‘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.
Juno is a fair-launch and interoperable smart contract network launching as a Hub in the Cosmos ecosystem. The goal of Juno is to relieve the computation burden of smart contracts from the Cosmos Hub itself, so the Cosmos Hub can specialise in core activities that strengthen the wider Cosmos ecosystem, such as security. Juno Hub acts as an alternate network that developers can use to develop smart contracts that are programmed in either Rust or Go, and then compiled to CosmWASM. A core element of Juno is the interoperability aspect, whereby developers can be guaranteed that any smart contract they develop in Juno can be ported to any other IBC-compatible Cosmos network.
In many ways, Juno enables Cosmos Hub to remain credibly neutral whilst mitigating typical L1 obstacles such as network congestion and high gas fees. Juno also shares a similar set of stakeholders to Cosmos, so much so that it has decided to airdrop 47% of the token supply to ATOM holders. The airdrop aligns incentives with builders to entice them to develop secure smart contracts on Juno and be rewarded for it.
Juno is built using Cosmos SDK. Users can delegate their $JUNO to Chorus One using a wallet, such as Keplr.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators is determined by the amount of staking tokens ($JUNO) bonded and/or delegated as collateral.
JUNO Inflation: 40% annual inflation in year 1 descending to 8% annual inflation to year 5. Descending to 1% in years 5–12.
Reward Rate: Rewards from staking JUNO 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.
Compounding Returns: You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns.
On October 7th, we will be sunsetting Anthem, a dashboard that allows users to track and manage their Celo, Oasis, and (before cosmoshub-4) Cosmos portfolios. This means that you will no longer be able to connect your Ledger or any address on the supported networks with Anthem and view your dashboard.
The core motivation to build Anthem arose from our own needs as a staking provider to allow delegators to see and track their historical staking rewards on proof-of-stake (PoS) networks. We started with support for the Cosmos Hub to get access to historical staking return data and gradually expanded to Celo and Oasis successfully.
Anthem’s features had a multitude of benefits from being able to track your portfolio day-to-day to staking on the supported networks from a Ledger device, to being able to record your revenues for accounting and taxation purposes by exporting your account data as a CSV file. One could choose different base fiat currencies and even different display languages including Chinese, German, Korean and Spanish.
We have decided to sunset Anthem as we are unable to fit this product within our larger organizational objectives. We have not been able to give Anthem the attention to deliver a product that matches the quality of what we as Chorus One want to provide to the community.
We are immensely grateful to all the users for using Anthem and providing valuable feedback over the years. We are also grateful for the support received from the Celo and Oasis Foundations. We will remain an active validator on both the Oasis and Celo networks and continue to serve our delegators through secure and available nodes. We are going to continue to focus on advancing the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem by providing our highly available and secure infrastructure, by doing work on interoperability (e.g. Celo <> Cosmos IBC), liquid staking (e.g. Lido for Solana), and through other initiatives.
In case of any questions, you may contact us at support@chorus.one or through the Intercom plugin on our website.
Your funds are completely safe. Chorus One is still a validator on both Celo and Oasis and you can stake your tokens with us.
There is NO impact on the users of Anthem. Your funds are completely safe! Your stake and tokens are still completely accessible and you don’t need to perform any transactions (be wary of folks claiming otherwise). Anthem was just a frontend to the Celo and Oasis blockchains. In fact Chorus One is still a validator on both Celo and Oasis and you can stake your tokens with us. The only change is that you will have to stake using alternate wallets.
There are alternative tools for both supported networks Celo and Oasis. Simply connect your Ledger to one of the following alternative wallets.
Oasis recently announced the launch of their web wallet and their Chrome browser extension as well. You can use the web wallet to
For Celo, we recommend using the official Celo Wallet app, which supports most of the features Anthem had (plus a variety of additional ones). In addition, Celo block explorers are helpful to observe your portfolio and the network itself
Chorus One is offering staking services and building protocols and tools to advance the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
Newsletter: https://substack.chorusone.com
Yesterday, Lido for Solana went live on Solana mainnet. In about 24 hours since launch, around $7m worth of SOL have already been staked with Lido by over 400 accounts.
Now that these stakers have unlocked all this liquidity, the biggest need of the hour is to enable them to utilize it in DeFi protocols.
We understand that and we’re thrilled to announce that we are live on two AMMs — Saber and Raydium.
Saber, the leading cross-chain stablecoin and wrapped assets exchange on Solana, has launched the stSOL/SOL pool currently holding roughly $300,000 in liquidity.
Raydium, an automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain which leverages the central order book of the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX), have launched a first stablecoin pool with stSOL
In the near future, another stSOL liquidity pool with an ETH pair will be launched on Raydium.
Raydium’s AMM aggregates Serum’s central limit order book, meaning that pools have access to all order flow and liquidity on Serum. For stSOL the following two markets exist on Serum:
In addition to these integrations, we are working with Mercurial Finance to go live with a stSOL/SOL pool that will use our internal price oracle to create a maximally efficient liquidity pool.
Keep a lookout for this and further upcoming integrations at https://chorus.one/products/liquid-staking
