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Urbit
Why Web3 Needs Urbit
Part 1 of our deep-dive on Urbit
September 1, 2022
5 min read

Urbit has gained some renown among crypto enthusiasts in recent years as an ambitious and compelling use case of NFTs to power a novel computing system and network. The technical stack that Urbit has developed is impressive and far-reaching, but some criticize its perceived opacity and lack of a precise use-case. If your first impression of Urbit came from a deep-dive into the intricacies of the OS, network, and identity system, you might be left wondering what Urbit’s specific use case even is. Is there a problem Urbit is trying to solve, or is it all just a severe case of NIH syndrome?

The reality is that there is a problem that Urbit solves, and it’s a complex enough problem that it won’t be obvious to most people, but it’s a deep and pernicious enough problem that it affects everyone using the internet. A rudimentary understanding of Urbit’s problem space can be gained from this tweet from Philip Monk, CTO of Tlon, the primary company driving Urbit development. Urbit is a solution to deep technical limitations of the internet that prevent it from being used the way it should: as a permissionless peer-to-peer network that gives freedom and responsibility to its users.

If this explanation feels under-explored, read on for a deep dive into the core value proposition from Urbit to users and developers alike. But before we begin, we should clarify a basic philosophical understanding of Web3.

Decentralization vs. Ownership

“Decentralization” is a commonly used buzzword in Web3 and elsewhere, with much said about new companies whose product is to decentralize some aspect of digital experience. Because of the enormous financial success of Bitcoin and other DeFi technologies, a case can be made that merely decentralizing a product is a sufficient advantage that consumers will flock to it. But this is a poor understanding of what consumers value in crypto, and thereby a flawed approach to Web3’s path to victory.

Bitcoin was, of course, not the first decentralized digital currency ever invented. E-Cash and Bit Gold were predecessors to Bitcoin in this domain, and they each used cryptography-powered precursors to blockchains to make digital payments permissionless. What made Bitcoin more successful than its predecessors is not solely that it was more decentralized (although in some cases it was), but that it was much more secure. The combination of decentralization and security gave Bitcoin holders ownership that they could rely on, and that went on to make it a successful product.

Decentralization is best understood as a special case of ownership, where trusted third parties in central control of a product reduce the user’s intuition that they own the product they use. Merely decentralizing a component of a product does not necessarily compel an end-user to use it, but to some degree, every end-user wants to own their tools if they can.

That’s all to say that Web3’s critics are correct that decentralization itself is not a product. However, decentralization can be a critical component of ownership, and ownership is a critical component of what makes Urbit a compelling product to end-users. Urbit is decentralized, but not for decentralization’s sake. Urbit is “yours forever” and that requires it to have many attributes, including permanence, security, and of course, decentralization.

The Value Proposition of Web3

The story and namesake of “Web3” is perhaps best summarized by this article on Ethereum’s website, which goes through the stages of the internet’s development and shows how a new, blockchain-powered paradigm can shift the balance of power and take ownership from giant tech corporations and give it back to users.

As is well understood by visionaries of a decentralized web, the internet of the early 1990’s was idealized as a permissionless space in which everyone had a voice and could make their own mark on the world by learning and using a set of open protocols that did not discriminate on who could operate them. The early internet was a pluralistic “Wild West” of custom-built websites and services, and while the distribution of activity was anything but equal, there was little resembling a monopoly on most use cases. Idealists saw this web as the beginning of a new flowering of culture and technology, where mass media would become obsolete in comparison to an open field where undiscovered talent could win hearts and minds by their own bootstraps.

As the internet’s ecosystem developed, the idealists only partially got their wish. The internet did become a phenomenal landscape for small contributors to make a big impact, but only under the patronage of monolithic platforms. Somewhere along the way, the expectation that users would have actually owned their means of communication was subverted. As it turned out, running infrastructure and operating servers is boring and hard. End-users needed powerful platforms to obfuscate the complexity of the tech stack, and were willing to give up their ownership in exchange for an approachable user interface.

Detractors and sympathizers alike refer to the early, pluralistic internet as “Web1” and the modern, centralized internet as “Web2”. In accordance with this scheme, the hypothesized successor paradigm of the Internet is called “Web3”.

Proponents of Web3 see in blockchain technology an opportunity for a new phase of development that corrects this flaw by taking the responsibilities of Web2 infrastructure and offloading them to consensus networks that are owned by everyone and no-one. Rather than private infrastructure managed by giant corporations, web services can use public infrastructure managed by the community, and the power structure of the internet can thereby resemble the same fair and open field that the Web1 idealists envisioned, while offering an equal or better user experience to Web2.

The Advantages and Limitations of Blockchains

Blockchains are a promising technology for secure digital ownership by providing one immeasurably valuable feature to its users: trustless consensus on data. By nature, applications must rely on a single source of truth for a dataset in order to be sensible to the developer and the user. In order to obviate the need for a trusted third party to secure and manage this data, consensus must be reached across a network on what is true. This problem is best summarized by the infamous Byzantine generals problem, to which blockchains offer a reasonable solution.

Blockchains also offer another potential way to revolutionize software by offering developers the ability to create new, scarce assets ex nihilo. By allowing investors to speculate on these spawned assets, free and open source software finds a new financial model where code can be given away to the community without thankless developers having nothing to show for their contributions. Given the scope of work required to make systems that are sensible to everyday users, this advantage is truly invaluable.

However, the aforementioned Byzantine fault tolerance comes at a cost in blockchains. Consensus over a network offers a better assurance of ownership to users, but duplicates work that, in the centralized case, only needs to be performed once. The inevitable tradeoff between ownership and efficiency in blockchain networks is best summarized by Vitalik Buterin’s scalability trilemma, which shows that the two most valuable components of blockchains are fundamentally at odds with a third attribute that powerful systems seek to maximize, which is efficiency.

Solutions exist which extend blockchain capabilities in all three domains, so the trilemma is not completely binding. But to the degree that the trilemma is unsolved, scalability constraints manifest themselves in gas fees, which make it costly to write transactions to any chain that is uncompromising on secure decentralization. Costly writes are an anti-feature that make it difficult to excite end-users, and so this limitation threatens the ability of blockchains to obviate monopolies powered by Web2 infrastructure.

Privacy and latency are also notable challenges in a blockchain environment. Infrastructure that, by default, gives read access to everyone and only adds new data at set intervals, forms a limiting use case for many applications that are expected to be responsive and permissioned. Like the scalability problem, these problems have prospective solutions, but still represent technical hurdles for developers to grapple with, that Web2 solutions can simply centralize away. There are several other hurdles of this type that would deserve exploration in deeper dive.

These limitations to blockchain-based infrastructure have, to some degree, already been explored in other places, and may one day each find satisfactory solutions. But one under-explored limitation is the repeated reliance of Web3 applications on trust in order to access blockchain data. This isn’t even necessarily a hard limitation in blockchains as a tool, but can be observed as a pattern in the industry.

Uniswap, for example, is served from a specific domain name, and consumers implicitly trust that domain name with their tokens. MetaMask is a ubiquitous non-custodial Ethereum wallet, but uses hard-coded proprietary endpoints to access on-chain data. OpenSea, despite its name, does not even claim to be permissionless — it’s explicitly a custodial service with administrators to intervene if something goes wrong.

These hallmarks of the Web3 ecosystem are all fueled by a cultural environment that eschews centralization and prioritizes ownership, and yet find themselves making similar compromises to Web2 companies that promise to democratize the ability for people to express themselves. Rather than creating a system that is thoroughly trustless, some trust is inserted into the equation in order to iron out the difficulties of operating permissionless systems, whether blockchain networks or other peer-to-peer protocols.

Again in Web3 as in Web2, complexity is hidden from the user by an interface that achieves a level of human-comprehensibility by offloading user choice to the provider. There are many exceptions, just as in the Web2 era there were alternatives to centralized services that could be used, but were not mainstream. But there is a reason why the choices that make compromises to user ownership tend to win in this environment, and it’s clear that the reason is not lack of access to blockchains as a tool.

It’s The Servers, Stupid

Despite countless efforts to make user-owned applications and networks reliant solely on peers, the role of nodes in any solution is costly to discount. Solutions that give primacy to peers still run nodes to pick up the slack caused by the intermittency of peers. In the Web3 world, offloading all node work to blockchains manifests itself in the cost of writes and the need to obfuscate the gas expense. The need for servers did not go away with blockchains, but only made itself manifest in new ways. Knowing this, the question of a user-owned internet returns to its old question: how can we create a world where each user runs a node?

The underlying need for user-owned servers is not breaking news to those familiar with the history of the internet. In the idealistic days of the early web, user-owned servers were simply a given — as applications became easier to use, always-connected services would follow suit, and the internet of the future would be a patchwork of independent personal servers hosting whichever services were important to the user. In this way, the developments of both Web2 and Web3 technologies can be seen as an adjustment made in response to the failure of personal servers to thrive in the consumer market.

This creates an ugly combination of two hard facts that are discouraging to reconcile, yet both so powerfully true that all previous attempts to engineer around them have failed:
  1. You cannot have a user-owned internet without personal servers.
  2. Consumers do not want personal servers.

We have made a case for why blockchains cannot provide an answer to the former problem. But do blockchains, and other advancements in computing, have anything to say about the latter?

The Marketplace of User-Owned Infrastructure

One interesting case to consider in the landscape of user-owned servers is the omnipresence of personal routers. A router has much in common with a server from a consumer’s point of view: it’s a black box that sits somewhere out of the way. It needs to always be powered on and connected to a network, and you will find out quickly if it’s been unplugged. If it malfunctions, getting it working again is a top priority. In order to do your business, you have to connect to it — what exactly it’s doing is not always clear to the end-user, but that it’s important is well-understood.

The personal router is a successful consumer product because it satisfies three basic conditions:
  • It’s valuable. It is needed in order to access a network, and that network has value.
  • It’s low maintenance. A reboot is required once or twice a year at most.
  • It’s opaque. A user does not need to understand it in order to use it proficiently.

Find a personal server that meets all three of these conditions, and we can begin to imagine a new computing paradigm. In practice, Unix servers typically fail on all three, and where they succeed in one domain, they typically compromise on at least one of the others.

A general study of successful consumer products is also helpful in understanding how and why personal servers failed in the market. This article by Lane Rettig makes a concise case for the viability of tools in the marketplace:

“What the tools we rely on the most heavily have in common is that they’re all simple, durable, and ours.” ~ Lane Rettig

While personal routers do not always satisfy the property of ownership, one can see how their value proposition fits neatly into this model. Unix servers, on the other hand, have only ownership to offer. While they are arguably simple from a highly technical point of view, none of this simplicity is legible to the non-technical user. And their durability is certainly not under question by professionals who rely on them, but non-professionals are almost universally unable to replicate that impression.

But why is Unix in particular under question? The answer is, there is not much else to offer consumers in the way of personal servers. Other solutions exist or have existed, but mostly in the business domain, and mostly targeted at professionals. Servers targeted at tinkerers and privacy advocates have seen some success, but even in that market, Unix is almost always the backbone of their software stack. This may shed significant light on the failure of personal servers in the marketplace: no fully capable operating system has been constructed with the personal server use-case in mind, except for various implementations of Unix. Unix, of course, was never designed for everyday consumers.

Enter Urbit

Urbit is a novel software stack, with its own OS, network, and identity system, built de nihilo from elementary primitives. The OS, as the centerpiece of the system, aims to fulfill the use case of a personal server that is simple, durable, and yours. Urbit uses many theoretical advancements in software engineering to achieve this outcome, most notably determinism, referential transparency, and cryptography.

At the risk of oversimplifying, these advancements can be said to roughly map to the qualities needed to meet the expectations of consumers:
  • Determinism makes Urbit simple. It is always computing one function, no matter the case.
  • Referential transparency makes Urbit durable. All erroneous behavior can and should be tracked down and eliminated by its developers.
  • Cryptography makes Urbit yours. Your ownership of your Urbit is as secure as your private key, no more and no less.

Much remains to be said about the innovations made to create a general purpose server that feels more like a mechanical clock than a fighter jet cockpit, and a deep dive into Urbit’s architecture is recommended to engineers who want to understand the system at more than a superficial level. But for our purposes, it’s also worth taking a glance at our earlier example of the personal router to examine how Urbit compares.

Urbit is as valuable as the personal router. The end-user’s access to the internet is mediated by their router, and the internet is an invaluable ecosystem of force-multiplying services. The Urbit network, similarly, can fulfill the same potential. By adding powerful primitives and a unified back-end to the protocol by which individual Urbit nodes communicate, Urbit’s network promises to lay the foundation for networked applications that can compete with, and even exceed, the services provided on the modern internet.

Urbit is as low maintenance as the personal router. It is designed to never reach an unrecoverable state, and even reboots should never be necessary. The commitment to minimalism and determinism at every turn has paid dividends for Urbit’s developers, and while it cannot be called “zero maintenance” yet, the path to that milestone today yields more known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

Urbit is as opaque as the personal router. The underlying architecture never shows itself to the end-user. To the degree that it has an interface, this interface is a friendly webpage that mirrors the homepage of a mobile OS. Developers can fork its code or play with the internals however they please, but should never need to look at the terminal to use it or its applications. Just like in the case of the router, a connection needs to be established so that services can be made available, and this intuition will be all the end-user needs to know to proficiently use their Urbit.

While serving primarily as a gateway into Urbit’s network, an Urbit server can do much more than merely route packets. As a general-purpose computer on a peer-to-peer network, Urbit can act as a much-needed backbone to user-owned applications that demand nothing more than code from developers. The guarantees of Urbit’s networking primitives, combined with the assumption that all peers run nodes, makes it possible to deliver cutting edge social applications consisting of only two elements: a protocol and an interface. This leads to limitless possibilities for developers, who previously needed to duplicate massive amounts of work and run their own servers in order to deliver software that satisfies users.

Urbit also benefits both users and developers by consolidating data to where it belongs: in a unified environment that the user owns. Developers need not assume the liability of user data residing on their own infrastructure, and users need not trust developers with their private information. And in the case of creating integrations between services, there is no chasm of APIs and terms of service to bridge between: all of the user’s data is in the same place, speaking the same language. The only chasm between two services is the user’s permission to share data between them.

Prior examples show that this level of added value is necessary to put ownership in the hands of users: a sensible, lightweight product that asks no compromises in terms of UX, while giving full control to the owner.

Web3 Revisited

While it is difficult to overstate the centrality of personal servers to the problems Web3 aims to remediate, there remains a need for applications that interface between end-users and blockchains. Even more than this, a growing industry is responsible for developing middleware in Web3, both between different blockchains and between a given blockchain and the real world. Urbit offers solutions in both of these domains, in the bleeding edge industry of blockchain development on Urbit.

Some aspects of Urbit’s natural affinity for blockchains are already well-understood. Azimuth, for example, which serves as Urbit’s identity system and PKI, is implemented as a Solidity contract on Ethereum. Furthermore, the basic problem of association between names and public keys can be considered solved on Urbit, as name-key associations are already an assumed part of the system, and already integrated into Urbit’s Bitcoin application. Already on Urbit, you can natively send and receive BTC with other Urbit users with no need to keep records of their addresses.

Other faults in Web3 are addressed by the mere lack of any need to compromise on user-owned architecture. dApps on Urbit, for example, are truly dApps — they are sent to the user’s server upon installation, and run locally. API layers and trust bottlenecks between Web3 applications and blockchains are not needed if blockchains are built on Urbit, as the network provides a sensible common language for all applications, even if they are hosted on different servers. And above all, the most important factor in keeping blockchains decentralized is user-run validators, which can be considered no different from any other application on a robust and user-friendly personal server.

Even beyond this, Urbit promises to add even more value to Web3 in the domain of global integration. The need for middleware to connect components on-and-off the chain is said by some in the Urbit community to be a symptom of a deeper problem: the lack of a sensible, unified execution environment shared between applications. In summary, crypto needs an OS, and Urbit can be that OS.

The accelerating power of crypto on an OS that speaks its native tongue is much discussed and speculated on in the Urbit community. Uqbar, the first blockchain native to Urbit’s network, aims to obviate any need for middleware by using Urbit as a general purpose orchestrator to synchronize data between disparate components, whether blockchains or ordinary local state. Their solution uses zero-knowledge proofs, sharding, and other bleeding edge technologies to create a crypto ecosystem on Urbit that can not only compete with the best of the L1s elsewhere, but add features that prove indisputably that Urbit is the true home of Web3.

Uqbar is hard at work developing their tooling and plans to release a public testnet in the very near future. Will it revolutionize the industry the way its developers claim? In that domain, only theories and speculation can provide an answer. But their argument is worth a glance for anyone interested in emerging technologies in crypto.

Urbit Now and in the Future

Much is promised here and elsewhere about the potential for Urbit to take the world by storm and bring about a new era of user-owned computing. Nevertheless, if you try Urbit today, you will see a friendly, somewhat minimal interface for text chat and an ecosystem of experimental applications. You may find Urbit’s promises wanting, in the domains of zero-maintenance servers, competitive UX, and perhaps even avoidance of sysadminship. Regrettably, it is not yet even possible to run a Bitcoin node on Urbit in the one-click way that it should.

Urbit is exciting to early adopters not because of what you can do with it right now, but because of what it can enable after the necessary steps are taken. And in contrast to the Urbit of even two or three years ago, the necessary steps are well-understood and waiting in queue. The revolution in computing is no longer “how?” but “when?” for the Urbit community.

Today, Urbit is a simple and clean tool for chatting with friends, playing games, and experimenting with new ideas. More than anything else, the Urbit of today is a tool for doing what its users care about most: building Urbit. If you’d like to get involved, the community would love to have you. If you’d rather observe from the outside, keep a keen eye out. Big things are coming in the near future for Urbit and Web3, and you don’t want to miss out.

Conclusion

Urbit’s value proposition is long-winded enough that it won’t fit into a tweet or a TV commercial, but it’s promising enough to excite developers who share our vision of the future and want to play a part in building it. When it matures as a product, rethinking Unix and the internet won’t be included in the pitch. Urbit will be a service you can buy, either as a subscription or a physical product, that enables you to use apps that are just plain better than the ones you used to use.

Much remains unclear about what happens between now and then, but crypto and Web3 enthusiasts will have many reasons to get involved before you start seeing ads on the television to buy an Urbit planet. Urbit offers a comfortable home to idealists who believe in cryptographic ownership and share a concern about the future of humans and technology, and the next generation of early adopters is sure to include a wide cohort from that audience.

Now that you understand Urbit’s core value proposition, stay tuned for an exposition into the details of Urbit’s capabilities as a platform, its integrations with crypto, and a deeper dive into the promise of Uqbar to reshape the landscape of blockchain development.

Guides
How to stake MINA (Mina Protocol)
A step-by-step guide on staking MINA (Mina Protocol)
August 31, 2022
5 min read

Overview

Category Details
Chorus One Validator Address B62qmFf6UZn2sg3j8bYLGmMinzS2FHX6hDM71nFxAfMhvh4hnGBtkBD
Wallet Clorio
APR 11.59%
Block Explorer https://mina.staketab.com/
Staking Rewards https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/mina/

How to stake MINA (Mina Protocol)

1. Create Account and Login

First of all, you have to log into your wallet.

Head to the Clorio web app or open the Clorio Desktop App and select Access with Ledger or Access with Private key.

In case you do not have an account click on Create a wallet and note down the passphrase and private key in a secure place.

Do not share your passphrase or private key with anyone. Doing so may cause loss of funds!

If you already have a wallet, insert your Private key to log in to your wallet. Once the Private key is inserted, the button Access the wallet will be enabled, allowing you to enter inside your wallet.

2. Delegate to Chorus One

On the left-side-menu click on Staking Hub item.

You will be brought to a new page, here you will have the staking status and the list of Validators.

To start delegating, you can scroll to Chorus One and click on the Delegate button, or you can manually delegate by clicking on the Custom delegation button.

After you click the Delegate button, a confirmation screen will show up.

Once you click on Confirm button you will be asked to insert a fee. The field will be pre-compiled with the Average fee, but you can choose the one that you want.

After you click on Proceed button, you will be asked to put your Private key in order to proceed with the delegation.

If the Private key is valid the modal will disappear, then will pop out an alert on the bottom right side of the screen confirming that your transaction has been successfully broadcasted to the network.

3. Using Ledger to delegate

If you are using a Ledger, Clorio will send all the information of the delegation to your Ledger in order to sign them on the device.

For instructions on how to install Ledger App for Mina visit here

Please be sure that your Ledger is connected, Ledger Mina app is open and your device is unlocked and your browser meets the minimum requirements.

If there are no issues with the delegation data, Clorio will wait for the Ledger signature and then broadcast the transaction to the network.

4. Delegation done

After entering your private key or signing with Ledger you will see the message Delegator successfully broadcasted. This means that delegation was successfully done!

Congratulations you are now staking Mina!!

5. (Optional) MINA Staking with Command-Line Interface (CLI)

If you are technically savvy and have a hardware wallet, we’ve included how to delegate to Mina using CLI.  First, if you haven’t already, you’ll need to generate a keypair and connect to the network.

Second, make sure you’ve unlocked your account and enter the following in the terminal:

mina account unlock -public-key $MINA_PUBLIC_KEY

Then run this command to delegate your stake:

mina client delegate-stake \
  • receiver <DELEGATE-PUBLIC-KEY> \
  • sender $MINA_PUBLIC_KEY \
  • fee 0.1
  1. The receiver is the public key of the validators to receive your stake delegation.
  2. The sender is the public key of the account from which you want to delegate
  3. The fee is the transaction fee required to record your transaction.

Chorus One's Public Key: B62qmFf6UZn2sg3j8bYLGmMinzS2FHX6hDM71nFxAfMhvh4hnGBtkBD

There is a 2-4 week delay (also known as a latency period) before your new stake delegation comes into effect.

Guides
How to stake OSMO (Osmosis)
A step-by-step guide on staking OSMO (Osmosis)
August 17, 2022
5 min read

Overview

Category Details
Chorus One Validator Address osmovaloper15urq2dtp9qce4fyc85m6upwm9xul3049wh9czc
Wallet Keplr
APR 92%
Block Explorer https://www.mintscan.io/osmosis
Staking Rewards (inactive) https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/osmosis
Unstaking Period 21 Days

Osmosis is a heterogeneous, interoperable AMM that gives users and LPs flexibility and customization never before seen in existing AMM protocols. LPs can select their time horizons for providing liquidity, third-parties can incentivize pools ad-hoc, governance can distribute OSMO rewards where they deem fit, pool creators can play with mathematical expressions (curves) for lower-slippage swapping and users can swap assets, cross-chain.

Osmosis uses the standard DPoS staking mechanism found in the Cosmos SDK. Users can delegate their OSMO tokens to Chorus One to receive a share of rewards generated by the network.

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!

How to stake

1. Install Keplr Wallet Extension

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.

2. Create/Import Account

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.

  • Anyone with your mnemonic seed can take your assets.
  • Lost mnemonic seed can't be recovered.

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

3. Log in to 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/#/osmosis/stake to see the full dashboard.

4. Stake your OSMO

If you don't already have OSMO in your account fund it with some tokens. You may use an exchange to transfer the OSMO tokens to your address or get it from someone who already holds those.

To stake click on the Osmosis 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 OSMOs during which delegator OSMOs do not earn rewards and cannot be transferred, exchanged, or spent. OSMOs can, however, be slashed during the unbonding period.

5. Claiming rewards

After some time you will see rewards getting accumulated in your account. You can simply go to the Keplr extension to claim them.

MEV
News
Chorus One announces MEV-Boost support
The Ethereum Merge is one of crypto’s most anticipated events.
August 12, 2022
5 min read

The Ethereum Merge is one of the most anticipated events in crypto history.

The transition, meant to take Ethereum from its current Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake model, has been in the works since Ethereum’s inception. However, it took its first step in December 2020, when the Beacon Chain was successfully launched. And now, with the consensus mechanism running unimpeded for a year and a half and over 13 million staked ETH, developers feel confident enough to move to the second step. This requires joining the consensus layer of the Beacon Chain with the execution state of the main Ethereum chain, the process known as “the Merge”.

This new era to the Ethereum protocol brings better security, greater energy efficiency, and sets the stage for future scaling efforts meant to take Ethereum to the moon.

Chorus One prepares for the Merge

Chorus One has been closely following the development efforts to bring Proof-of-Stake Ethereum to reality. As a trusted staking provider in the ecosystem, we are participating in testing the Merge at this critical point with our Prater/Goerli nodes ready for transition. We are particularly aware of the risks associated with such a significant change of operations in a blockchain that has captured a major part of the economic activity in the crypto ecosystem. For that reason, our goal remains to support decentralised networks to promote the security and availability of our services, and to increase the rewards of our clients under such a standard.

As we think of the future for both our operations in the Ethereum ecosystem and the existential threats that can compromise the integrity and stability of the network, we have devoted a lot of effort into understanding MEV and clarifying our position towards it.

MEV-Boost

On our path to support a more decentralised, democratic and fair distribution of MEV rewards for our stakers, we would like to announce our support for MEV-Boost.

Although MEV continues to be a controversial and cutting-edge space for research, we believe that this can be an interim solution as we wait for more sophisticated in-protocol upgrades. On a high level, MEV-Boost is an implementation of proposer-builder separation (PBS) built by the Flashbots team for Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. As a free, open-source and neutral software, we believe it embraces the values of the Ethereum community and can be a valuable asset for all validators, big or small.

Why run MEV-Boost

By participating in the fair extraction of MEV, we believe we are unlocking the real value of the networks we support, as well as increasing the value of staking to promote higher rates of participation, and an increase in the security of the PoS protocol.

As staking providers, running MEV-Boost allows us to maximize the staking rewards of our clients while protecting Ethereum decentralization, with an estimated increase of 60% in the rewards we can share.

Unlike previous Flashbots’ offerings, this software is compatible with all client implementations of the Ethereum protocol, making it a big step towards further client diversity, a topic that has been the subject of research at Chorus One in the past year.

Finally, we are committed to evaluate and continue to monitor different approaches to our MEV implementations, and to the risks of single-relay and single-block producers, working with different teams to find the most balanced system. Fair MEV extraction continues to be something we iterate on going forward.

The way forward

In the coming days we will be getting ready to test MEV-Boost on our Goerli infrastructure to best prepare in time for the mainnet Merge. We have been working closely with Flashbots and collaborating with other node operators to ensure that the product is ready and tested by the time it goes live.

MEV is an inevitable part of participating, not only on blockchains, but in all ordered economic systems. Our intent is to be responsible participants of Ethereum and beyond, with MEV research spanning Solana and Cosmos, there is more to come. For the time being, follow our node readiness for MEV-Boost here.

About Chorus One

Chorus One is one of the largest staking providers globally. We provide node infrastructure and closely work with over 30 Proof-of-Stake networks.

Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
Newsletter: https://substack.chorusone.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChorusOne

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