At Chorus One, our primary goal is to provide our users with the best possible experience across a wide variety of networks. In light of current market conditions and lower network activity, we’ve made the decision to offboard a few networks. This change allows us to streamline our focus and dedicate more resources to networks that offer stronger long-term growth and user adoption.

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Networks being offboarded:

• Evmos
• Mars
• Secret
• Gelato

Why we're making this change:

While we have enjoyed working with and supporting these networks, we’ve observed a few trends that have led to this decision:

1. Market Conditions: The volatility and price movement of these tokens have impacted their sustainability from a node operation perspective. In uncertain market conditions, it’s crucial for us to prioritize networks that show resilience and consistent growth.
2. Low Network Activity: Despite their early potential, the applications and user adoption on these networks have not reached the levels necessary to justify continued support. In our commitment to delivering the best experience to our users, we believe it’s important to focus on networks with higher engagement and vibrant ecosystems.

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What does this mean for you?

If you’re currently staking tokens on any of the networks we are off-boarding, please take note of the following important details:

• Migrate your stake to a different validator:
  We kindly ask that you migrate any tokens you have staked on Mars, Secret, and Gelato by November 10th to a different validator. After this date, staking services on these networks will no longer be supported, and it’s important to ensure your tokens are securely unstaked before then.
• Evmos:
  With the recent upgrade in the network, the validator set was reduced to just a small number of slots. With Chorus One node already out of the active set, we have already completed the off-boarding process for Evmos. If you have any questions regarding this transition, please feel free to reach out to our support team.

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Looking forward:

This decision allows us to allocate more resources and attention to the networks that show the most promise in terms of activity, user growth, and long-term sustainability. As we continue to grow and evolve, we remain committed to offering the best staking services and supporting the most innovative and active networks in the industry.

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Need help?

If you have any questions or need assistance with unstaking your tokens, our support team is here to help. Feel free to reach out to us via [email protected].

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About Chorus One

Chorus One is one of the largest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for over 60 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Near, and others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry, offering easy-to-use, enterprise-grade staking solutions, conducting industry-leading research, and investing in innovative protocols through Chorus One Ventures. As an ISO 27001 certified provider, Chorus One also offers slashing and double-signing insurance to its institutional clients. For more information, visit chorus.one or follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram.

On June 4th 2024, the Tezos blockchain successfully activated the Paris protocol upgrade proposal at block 5,726,209. This marks a new era for the chain, with significant effects on its Proof-of-Stake model in three key areas: Faster Finality, Higher Scalability, Stronger PoS.

• Faster finality: block times have been reduced to 10s, for fast finality times and lower latency.
• Higher Scalability: the upgrade activated the Data Availability Layer (the DAL) on mainnet, which helps the throughput sent of the Smart Rollups.
• Stronger PoS: the PoS model has been refined to reduce the delays in baking rights and simplify their computation.

We will focus this guide on the last point, and describe the new PoS mechanism brought by this upgrade, as it has a significant impact on the staking rewards that can be accrued on the blockchain.

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Adaptive Issuance

For this upgrade, a new mechanism called “Adaptive Issuance and Staking“ has been implemented, which sets a new calendar for the inflation rewarded to bakers as well as a new staking system, adapting the economics of Tezos to fit better with real-world usage.

Adaptive Issuance means that staking rewards are no longer issued at a fixed (constant) rate, but instead will adjust depending on the share of total supply involved in staking. At the end of each cycle, the protocol adjusts reward values automatically, in order to bring the staked funds ratio towards a chosen target (50% in Paris).

Staker has also been introduced as a new role along with Adaptive Issuance. As a reminder, Tezos previously only allowed bakers (or delegators) to receive rewards through their assets. Like delegators, stakers delegate consensus and voting rights to a chosen baker. Unlike delegators, they can stake funds, which count towards their baker’s staking balance. Staked funds are frozen, and subject to slashing if the baker misbehaves.

With the new mechanism, staked funds are worth twice as much as delegated funds for the computation of consensus rights.  Rewards arising from stakes are accrued automatically by the economic protocol for both bakers and stakers alike.

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Adaptive Slashing

The other side of this coin is Adaptive Slashing. As stakers are subject to slashing if their chosen bakers misbehaves, the effect of penalties extends to more users. It becomes important then to differentiate between sporadic incidents arising from involuntary errors, from malicious, sustained attacks. This new mechanism then introduces changes in how penalties for double-signing consensus operations are computed, adapting to the fraction of the total attesting stake involved (more stake, higher penalties).

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Key Takeaways for Users

• The general Tezos user can still delegate their coins to a baker and be a delegator.
• Additionally they can stake their coins and become a staker if the baker accepts staking.
• You can stake any amount in your spendable balance, but you should reserve some funds for staking, unstaking and finalization fees.
• You can stake more or unstake at any time, but changes take 2 cycles to affect baking rights and hence any rewards.
• Unstaked funds are still frozen. The unstaking needs to be finalized after 4 cycles.
• The user’s wallet receives any baking rewards due to the staking directly from the Tezos protocol. The baker is not involved in this process. The rewards are automatically staked.
• The user’s stake is subject to slashing should the baker misbehave.
• You can liquidate your stake by unstaking everything, waiting 4 cycles, and then by issuing the finalization command.

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Chorus One’s Recommendation

We recommend all delegators to familiarize themselves with the changes implemented in this Tezos Paris upgrade: Quick Start Guide for Adaptive Issuance.

On our side, Chorus One has implemented the Paris upgrade and is now accepting stakers. Through the previous guide, you will be able to complete the steps needed to start staking on Tezos and avoid any diminished rewards due to the new issuance model.

Please contact us if you have any issues.

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About Chorus One

Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 60+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.

Follow this step-by-step guide to stake your Bitcoin (BTC) to the Babylon protocol via Chorus One’s Finality Provider. [using Staking Rewards]

Important to note:

‍It is recommended that you have Step 1 prepared ahead of time, to be ready for when BTC staking goes live.

Bitcoin (BTC) staking on Babylon will be activated once the BTC block height passes 857909. At this exact point, the “Stake Now” button will be activated in the Stake App and BTC staking transactions can be submitted.

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Step 1: Prepare your OKX Bitcoin wallet

For the Babylon’s Phase 1 mainnet, the Stake App will only support BTC staking via OKX Wallet. Install the OKX wallet browser extension and deposit your BTC before proceeding to the next step.

Note: When setting up and funding your wallet, it is important to:

(1) not use a hardware a wallet (such as Ledger), aside from Keystone QR code either directly or through other software wallets and

(2) not use a wallet that holds any Bitcoin Inscriptions.

(3) choose either Native Segwit or Taproot format

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Step 2: Start staking BTC

Navigate to the Chorus One’s BTC Staking Interface.

The direct link will be: https://www.stakingrewards.com/stake-app?input=bitcoin&type=babylon-staking&provider=chorus-one&locked=true

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Step 3: Connect your Bitcoin wallet

Connect your wallet. If you’re visiting the website for the first time, you will need to sign the signature request to get your wallet connected.

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Step 4: Enter your BTC amount

Input the amount of BTC you want to stake. During Babylon Phase 1, you have the option to stake between 0.005 and 0.05 BTC per transaction.

Select or switch the address format in your wallet.

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Step 5: Determine the transaction fee

Next you can choose to keep the current network fee or prioritize your delegation by increasing the transaction fee.

Reminder: The cap for phase 1 will fill very quickly (around 20 - 40 mins). The higher you set your fee, the higher the likelihood your BTC will be staked to the next block, before the cap is filled.

If your stake arrives after the cap is filled, then it will be in the “overflow” status and you will need to unbond and withdraw your BTC.

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Step 6: Stake BTC

Finalize the staking process by clicking “Stake” and confirm the transaction in your wallet.

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Step 7: Complete the process

Congratulations you have successfully staked your BTC to Babylon via Chorus One’s Finality Provider. You can now track your staked position via the Staking Terminal.

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How to Unstake BTC?

You can unstake your BTC and withdraw it via the Staking Terminal. There are two steps required to withdraw your BTC,

1. Submit an unbonding transaction, to enable your BTC to be withdrawn. The unbonding period takes roughly 7 days (or exactly 1008 Bitcoin blocks as defined by the unbonding script).
2. Once unbonded you will be able to withdraw your BTC.

Note: Stake will automatically unbond after 65 weeks.

To begin the process of unstaking your BTC follow the the steps below:

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Step 1: Go to the Staking Terminal

Visit the Staking Terminal to view your staking positions.

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Step 2: Connect your Bitcoin wallet

Connect the wallet you staked with previously.

Step 3: Manage delegations

Navigate to the “My Holdings” tab to view your staked positions.

Step 4: Unbond BTC

Click on position details and select “Unbond”. Confirm the transaction in your wallet.

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Step 5: Withdraw BTC

You can monitor your unbonded BTC via the “Unbonding” as shown below. Once your unbonding period of 7 days ends, you will be able to withdraw your BTC.

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About Chorus One

Chorus One is a leading institutional staking provider, securing over $3 billion in assets across 60+ Proof-of-Stake networks. Since 2018, Chorus One has been a trusted partner for institutions, offering enterprise-grade solutions, industry-leading research, and investments in cutting-edge protocols.

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Blockchain technology, particularly EVM-compatible blockchains, has radically transformed how we think about trust, value transfer, and decentralized applications (dApps). Ethereum, the frontrunner in this space, has been the playground for developers and innovators to build decentralized finance (DeFi), digital art (NFTs), and beyond. However, despite its revolutionary potential, Ethereum faces a fundamental challenge: transaction inefficiency.

Ethereum processes roughly 15-30 transactions per second (TPS). In contrast, payment networks like Visa handle over 1,700 TPS on average. This gap is not because Ethereum lacks innovation but because the very architecture that enables decentralization also imposes bottlenecks. As the world looks to blockchain for global-scale solutions, Ethereum’s single-threaded execution model, coupled consensus and execution, and storage inefficiencies mean that it struggles to meet the needs of millions of users. This inefficiency creates high fees, slow finality, and a system that often feels impractical for mainstream adoption.

So how do we build a blockchain that scales to millions while still retaining the core ethos of decentralization and trustlessness?

Enter Monad—a Layer 1 blockchain designed not to replace Ethereum but to optimize the very way EVM-compatible blockchains process transactions. Monad offers a paradigm shift, introducing radical but well-reasoned changes that solve the very inefficiencies that have stifled blockchain scalability.

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The Solution: A new approach to transaction processing

Monad isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. It embraces the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and maintains compatibility with Ethereum’s rich ecosystem. But it takes a surgical approach to fixing Ethereum’s inefficiencies by optimizing the processes that slow it down.

At its core, Monad offers a solution by decoupling execution from consensus. Unlike Ethereum, where every validator must execute transactions in real-time to reach consensus, Monad rethinks the process. In Monad’s world, the network first agrees on the order of transactions and then proceeds to execute them independently. This seemingly simple separation is the key to unlocking a blockchain that can scale to 10,000 TPS with 1-second finality.

Monad prioritizes two things above all: decentralization and efficiency. Instead of sacrificing one for the other, Monad’s approach ensures that transaction throughput increases without compromising the trustless, decentralized nature of the network.

Now, let’s delve into the optimizations that make this vision a reality.

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The key optimizations: How Monad breaks the bottlenecks

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1. MonadBFT

Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism intertwines transaction validation and execution. But Monad takes inspiration from HotStuff to create MonadBFT, a consensus protocol that eliminates the need for execution during consensus.

By doing so, MonadBFT focuses solely on reaching agreement on transaction ordering. It achieves 1-second block times with single-slot finality, compared to Ethereum’s multi-minute finality, by reducing communication rounds and allowing consensus to happen faster. This streamlined approach lets validators come to agreement on a block’s content, even before they execute it.

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2. Deferred Execution

In Ethereum, consensus and execution are linked in a way that forces validators to both agree on and execute transactions within the same block window, which can be inefficient. Deferred Execution in Monad separates the two, enabling the network to reach consensus first, and allowing transaction execution to take place afterward, in parallel.

What does this mean in practice? Instead of validators being forced to immediately execute transactions as they propose blocks, they can delay execution. The transactions are committed in the agreed order, but the execution happens alongside consensus for the next block. This approach vastly improves throughput by allowing the network to optimize execution time across multiple blocks.

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3. Parallel execution and Superscalar pipelining

Monad implements optimistic parallel execution, where transactions are processed in parallel across multiple cores but committed in their original order, maintaining the same deterministic outcomes as Ethereum. While this boosts throughput, it can lead to state conflicts when transactions depend on each other. In such cases, Monad re-executes conflicting transactions to ensure correctness.

To further enhance efficiency, Monad introduces superscalar pipelining. This technique divides the transaction processing into multiple stages (e.g., signature verification, state access) and processes these stages in parallel, similar to how modern CPUs work. By overlapping different stages of transaction execution, Monad maximizes resource utilization, reducing delays and increasing throughput, all while preserving the linear ordering of transactions.

A simple diagram to illustrate superscalar pipelining:

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4. MonadDb

State storage is a lesser-known bottleneck in Ethereum. The Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT) structure that Ethereum uses is embedded into key-value databases like LevelDB, which weren’t designed for blockchain workloads. Monad solves this inefficiency by designing MonadDb, a storage solution that natively implements the Patricia Trie in both on-disk and in-memory formats.

Additionally, MonadDb uses asynchronous I/O to avoid the blocking nature of traditional storage operations. This means that even if one transaction is waiting for state to be loaded from disk, the system can continue processing other transactions, thereby optimizing overall performance.

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Challenges of these optimizations

While Monad’s optimizations are powerful, they are not without challenges.

• Parallel execution conflicts: While optimistic parallel execution boosts throughput, it can lead to state conflict when two transactions attempt to modify the same variable. Although Monad re-executes conflicting transactions, there’s a cost in terms of processing power and efficiency. Predicting dependencies and scheduling transactions intelligently is a technical challenge that Monad is continuously refining.
• Deferred execution lag: Decoupling consensus and execution introduces a slight lag between consensus and execution, which could be problematic in use cases that require real-time results, such as high-frequency trading. Monad mitigates this with its delayed Merkle root system, but there is still a gap between knowing the order of transactions and knowing their outcome.

Despite these challenges, the benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks. Let’s look at the results Monad’s innovations deliver.

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The Results: A blockchain built for scale

Thanks to these four key optimizations, Monad aims to achieve what few blockchains can:

• 10,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS): By decoupling consensus from execution and enabling parallel execution, Monad can handle thousands of transactions per second, a dramatic improvement over Ethereum’s 15-30 TPS.
• 1-Second Finality: Single-slot finality means that transactions are finalized in just 1 second. There are no long waits for confirmation, making Monad ideal for time-sensitive applications.
• Lower Transaction Costs: By increasing throughput and optimizing resource usage, Monad significantly reduces the per-transaction cost, making it affordable for users and scalable for dApps with millions of users.

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The current state of Monad and what’s next

Monad is still in development, but its ambitious roadmap is clear. The project’s public testnet is expected in the near future, allowing developers to integrate it into their Ethereum-compatible wallets and applications. This will be a crucial step in proving Monad’s ability to scale without sacrificing the core values of decentralization and trustlessness.

Monad’s team is focused on ensuring that its network remains easy to use for developers familiar with Ethereum. They’ve built Monad as a drop-in replacement for Ethereum, meaning developers can port their dApps with little to no changes. As more users and developers flock to the testnet, Monad aims to further refine its consensus, execution, and storage systems, solving the scalability trilemma in a way that balances decentralization, performance, and security.

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Final word

Monad offers a bold new approach to solving blockchain’s biggest bottleneck: transaction inefficiency. By decoupling execution from consensus, enabling parallel execution, and optimizing storage with MonadDb, it delivers a blockchain that can handle 10,000 TPS with 1-second finality—all without sacrificing decentralization. As Monad continues to build and refine its technology, it stands as a potential blueprint for the future of blockchain scalability, offering a glimpse of what’s possible when we think beyond the limitations of today’s networks.

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Frequently asked Questions (source: docs.monad.xyz):

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1. In what language is the Monad client developed?

The Monad client is built with a modular software architecture, separating the tasks of consensus and execution between two software modules: the consensus client and execution client respectively. The consensus client is written in Rust which is a memory-safe language that allows for low-level optimizations. The execution client is written in C/C++, well-established and battle-tested languages for developing low-level system critical code.

2. Why is Monad built as an L1 network?

The Monad network is a full stack solution for developers, allowing access to a highly composable ecosystem without compromising on real-time censorship resistance. While L2 solutions may offer one way to compress data stored on the base layer, the Monad blockchain is a scalable base layer for the EVM itself at its most fundamental layer. A highly-performant base layer gives application developers the best of both worlds, with a high degree of composability and real-time censorship resistance in the name of scalability.

3. Is Monad truly 100% EVM-compatible without code changes?

Yes! The Monad blockchain is 100% EVM compatible at the bytecode level - meaning contracts from ETH mainnet, or other fully EVM compatible networks will work out-of-the-box without requiring any code changes.

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About Chorus One

Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally, operating infrastructure for 60+ Proof-of-Stake networks, including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near, amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.