks owner recently joined Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman from Bankless for a Live Interview. They talk about DeFi, NFTs, Layer-1s, and a lot more. Saying that Mark Cuban is bullish on crypto is an understatement - but convince yourself!