Welcome to our June issue,
a lot has happened since you last heard from us. As usual, there is never a dull moment in crypto and while markets remain quite volatile, cryptos' advance into the mainstream continues to remain on a steady path forward. Read on to learn why we think so!
Composition of USD amount staked at Staking Facilities
Not much has changed with regards to the composition of staked assets denominated in their USD value. Solana continues to be our largest network in terms of staked assets on our nodes.
Percentage staked across the whole network
Similar to what we reported in our May issue, the share of staked tokens (in % of the Circulating Supply) across the whole network for each of our portfolio projects remains largely unchanged. For Kusama, we saw a decrease of ~3.5% of staked KSM. This is most likely due to people unbonding their KSM, so that they can use their funds for crowdloans in order to support their favorite projects in the ongoing parachain auctions. For The Graph, on the other hand, we could witness an increase of ~4% in staked GRT.
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.
Polkadot, Kusama, HyrdaDX, and Basilisk
There have been some major changes to the staking mechanism on Polkadot and Kusama. More precisely, two limits have been put in place to prevent validator nodes from running out of memory and to safeguard their proper functionality:
a maximum of 20 000 accounts that can be nominators at any given time
a minimum of 20 DOT or 0.1 KSM respectively needed to nominate
In case you nominated with less than the required amount on Polkadot, your account(s) automatically stop(s) nominating. Note that these limits can be modified through governance. As a matter of fact, Referendum 28 was executed already, which increase both limits on Polkadot to 40 DOT and 22 500 nominators respectively.
Parachain auctions on Kusama are in full swing with the third auction currently ongoing and ~8% of KSM being locked up by crowdloans. After Statemine and Karura, Moonriver will become the third parachain on Kusama. Basilisk is set to join the auctioning party for the fourth round of parachain auctions which are expected to commence in the first week of July. We introduced you to Basilisk, a liquidity bootstrapping protocol on Kusama, in our May issue. The team behind Basilisk has recently laid out their parachain auction strategy in this blog post.
The More, The Merrier, The Graph!
The Graph Foundation awarded a $60 Million grant to StreamingFast to join forces for the core development of The Graph network. StreamingFast is a protocol infrastructure company that provides scalable architecture for streaming blockchain data. The team is working on protocol R&D, improving indexing performance, and accelerating the adoption of Web3 alongside Edge&Node, Indexers as well as the overall Graph community. The announcement post reads that "Relevant IP and products will be open-sourced under The Graph Protocol Github repo and API products will migrate to The Graph Network for backend indexing and querying support", once again proving that the core stakeholders of The Graph network practice what they preach!
The Cambrian explosion on Solana continues
There have been over 13 000(!) participants and more than 350 project submissions for the Solana Season Hackathon, which concluded on June 7th. You can browse through all project submissions here. Since the list of top-notch projects, sponsored-award and track-specific winners is quite long, here's only a brief overview:
Grand Prize: Zeta, an under-collateralized DeFi options platform
DeFi Track: Solend, an algorithmic, decentralized protocol for lending and borrowing
NFT Track: Coral Reef, an NFT marketplace
Web3 Track: Solarium, a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, censorship-resistant instant messenger
Community Choice Award: Boring Protocol, a decentralized VPN
You can find more about all the winners in this comprehensive blog post.
In addition to this influx of builders to the Solana ecosystem, there is also more capital flowing Solana way. Solana Labs, the core developers of the Solana blockchain, recently raised $314.15 million in a private token sale lead by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital.
99 Problems, but ETH ain't one
More than 5% of Ethereums' circulating ETH supply is now being staked on the Beacon Chain with more than 100K of ETH staked in a single day on June 23rd. With the London Upgrade pretty much just around the corner, July is set to mark a big month for Ethereum. The London upgrade includes several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), most notably EIP-1559, which introduces a new transaction pricing model by creating a 'base fee' and burn mechanism for parts of the transaction fees of each block. EIP-1559 brings many improvements to the table such as making gas prices more predictable or increased security against DDOS attacks. You can learn more about the London Upgrade in this blog post by Tim Beiko.
More exciting news, the Bank of Israel is playing around with digital shekels on Ethereum in an internal pilot program. While no 'real' money is involved, employees of the banks' IT department are getting their hands-on Ethereum experience by sending digital shekels to each others' wallets. Crypto really is advancing into the mainstream more each day. Just recently, famous rapper and music artist, Jay Z put up a CryptoPunk NFT as his Twitter Profile. Jay Z is also auctioning an NFT based on his debut album Reasonable Doubt.
Interchain DeFi is here
$ATOM holders and delegators listen up: you can still claim your $OSMO 'fairdrop' - to see if you're eligible, look up your Cosmos address here. Osmosis is an AMM protocol built on the Cosmos SDK that leverages IBC to enable cross-chain asset swaps and liquidity provision via the Osmosis dApp. Osmosis is the 6th chain connected to the Cosmos Hub and the 8th chain to enable IBC. That being said, Osmosis took IBC to the next level and increased the daily IBC tx almost a hundred-fold! You can learn more about Osmosis and their vision in this blog post.
With Osmosis and proposal 51 now being live, the Cosmos DeFi ecosystem is set for a growth spurt. Proposal 51 is about adopting the Gravity DEX protocol on the Cosmos Hub. Gravity is designed to be more conservative and less experimental (compared to e.g. Osmosis) in order to secure more transactions and larger pools. To implement the changes brought forth in the proposal, the Cosmos network will be halted on July 12th and validators have to update the state machine binary to accommodate the upgrade.
More ways to stake your Skale
On June 10th, the Skale team announced their plans to integrate with The Graphs' hosted service to provide developers building on top of Skale with faster access to indexed blockchain data. Ultimately this frees projects from having to design and implement costly and time-consuming indexing servers.
As an SKL holder, you now have more options to stake your precious SKL token. Besides Consesys' Activate platform, you can now also use Figments' Hubble together with Metamask or stake SKL via Unagii.
To Dfinity and beyond
After their Beta Mainnet launch last month, Dfinitys' ecosystem is rapidly taking shape. On their new showcase page, the Dfinity Foundation aggregates an overview of some applications building on top of the Internet Computer. These range from infrastructure, NFTs, social media all the way to gaming - we are looking forward to seeing this list grow even more in the future.
The Foundation also recently open-sourced its' custom-built programming language Motoko as well as Quill, their ledger and governance toolkit. This should accelerate the growth of Dfinitys' ecosystem even more as it lowers entry barriers for developers and entrepreneurs eager to build on the Internet Computer.
Happy Anniversary, Tezos!
On June 30th, the Tezos network had its' third anniversary. Ever since the genesis block on June 30, 2018, 05:07:32 PM GMT, the network saw six upgrades, more than 1.5 million blocks, +55 million transactions, and more than 1.3 million funded accounts! To kick-off year four, the Tezos website got a new look. Furthermore, USDC is expected to come to Tezos in the course of the coming month according to a draft announcement by Centre, the open-source project behind USDC founded by Coinbase and Circle. Other blockchains anticipating USDC on their networks are Avalanche, Celo, Flow, Hedera, Kava, Nervos, Polkadot, Stacks, and Tron.
Welcome aboard, Simon!
This month, however, the biggest news for us as a company is Simon joining our team as a Web Developer! In the course of the last few months, Simon proved to be an invaluable member of the HydraDX as well as the overall Substrate ecosystem. His community support was outstanding and we couldn't be more excited about welcoming Simon on board with us. You can learn more about Simon here.
The best investment you can make ... education!
We're still excited about the re-launch of the Staking Academy, our content aggregation platform. On the Staking Academy, you can find educational content such as blog posts, videos, and research reports as well as guides, tutorials, and tools that help you to participate in staking or DeFi projects. Furthermore, we list upcoming events, podcasts, and resources that are worthy of your time. While we mainly focus on Proof-of-Stake protocols, we also list curated, more general content about the overall industry as well as legal and DeFi specific pieces.
Join us at the beach!
We officially joined forces with VGNG to bring Solana Beach to the next level and execute the mission of becoming the go-to blockexplorer for the Solana ecosystem. Solana Beach now is a joint venture between two teams with years of experience working in the blockchain industry. Since our team members are lead users themselves, we can draw from a great set of insights and best practices.
Solana is a different kind of beast, given its ultra-high performance and the Cambrian explosion that the ecosystem has recently seen. Running the necessary infrastructure for Solana Beach as well as supporting a hard-working team obviously incurs quite significant costs.
Therefore we spun up our very own Solana Beach validator node, whose revenues we are using to cover the costs of our operations and improve the Solana Beach experience through better performance and new features. We want to stay independent and develop Solana Beach as a community-focused tool. Our validator allows us to do so and sustainably develop Solana Beach tailored to community needs. It also enables any $SOL-holder to support an ecosystem-wide tool and contribute to the security of the network while still earning yield on their funds. That makes one heck of a win-win situation, wouldn't you agree?
Expert insights on blockchain-enabled self-sovereign identity
Our friend Martin Schäffner, member of the EuSSI Working Group and Blockchain Architect at the amazing Datarella team recently published a blog post for the Zigurat Innovation & Business School. In the post, Martin explains the concept of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), how it works, what it holds in store for us, and how differs from todays' digital identities. With the EU commission proposing a trusted and secure Digital Identity for all Europeans, the topic has reached the highest ranks - we sure hope that the commissioners seek the advice of experts such as Martin!
European Central Bank Warns Countries that Fail to Launch Their Own Digital Currency (read)
Interactive Brokers will offer crypto trading by the end of the summer (read)
BaFin approves crypto custody license for Coinbase (read)
Coinbase and Compound are now looking to offer their customers a reinvention of the good ol' savings account with rates more than 50x than the US national average (read)