2021 was an incredible year for Proof-of-Stake. As a major staking provider, we are keen to explore new ways to give back to our delegator community that enables us to pursue our mission to advance the staking ecosystem. For this reason, we decided to initiate the first NFT airdrop to our Solana delegators (see also the official announcement post covering the basics and our reasoning for the ‘Reaction’ drop). In this post, we want to expand on our collaboration with CoherenceNFT going deeper into the background of this initiative and on how our snapshot of on-chain data is impacting the generated art.
After Uniswap’s initial $UNI airdrop, there have been many further iterations to reward initial users and to bootstrap a community of dedicated users. While some airdrops currently try to form a community based on on-chain activity without much of a product (see $SOS and $GAS), others are trying to bring valuable users into their communities; this can especially be seen in the Cosmos ecosystem. Here, Osmosis led the way by airdropping a large portion of tokens to valuable Cosmos community members, an example many others are following, a recent ambitious example being the Evmos Rektdrop. As a validator, we found ourselves in a slightly different situation. We already have a sizable community of delegators earning rewards on their staked assets with us and we wanted to give them something unique to thank them for their support while working towards a larger goal.
We realised that NFTs could serve as a gateway for our ambitions to form an engaged community enabling us to reward our most valued supporters in a crypto-native way. Ultimately, we aim to weave NFTs — including the Reaction drop — into our products and services in creative ways. Stay tuned and hold onto your Reaction NFTs to get access to unique benefits as we explore the possibilities enabled by them!
We decided to begin in the Solana ecosystem, to which we attribute a lot of our success and which has a flourishing NFT ecosystem and low fees; uniquely enabling our initial concept: a large-scale NFT airdrop that is using on-chain data to create art with differing rarities based on our delegators’ profiles. We took a snapshot of the stake accounts delegated to the Chorus One public validator on Dec 8th, set a threshold for delegations of above 0.1 SOL, and aggregated addresses with multiple stake accounts. This resulted in 3,600 unique NFTs which we — in collaboration with CoherenceNFT — decided to further break down into 9 rarities. The NFTs differ in qualities depending on their rarity. This applies to the colours used, which range from new stakers which are coloured in Chorus One greens, to medium duration stakers that are coloured in Solana’s brand colours, to long-term stakers that receive a mix of both. In a similar fashion, the thickness of the lines used in the artworks depends on the amount of stake going from thin for lower amounts of stake to thick for large stakers. The chosen parameters resulted in the distribution illustrated in the image below.
Conclusion
We are thrilled to have started our foray into NFTs and are looking forward to expanding this effort and engaging with various other web3 tools complementing our services. Stay in the loop by jumping onto our Discord, Telegram or showing us your NFTs on Twitter. And while you do that, why not consider staking with us too? Who knows, you could lay your hands on another surprise NFT in the future!
We want to thank CoherenceNFT for this collaboration and are looking forward to engaging with other artists and projects in the NFT space in the future!
I’m excited to work with Chorus One to grow the Solana NFT community by creating an asset to expand the benefits offered to Chorus One stakers. More companies entering the NFT space are making NFT utility and adoption a reality. I’m hoping a broader and more diverse set of businesses and creators are inspired by this to make use of blockchains as a way to fulfil their visions. From a creative point of view, it was really challenging and inspiring to use a new creative mode, where I had to design in advance to reward different ranges of users according to the desired characteristics of the Chorus One team
CoherenceNFT
Today, we are excited to announce that we are airdropping 3600 NFTs to all of our Solana delegators that stake more than 0.1 SOL with us. We have teamed up with CoherenceNFT to work on Chorus One’s first-ever venture into NFTs. Solana addresses that are eligible for the airdrop can be found here. We took a snapshot of all delegators that stake more than 0.1 SOL with us on 08-Dec-2021 at 10:58:37 AM UTC.
To the best of our knowledge, ‘Reaction’ is the first-ever large-scale validator NFT drop. We thought surprising our Solana delegators with a gift in the form of NFTs would be the perfect start to the new year.
We decided to drop Chorus One NFTs to reward different clusters of delegators that have chosen to stake with us since the inception of Solana Mainnet-Beta. These NFTs will be used to give their holders an on-chain identity. In 2022, we will use these identities to personalise our validator services via a variety of reward tiers. We will be giving our delegator community exclusive utility related to Chorus One’s services and beyond. In future, we will have another post outlining how NFT rarities were determined and the impact rarities have on utility.
For those who are reading this and wondering why we’re only rewarding our Solana delegators - don’t worry as our NFT strategy will be multi-chain! We have decided to reward our delegator community on Solana first because it is our most important network that also happens to be the home of a vibrant NFT community. However, we have active plans to reward delegators on other networks with NFTs in the near future as we want to ensure as many of our delegators as possible are rewarded for choosing to stake their assets with us. It is also not too late to stake SOL with us on Solana, as it’s likely that we will continue future NFT drops for our Solana delegators — we want to reward newcomers too!
The drop of ‘Reaction’ is just the beginning of our web3 strategy. We are looking forward to experimenting with web3 and NFTs by making use of on-chain data in ways never done before by a staking provider. For example, we have just announced a collaboration with Portals, a metaverse in the Solana ecosystem. Initiatives like this will play an integral part in supporting our mission to advance the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem by helping to get people interested in securing decentralized networks such as Solana.
Vega is a protocol that lets users create and trade derivative financial products. The goal of Vega is to spawn new markets with innovative financial products created by users. Currently, the creation and consumption of derivatives is limited to very few users in certain markets, but Vega aims to expand the access of these products to underbanked users who would otherwise be excluded from these markets. Vega aims to do this by providing a comprehensive and decentralized financial suite where users can build out these derivatives in permissionless and non-custodial manner.
This brings forward two questions: How do people create markets on Vega? And what sets Vega apart from other blockchain based derivative trading platforms?
To answer the first question, Vega offers a custom made smart product language which provides a simple toolkit with economic primitives for users to create their markets. There is also a risk model that comes with this toolkit that manages and quantifies risk for leveraged trades and markets, this brings financial security to permissionless market creation. Stakers of Vega will have to approve every market that goes out through governance before it is launched.
Apart from straightforward market creation, Vega sets itself apart by having a wide range of collateral assets from all major blockchain ecosystems; and having innovative liquidity incentives for market creation. For every market created, there has to be market makers providing liquidity. Vega has a dynamic model for fees on each market based on the amount of liquidity of the market, thus incentivizing market makers to provide liquidity to under-provided markets.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators is determined by the amount of staking tokens (VEGA) bonded as collateral. There is a reward cap in place that lowers rewards for validators controlling more than 20% of the network’s stake.
Reward Rate: Rewards from staking VEGA will vary depending on the amount of VEGA tokens distributed as rewards and total amount of tokens that are staked at a given time.
Chorus Commission: 11.7% (initial network-wide Vega commission)
Withdrawal Delay: After withdrawing, your staked funds will only become accessible in the following epoch (targeted to be 24h on Vega). When starting to stake, your stake will become active in the upcoming epoch, i.e. up to 24h after your transaction went through.
Slashing: In the immediate term, there are no plans to implement slashing on Vega.
Re-Staking: Rewards in VEGA are being distributed every 3 epochs (days). You will need to re-stake rewards with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns.
Vega Explorer:
https://token.vega.xyz/staking
Vega Restricted Mainnet Announcement: https://blog.vega.xyz/what-to-expect-from-restricted-mainnet-616086d9fdaf
Vega Staking Guide:
https://blog.vega.xyz/staking-on-vega-17f22113e3df
‘Akash’ translating to sky/open space in Sanskrit is just that: a decentralized, open source, cloud platform that aims to challenge the oligopoly of Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in the $286 billion cloud computing market. It does this by creating a marketplace, where cloud providers (providers) can lease their computing power to users (tenants). Akash refers to this marketplace as the ‘Airbnb of server hosting’.
The Akash marketplace functions by conducting reverse auctions wherein the tenant creates orders for computing power, and providers bid on these orders. When the tenant chooses a provider, they create a lease. After this, the user deploys a Docker container on the Akash Container Platform, which is a deployment platform for hosting and managing containers. Here, users can run any cloud native application and access a range of cloud management services like Kubernetes. The Akash token is used as the standard for payment of these leases.
The selling point and what we think makes Akash a serious candidate for disruption in the gargantuan cloud computing industry is its cost. Currently, hosting on Akash costs a third of what it does to do so on AWS, Azure and GCP. The reason for this is that Akash sources their computing power from unutilized capacity of data centres, that would otherwise sit idle. The reverse auction mechanism also helps in lowering prices. This tool compares the current price of the big three to Akash.
If Akash can keep its costs low and gain traction it has the potential to compete with some of the biggest cloud providers and even a small market share gain would mean dramatic usage for the network. Akash also presents an opportunity for Web 3 and 2 applications alike to decentralize a huge point of centralization, which is cloud storage.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators is determined by the amount of staking tokens (AKT) bonded as collateral.
AKT Inflation: 54% at genesis. Inflation rate reduces everyday and halves every 3.75 years.
Reward Rate: Rewards from staking AKT will vary depending on the inflation and total amount of tokens that are staked at a given time. Learn more about the details of staking reward rates for chains built using Cosmos SDK here.
Chorus Commission: 8%
Withdrawal Delay: After withdrawing, your staked funds will only become accessible after the unbonding period (usually 21 days) has passed.
Slashing: You can get slashed (loss funds) in case the validator you are delegated to commits an offense. Make sure to do due diligence to minimize this risk.
Re-Staking: You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns.
