Centrifuge is building the operating system to connect the global financial supply chain.
Centrifuge is bridging real-world trade finance assets like company invoices into the world of decentralized finance through the Tinlake asset-backed lending protocol. Through Tinlake, users can tokenize non-liquid assets such as invoices (e.g. ConsolFreight) or streaming royalties (e.g. Paperchain) and borrow against these securitized assets.The Centrifuge Chain, which hosts the Tinlake protocol, is a Substrate-based Proof-of-Stake chain secured by a small set of validators including Chorus One. By delegating Centrifuge (CFG) tokens, stakers help maintain the network and its bridge to Ethereum, for which they earn staking rewards.
Make sure to note down your mnemonic seed in a safe place! You will lose access to your funds if you forget or lose it. It is not recommended to store them on an unsecured laptop
2. Create 2 accounts
To stake CFG tokens you require 2 funded wallets. Follow step 1 twice to create these two and some CFG to both.
For any organization dealing majorly in crypto, the last few weeks were something akin to a bad dream. Over $1T of market cap was washed out in the last 3 months with many believing that we’re already in a bear market. Queries about the bear market, recession, and other related terms have gone up on Google by more than 100% compared to the previous few months. The global equity markets shadowed this behavior too with the macro headwinds of high inflation & slower growth finally starting to haunt the central banks.
It’s safe to say that the traders were the worst hit by this sudden price movement with more than $1B worth of liquidations taking place between June 13 and 14 alone. The cascading effects of over-leveraged trades were visible in full display. But as they say — when in doubt, zoom out. Anyone worth their salt would agree that blockchain is a revolutionary technology and cryptocurrencies will change the way people transact and trade in the next decade. And we, at Chorus One, are not the only ones to believe so.
Goldman Sachs recently released the eleventh edition of its annual insurance survey where cryptocurrency was included for the first time. This survey considers inputs from 328 Chief Investment Officers and Chief Financial Officers, representing companies that have nearly $13 trillion in balance sheet assets. Nearly 6% of respondents said they were invested in crypto or are considering doing so. Even Bank of America released a report recently where more than 90% of the people surveyed said that they plan to invest in cryptocurrencies in the next 6 months. It’s no secret that more and more institutions are increasing their exposure to digital assets and with the recent twists and turns in the Celsius saga and rumours of them “managing their money like degens” or “having complete naked exposure to the market”, institutions deserve a safer and less-riskier option to invest where they, and only they, can control their funds. And that’s where staking comes in.
Staking refers to the “locking up” of your digital assets and earning the right to validate the next block of transactions. This is possible for most of the tokens that are based on the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism like Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, Tezos or Ethereum (expected to be PoS driven by 2022). And Proof-of-Stake consumes only a fraction of energy compared to the energy-guzzling Proof-of-Work. And of course, you get rewarded too. According to Staking Rewards, the average interest rate currently is greater than 9% but it can swing between single-digit and triple-digit APYs depending on your asset. In fact, if you currently own Proof-of-Stake-based tokens and don’t stake them, you’re not only losing rewards but your portion of assets would also be continuously shrinking in relation to total supply as the rewards for most of the tokens are mainly generated through inflationary returns.
Enterprise staking is one the safest options for institutions that take a long-term view of the crypto ecosystem as it is not market-dependent. Investing in a liquidity pool comes with its own set of risks not limited to impermanent losses, volatility, no fixed returns, hacks etc. But when you have your tokens staked, even though the market value of your assets might drop, they continue to accrue predictable rewards in that same asset.
Staking is also custody-friendly as you continue to hold control of your institutional assets. No other party can seize control or deny you your accrued rewards, not even a staking company like Chorus One. Compliance is usually one of the top concerns for institutions and hence we also have partnerships with global custodians like Finoa. We also work with custodians of your choice when you partner with us.
Of course, you can run your own validator nodes too but it’s an extremely complicated process requiring expertise and hands-on knowledge and that’s where companies like Chorus One come into play. We’re one of the biggest staking companies globally and work with some of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, VC funds, family trusts and other organizations. We monitor our nodes 24/7 and have stringent SLAs with all our institutional clients that act as guarantees against any risk of slashing. In fact, we have never been slashed. Since 2018. We work with the best minds in crypto so you can spend your time deploying funds and not worry about validator technicalities.
If you’re looking for an institutional staking partner, look no further. Drop an email to sales@chorus.one and we shall get back to you.
The bull cycle of 2021/2022 was largely defined by decentralized application platforms that provide an alternative to Ethereum experiencing adoption and growth within their ecosystems. All these platforms have one thing in common: they need operators commonly called validators actually running the underlying infrastructure to enable the applications built on them to be usable.
Most importantly, there should be enough independent operators for such a network to be considered sufficiently (politically) decentralized, to avoid a subset of parties being able to shut down applications, censor transactions, or in other ways impede the credible neutrality of the platform.
A core belief within Chorus One is that the increasing adoption of decentralized applications will lead to further networks springing up; a directional trend that can be observed looking at the growth of application-specific chains, e.g. in Cosmos, the pioneering and leading ecosystem of this approach (via the Cosmos SDK and IBC), which is also being pursued by similar initiatives in other ecosystems (e.g. Avalanche subnets, Polygon supernets, Substrate chains on Polkadot). Notably, in recent months, some of the most used applications including decentralized derivatives trading platform dYdX confirmed and NFT juggernaut Yuga Labs hinted at plans to launch their own application-specific blockchain.
Given these forces on the network supply side, the demand and competition for professional operators are growing and protocol designers need to think about how to incentivize validators to join their ecosystems — as opposed to a “build it and they will come” mentality.
The following post aims to provide an insight into existing strategies and criteria for network foundations to foster decentralization and create a healthy validator set via stake delegation programs.
As mentioned, a key tool in the toolbox of network foundations, who generally are endowed with a decent portion of the underlying protocol’s staking token and the mandate to grow the ecosystem, is the ability to distribute the stake to independent validators. Crucially, here we are not talking about giving tokens directly to validators through e.g. validator-specific investment rounds or incentivized testnets, which are other viable strategies to create alignment. Rather, we talk about delegating foundation tokens to validators based on some sort of evaluation. This mechanism can be used to continuously reward operators that add value enabling them to build a stake in the network via commission rewards. This cannot be underestimated as both a bootstrapping mechanism for validators to join your network and as a mechanism to reward valuable contributions, as well as continued participation and performance.
In the following table, we aim to highlight some of the different criteria choices providing examples of existing foundation delegation strategies that can be taken into consideration. We also look at two exemplary liquid staking protocols, another interesting party with similar goals to a protocol foundation that has been innovating on establishing methods of how stake is distributed among their validator sets.
Furthermore, most programs also institute a maximum fee that validators are allowed to charge. Notably, it can be observed that some liquid staking protocols actively try to minimize validator fees as their main product is the APY of their liquid staking token.
Finally, it is also interesting to note which programs are carried out in an automated fashion on-chain, which is spearheaded e.g. by Solana stake pools and Polkadot’s 1,000 validator program (see links below).
Once aligned on the desired criteria, you’ll need to decide on the frequency and how to communicate the criteria, how people can take part, and how decisions will be communicated. We recommend using a mailing list for upgrade communication and Discord or Telegram for active discussion. We have collected some critical resources from other delegation programs at the end of this post for inspiration.
An alternative to delegation programs that some networks opt for is to run foundation nodes themselves, a practice that we would largely discourage or at least try to limit for early phases of the network in which some additional control of the foundation might be necessary or in some minor fashion to ensure the network’s validator software and surrounding process are useable. At scale, this practice takes away the chance for validators to truly become a part of the network and will ultimately result in a centralized, and thus pointless, network.
Well-designed stake delegation strategies are a powerful bootstrapping mechanism to get independent operators interested in your decentralized network. In addition, they can serve as a mechanism to continuously reward valuable contributions such as community engagement and open-source tooling.
In this post, we touched upon why delegation programs are needed, the underlying goals, and what criteria can be used to conduct them. There is a lot of work to be done evaluating the effectiveness and improving and innovating on delegation strategies we have introduced here.
Chorus One is an experienced staking provider active on over 30 networks actively investing in the ecosystem and helping networks from conception to launch and beyond. We have also written about other tools, including incentivized testnets. We encourage builders launching their application-specific blockchains and researchers interested in this space to get in touch with us through ventures(at)chorus.one
Solana Foundation
Interchain Foundation
Web3 Foundation
Tendermint Team
Lido
Marinade
Terraform Labs
Celo Foundation
Socean
e-Money
Kava is a cross-chain, decentralized finance project focused on providing collateralized, USD-pegged stablecoin borrowing for assets from different blockchains. Kava is making use of interoperability solutions to bring its services to tokens like Binance’s BNB and Bitcoin.
Users of the Kava CDP system earn KAVA tokens and can delegate them to validators like Chorus One, which maintains and govern the protocol with the goal to create a stable platform for cross-chain decentralized finance.
Please note that the unstake period is 21 days. This means that you can only unstake and withdraw coins to your wallet after this time has passed. We wish you profitable staking!
In case you don't have the keplr extension installed in your browser visit https://www.keplr.app/ and click on Install extension.
Click on Install Keplr for Chrome if you are using a Chrome browser or Brave if you are using the Brave browser and follow the installation instructions.
Click on the extension in the Chrome/Brave toolbar and the following page will open up.
In case you do not have an existing Keplr account you can create a new account
You will be shown 12 words as your mnemonic seed. Select24 words option for a more secure mnemonic. Back it up securely (read the warning below)
Back up your mnemonic seed securely.
Enter an account name and a passphrase to unlock your wallet. You will be asked for the mnemonic again. Enter the 24 words in order. This is to make sure you remember the mnemonic.
Finally, click on Next to create your account
Regardless of whether you already have an account or if you created it just now you may now click on the extension to view your address or visit https://wallet.keplr.app/#/akashnet/stake to see the full dashboard.
If you don't already have KAVA in your account fund it with some tokens. You may use an exchange to transfer the KAVA tokens to your address or get it from someone who already holds those.
To stake click on the Kava network in the left panel and click on Stake
You will be shown a list of validators with whom to stake on the right side. Scroll to Chorus One and click on Manage.
A modal with Chorus One's description will pop up. Click once on Delegate to enter the amount of tokens you want to stake.
Clicking on Delegate again will take you to Keplr wallet for approval. Approve the transaction and you will be able to see your stake.
There is a 21-day unbonding process for staked KAVAs during which delegator KAVAs do not earn rewards and cannot be transferred, exchanged, or spent. KAVAs can, however, be slashed during the unbonding period.
Once your transaction is approved you will be able to see your Kava getting staked. Congratulations you have successfully staked your $KAVA!!
After some time you will see rewards getting accumulated in your account. You can simply go to the Keplr extension to claim them.
