The Staking Standard | SF Newsletter
Drop it like it's air; certification alert; new heights and much more!
Welcome to our first issue of 2024 of The Staking Standard,
we sure hope you had a smooth transition into the new year and are more than pleased to have you with us for another trip around the sun. With Bitcoin ETFs being a thing now, 2024 is off to a good start, but let’s not jinks anything and jump directly into some updates, shall we?
Staking. Made in Germany. … Certified.
We’re proud to announce that our high-security standards have now been officially recognized and certified under the ISO 27001:2022 standards. This certification is a testament to our dedication to maintaining the highest level of information security management, ensuring that our infrastructure, operations, and customer data are protected with the utmost integrity. Achieving this certification reflects our ongoing commitment to excellence and trustworthiness in the blockchain infrastructure space.
For a detailed insight into our journey to obtaining the ISO 27001:2022 certification and what it means for our stakeholders, check out our latest blog post here.
Zero Knowledge at Internet Scale
We’re thrilled to announce our latest investment in Gevulot, a decentralized compute network exclusively optimized for zero-knowledge proof generation and verification. We've joined forces with other prominent investors in Gevulot's $6 million Seed round, led by Variant. We’re stoked to collaborate with 2P.org, Supranational, and RockawayX Infrastructure for Gevolut’s Devent, which is set to launch on March 25th. This collaboration aims to test proof generation pipeline and core functionalities, including deployment, proving, verifying, networking, and orchestration. Gevulot's mission resonates with our goal of fostering innovation in the blockchain space, ensuring credible neutrality and enhancing user privacy. This investment is a stride towards realizing decentralized proving, a crucial component for the future of modular rollups and blockchain scalability.
Solana
Tokens extended. With version 1.17, token extensions were introduced to the Solana network. These extensions, comprising over a dozen features, allow for the creation of advanced, compliance-friendly tokens. This includes functionalities like confidential transfers, which enable private transactions without revealing amounts, and transfer hooks for intricate token interactions and compliance enforcement. Notably, the token extension upgrade empowers the issuance of permissioned tokens on a permissionless public blockchain, addressing compliance needs without necessitating private, permissioned environments. The full suite of extensions is being rolled out gradually with most being live already today. Eager builders can dabble with the extension and put their ideas into action for the upcoming Colosseum global online hackathon.
Growth across the board. Solana's ecosystem is showing robust growth, as evidenced by a notable increase in its developer community and on-chain activities. The network now boasts over 2,500 monthly active developers, with developer retention surpassing 50% in the last three months, indicating a healthy and expanding ecosystem. Concurrently, there's been a significant surge in on-chain activities, with daily average non-voting transactions reaching 40.7 million, a 65% increase from the previous quarter. Additionally, the number of daily average fee payers has risen to 190,000, marking a 102% increase. These metrics highlight the growing engagement and vitality within the Solana ecosystem…and not to jinx anything, but the network is getting close to the one-year mark of having no outages. With yet another validator client being build, outages should really be(come) a thing of the past.
To Jupiter and beyond. History was made on January 31st with the Jupiter airdrop. During this massive event, Solana's blockchain and our validator infrastructure worked just as intended, handling an uptick in bandwidth effortlessly. Remarkably, $1 billion in DeFi trading volume was recorded for $JUP within three hours. The network processed 2.5 million non-vote transactions in just 2.5 hours, showcasing an impressive recovery in transaction throughput, from an initial drop to 568 TPS to a swift rise to 2200 TPS two hours in. Validator performance was flawless with zero failures, maintaining transaction integrity throughout. Although wallet providers faced challenges with overloaded RPCs, Solflare's transparency was commendable and were certain that they will only grow stronger from this. Cheers to all Catdetes and the entire ecosystem.
Ethereum
New heights. January 2024 marked a notable increase in Ethereum staking participation, hitting a new peak with about 30 million ETH staked, representing over 24% of the total supply.
Keep an eye out. Several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are underway to upgrade the network. EIP-1153, a feature of Dencun, brings in transient storage opcodes to streamline smart contract processing. EIP-4788 enhances network alignment by incorporating a Beacon Block Root in each EVM block. EIP-5656, introducing the MCOPY opcode, optimizes memory data copying for smart contracts. Lastly, EIP-6780 focuses on restricting the SELFDESTRUCT opcode, bolstering Ethereum’s state management and security.
Lido 🤝 Wormhole. The Lido DAO, which currently has a TVIL of $20.8 billion, selected Wormhole and Axelar as its main bridge partners for stETH token transfers. This choice followed a community vote where Wormhole and Axelar's proposal received overwhelming support of over 81%, significantly ahead of LayerZero’s 5%.
Tendermint
Zero chance. A proposal was made to reduce the ATOM inflation rate from the current minimum of 7% to 0%. However, the community voted to keep the minimum inflation rate at 7%. The decision reflects concerns about ecosystem tokenomics and the desire to balance staking incentives with sustainable economic growth.
Stake it till you make it. Stride has launched liquid staking on the dYdX chain within the Cosmos ecosystem. This development includes an airdrop of up to 100,000 STRD tokens for holders who liquid stake their DYDX with Stride. The integration aims to increase interest in the Cosmos ecosystem by leveraging dYdX's large user base.
Stark! Celestia is collaborating with Ethereum scaling solution Starknet to enhance data availability for Layer 3 chains. This partnership enables Starknet to use Blobstream from Celestia for data storage, reducing transaction costs and improving efficiency for Layer 3 appchains within Starknet. Blobstream, a data availability (DA) layer in Celestia, stores large data amounts off-chain while ensuring verifiability.
Substrate
Payback. The Polkadot network has achieved a significant milestone with the release of Polkadot 1.6.0. Additionally, DOT tokens crowdloaned for auction winners 6 - 11, including Efinity, Composable, Centrifuge, Interlay, Nodle, and HydraDX, have been refunded to the contributors.
Zeros and ones. Kusama has upgraded its relay chain to runtime 1’001’000, reinforcing the network's robustness and technological agility. However, there have been incidents of instability in parachain block production, which have been resolved in the meantime.
Network quick takes
The Graph. In Q4 2023, the network witnessed a 144% year-over-year increase in subgraphs, with 1,509 transitioning from the hosted service to the decentralized network, marking a 14% rise quarter-over-quarter. Despite a decrease in GRT terms, indexing rewards in USD surged by 24% to nearly $10 million, buoyed by the GRT/USD exchange rate rise, even as GRT inflation stayed below 3% throughout the year. On the other hand, demand-side revenue saw a 10% quarter-over-quarter and 65% year-over-year drop in USD, attributed to query price optimizations. The Graph also released an Indexer upgrade, easing the transition of subgraphs to the decentralized network. For more, check out Messari’s Q4 report.
Chainlink. In the recent episode Chainlink’s ‘The Future is On’, Waqar Chaudry, the Managing Director of Digital Assets at Standard Chartered, discussed the imminent tipping point in the world of asset tokenization. Chaudry emphasized the transformative potential of tokenization in the financial industry, predicting a significant shift in how assets are managed and traded. He highlighted that tokenization could lead to increased liquidity, more efficient markets, and broader accessibility to a variety of asset classes. This advancement, he believes, will redefine the landscape of modern finance, paving the way for innovative and inclusive financial products and services.
Aptos. Developers take note - Aptos has launched MoveSpiders, a free resource offering extensive and practical lessons in Move, the programming language of Aptos. This initiative is aimed at both beginners and skilled developers, further strengthening the developer community on Aptos.
Wormhole. Wormhole's recently announced their Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Roadmap, which includes the integration of four new engineering teams specializing in ZK cryptography, backed by Wormhole Foundation Contributor Grants. Collaborating with a strategic hardware provider, Wormhole aims to accelerate light client implementations and offer hardware accelerators to its contributors. This initiative also includes deploying ZK light-clients for major blockchains such as Ethereum, Sui, Aptos, Near, and Cosmos, fostering trustless and efficient bi-directional data transfers. The roadmap focuses on enhancing flexibility in message verification, minimizing reliance on trust-based systems, and enabling scalable integration of new blockchains. These efforts are geared towards reinforcing Wormhole's position as a leader in multichain applications and bridges, ensuring a more secure, efficient, and flexible verification mechanism across diverse blockchain networks.
Sui. Sui has strengthened its ties with Alibaba Cloud, boosting its ecosystem growth. This partnership is set to provide more resources for developers using the Move programming language and includes plans for an AI-assisted Move code writing tool, educational initiatives, and incubator programs across Asia.