We are excited to announce that Chorus One is joining Chainlink as a node operator. Starting today, our Chainlink node will assist in providing highly available and reliable data feeds to the crypto ecosystem.
The Chainlink team is providing a core piece of infrastructure for blockchain applications by allowing them to handle off-chain data. On their own, blockchains are unable to verify “real world” data that is created outside their native network. This creates a conundrum, as many blockchain use cases need to stay informed about external events to trigger the execution of smart contracts. For example, financial contracts need market data, insurance contracts need IoT data, and gaming applications need provable randomness.
Not only do smart contracts need off-chain connection, but they need that connection to be as secure as the underlying blockchain. Hence, there needs to be a way for external data to be fed into blockchains in a secure and reliable manner. This is widely referred to as the oracle problem, and Chainlink is leading the effort in making integrating off-chain data, such as price feeds, simple, yet secure for decentralized applications.
Chainlink relies on node operators providing streams of data to the network from external sources. These Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle networks are live on the Ethereum mainnet with additional plans to become blockchain agnostic over time. At the moment node operators are vetted by the Chainlink team to maintain Sybil resistance in the early stages of the network. A staking incentive model is in the works that will allow LINK holders to stake their tokens with trustworthy node operators. This will help create a permissionless, decentralized network focused on reliably providing accurate data to be consumed by blockchain applications.
We have valuable experience in working with networks that rely on price oracles. The Terra stablecoin protocol allows anyone to exchange their stablecoins with the network’s native staking token Luna through an automated market maker. The Terra community has implemented an incentivized, stake-based oracle protocol in which validators provide price data on-chain in frequent time intervals. While this approach may be suitable for some large applications and networks; it appears that a general, customizable solution that works across blockchains and applications will be more scalable, reliable, and ultimately trustworthy, if designed with the proper incentives.
Following Chainlink’s progress over the last couple of months, it is our belief that the protocol has a good chance of becoming the standard for providing off-chain data to blockchain applications. Our thesis is further supported by the transition of several major decentralized finance projects on Ethereum to the Chainlink network instead of running their own oracle implementations. Examples include Aave and Synthetix, which made this decision after their early price reference feed was exploited by a trader.
We are excited to join the Chainlink community to help make blockchain adoption for real-world applications a reality. We will be supporting the network with our infrastructure and knowledge of staking systems and look forward to publishing further content around Chainlink and the planned staking implementation in the future.
Chorus One is building validation and staking infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks.
We will offer staking for Chainlink when it goes live. You will be able to support our work and earn staking rewards by delegating LINK to our node.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. Chainlink is consistently selected as one of the top blockchain technologies by leading independent research firms such as Gartner. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to great companies like Google, Oracle, SWIFT, and many other large enterprises, as well as many of the world’s best smart contract projects/teams such as Web3/Polkadot, Synthetix, Loopring, Kaleido, OpenLaw, Reserve, and many more.
Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website, Twitter or Reddit. If you’re a developer, visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord.
We’re in the midst of a cambrian explosion of decentralized protocols. From peer-to-peer payments to non-state forms of money to decentralized organizational structures, blockchains are redefining human collaboration in the 21st century. But those new networks can’t rely on the enforcement of rules in the old, slow, fuzzy and nation-bound court system. Instead, they are embracing economic incentives and particularly the usage of cryptoassets as collateral.
At the forefront of this is Proof-of-Stake, which replaces the expensive mining process by using cryptoassets as collateral for enforcing consensus rules. In the last year, networks like Cosmos and Tezos have pushed Proof-of-Stake into the crypto mainstream. Today, we have ahead of us a wave of blockchain networks all launching based on the same design insight. To operate this infrastructure, a new industry of node operators has emerged. We went from theoretical protocols and academic papers to live networks with billions of dollars at stake. And even large exchanges like Coinbase and Binance are entering the fray and have begun offering staking to their customers.
But while it is clear that the Proof-of-Stake paradigm is upon us, it’s still very unclear how it will play out. When Satoshi created Bitcoin, he didn’t seem to have anticipated ASICs nor mining pools. Similarly, in the infinitely richer design space of Proof-of-Stake, we don’t know what the end state will be and what preconditions will lead to resilient, decentralized networks capable of sustaining censorship-resistance at scale.
One clear demand that is emerging is the ability to re-use and transfer staked collateral. If a user can borrow a stablecoin like Maker’s DAI against their interest-earning staked ATOMs, clearly those gain in value and utility. Similarly, the ability to transfer and sell tokens without going through an unbonding period has substantial value.
The centralized exchanges that have entered staking will easily be able to provide that and much more in their walled gardens. But in Proof-of-Stake, control over private keys means control over the consensus process. So can these networks sustain healthy communities and robust decentralization if token holders are driven to surrender custody to unlock additional capabilities and returns?
In the past six months, many approaches have been explored to unlock innovation around staked assets directly on-chain. These efforts can be subsumed under the term “ liquid staking”. One example of these efforts was built by Chorus One together with Sikka, when we implemented Delegation Vouchers as part of the Cosmos-SDK hackathon in Berlin. Since then, various other teams have risen to the challenge and came up with their own designs. Some examples include Everett, Stafi Protocol, Stake Capital DAO, and Staker DAO.
Today, we are proud to announce that we received support from the Interchain Foundation to form a working group and to produce a research report focused on approaches to liquid staking. The goal is to take a holistic look at the design space, evaluate the different approaches with respect to clear criteria and understand their impact on network security and sustainability. We will focus on aspects such as:
We will map out different paths for the future of Proof-of-Stake and hope to create a shared vision for how to ensure open innovation, sustainability and decentralization for Proof-of-Stake networks.
We’re inviting protocol designers, validators, token holders, and anyone else interested in working on this topic to join the working group and contribute to this crucial research and discussion. The publication of the final report is planned to happen by the end of April.
A core feature of the working group will be our bi-weekly community calls. Our first community call, which will serve as an introduction to the project, will take place January 15th at 5pm CET. During this call, you will be able to find out more about our plans and learn how to contribute. Sign up here to for the calendar invite to this first working group call.
In the meantime, you can find the Liquid Staking Working Group on Telegram and Github ( https://github.com/ChorusOne/liquid-staking), where we already began to gather relevant material. We want to thank the Interchain Foundation for realizing the importance of this topic and hope that our research will help inform stakeholders and improve Proof-of-Stake protocol design.
Your Chorus One Team
About Chorus One
Chorus One is operating validation infrastructure and staking services for Proof-of-Stake networks.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
About Interchain Foundation
The ICF is a Swiss foundation funding and pushing the frontiers of blockchain-related infrastructure.
Website: https://interchain.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/interchain_io
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on January 9, 2020.
When Kyle Samani first arrived on the crypto scene many were sceptical of this entrepreneur-turned-hedge-fund-manager. Kyle’s unique Crypto Twitter style made him hard to ignore. He would often throw out difficult to answer questions or make provocative statements of “fact”, which seemed designed to trigger the crypto idealists. In the process the community would fight out the ideas, and everyone gained more insight into the issues. Twitter became his crowd-sourced research tool. Later Multicoin built out a great research team to augment the crowd-sourced research, which lead to great insights we can see in their published research.
Since then, Kyle and Tushar have proved to be two of the hardest working fund managers in crypto. Their research has been excellent. Their focus on real business value and on identifying genuine customer needs has been a welcome relief in a sea of idealistic visions. Their deep strategic analysis of how this plays out has been second to none. So it was with great pleasure that we sat down with Kyle to explore the Multicoin mega theses on our podcast. Below are my five key takeaways.
While it’s early days in crypto, it will be hard for new players to get traction in DeFi. Binance is moving quickly in many different areas. They are leveraging their customer base to launch new products. So only new players who can build highly effective customer acquisition funnels will have a chance of competing. The best strategy for new entrants is a novel go-to-market focused on a narrowly defined customer segment, e.g. Bakkt super high-end institutional, FTX in derivatives.
A different approach is to leverage an existing distribution advantage. There are many products that already have millions of users that could leverage this to launch new crypto services. Social networks like Reddit or fintech upstarts can pivot into crypto in this way. Facebook / Libra is the obvious example here. What’s interesting here is that this option is open to any major corporation who is brave enough to take on the regulatory risk and who can overcome the innovator’s dilemma.
It’s hard to see how DeFi aggregators can create network effects. As a thin layer on top of other protocols (Compound, Maker etc.) it seems clear that the protocols have network effects but the UI layer does not. It will be interesting to see if any aggregation service can find a way to build in their own network effects. But maybe this feeds in (2) above: potentially the best strategy is to build a network effect elsewhere and then leverage that to resell DeFi services to a captive audience.
Samani argues (pretty convincingly) that the Cosmos vision of thousands of self-sovereign blockchains may be too complex to achieve. Do developers really want to build their own blockchains or would they prefer to focus on building services? Can the complexities of cross-chain messaging ever we abstracted away? Can all of these chains be secured? It seems like a concerted effort to build out shared security on Cosmos would be a meaningful first step to address this, followed by great libraries for building cross-chain dapps.
So maybe the future isn’t thousands of inter-operating chains. And if we haven’t solved the interchain complexity, then we probably haven’t solved the complexity of sharded chains either (as it’s pretty much the same problem).
One outcome is that Ethereum 2.0 wins out and retains its dominance. A second potential answer: Solana takes over from Ethereum as the platform of choice.
If it delivers on it’s promise, then we will get tens of thousands of transactions per second, with sub-second block times and very cheap fees. It could feasibly meet the needs of almost all use cases. And it can get faster — GPU cores are doubling every 18 months and so is bandwidth, so Solana validators could add more capacity at any time.
With the Ethereum 2.0 release looking so far away, will Solana have an opportunity to take over? Instead of an interchain world, could we see a return to a single chain dominating the space?
While we may not agree with all of what Kyle has to say, there is no doubt that he has thought deeply about all of these issues and his arguments are well reasoned.
We hope you enjoy the podcast: https://chorusone.libsyn.com/episode-25
The performance and security of a blockchain is determined by the nodes operating it. A conventional blockchain is limited by the transactional processing power of a single node in the network. To circumvent this limitation, most protocol designers come up with complex schemes to distribute work across a subset of nodes in the system. This is what we refer to as sharding. Sharding is a complex problem statement that requires well-thought out mechanisms to ensure safety and usability, especially with respect to composability of applications.
There is one team that stands out by taking a different approach to scaling a layer-1 blockchain network: Solana. Instead of trying to scale by adding more nodes, subsetting them across different blockchains, and then trying to economically link them together into one system, Solana is radically optimizing the performance of a single node on one chain (#NoSharding).
The results of this approach are astonishing: in a cluster with nodes running high-performance GPU-based validation hardware, Solana can achieve a throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second on a single, composable, blockchain!
Sustaining this type of performance in a production environment relies on more than low-level optimization and high-end hardware. Node operators need to be able to continuously operate- even in adversarial settings-both to ensure the network stays performant, and to maximize their rewards for maintaining the blockchain.
One way to achieve this is to rely on network engineers to troubleshoot nodes in case they go down for whatever reason. This solution comes with a host of problems and is putting pressure on individuals. This makes it not well-suited for an environment seeking to be the base layer of a new financial system. Imagine getting a call at night and having to manually fix a machine that is handling large amounts of value, knowing that a mistake can become extremely costly, even catastrophic.
Another approach is to institute an automated failover system consisting of multiple nodes communicating and deciding internally which of them gets to sign blocks. Such a design comes with its own challenges, especially around ensuring that no blocks are accidentally double-signed, which would lead to large slashing penalties. So far only a very small group of teams have explored this design space, e.g. Certus One and Chorus One.
With support from the Solana team, Chorus One has dedicated resources to build and maintain software to provide high availability validation tailored to the Solana network: Solana StrongGate.
StrongGate allows validators on Solana to run redundant infrastructure with a focus on protecting against accidental double-signing. StrongGate works by using the Solana blockchain as a detection mechanism and a highly available, strongly consistent database as a resolution mechanism to determine which of the validator nodes gets to sign blocks.
Watch Chorus One’s Meher Roy present StrongGate at the first SolCon in Osaka, Japan for a detailed breakdown of the design and rationale:
We will soon share the repo and more information on how to use StrongGate for your Solana validator operation. We’d like to thank Solana for their support and we are looking forward to continuing to contribute our part to build and operate the web scale blockchain that the world deserves!
Chorus One is building validation and staking infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks.
We will offer staking on the Solana blockchain. You can support our work and earn staking rewards by delegating to our validator node.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
Solana is a web-scale blockchain with speeds up to 50,000 tps powered by Proof of History.
Website: https://solana.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana
Telegram: https://t.me/solanaio
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on November 15, 2019.
