We’re very excited to announce that Chorus One is now live on the KYVE Network mainnet.
Kyve aims to revolutionize customized access to on- and off-chain data by providing fast and easy tooling for decentralized data validation, immutability, and retrieval. With these tools, developers, data engineers, and others can easily and reliably access the trustless data they need in order to continue building the future of Web3.
It is a PoS blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK. It has two layers: the Chain Layer and the Protocol Layer, each with its own node infrastructure.
The protocol layer nodes are responsible for collecting data from a data source, bundling and uploading it to any decentralized storage solution, and then validating it, keeping track of which data is truly valid for its users to tap into. This enables KYVE to store any data permanently and in a decentralized manner, creating a Web3 data lake.
Via KYVE, developers first input the desired endpoint from which they would like to fetch data and then fund a pool with $KYVE. Node runners wanting to participate in the protocol will be the ones fetching, bundling, storing, and validating the data to earn $KYVE rewards.
Data pipeline is another way of using KYVE. Through a non-code solution, KYVE data can be imported into any data source supported by Airbyte within just a few clicks. Since KYVE fetches raw data, it allows you to transform it to best fit your use case.
John Letey, Kyve’s co-founder & CTO, joined our podcast and told everything you need to know about Kyve, including some fun facts: John wrote his first program in C++ when he was only 8 years old.
At genesis, inflation was disabled. A governance proposal is currently being voted on to activate inflation with default parameters that were calculated considering the staking ratio at genesis. The goal is to reach an APY of 20%, a reference value influenced by other Cosmos networks.
The project is backed by multiple relevant foundations such as Near, Solana, and Avalanche, to name a few.
To know more about staking $KYVE with Chorus One, click here
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 35+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
For more information, please visit chorus.one
Withdrawals are imminent. This March, Ethereum will be undergoing its first hard fork of the year, bringing much anticipated withdrawals to the mainnet. As developers move into the final pre-launch sequence, by upgrading the public testnets (first Sepolia, then Goerli), we wanted to get you up to speed on this coming Shapella (Shanghai + Capella) upgrade.
If you look at Ethereum’s Beacon Chain today, the way to participate as a validator means you must send at least 32 ETH to the Deposit Contract, or “stake” your ETH. The Beacon Chain follows the contract, querying for changes so that it can process any new deposits. The entire validator lifecycle consists of different states that determine what you can or can’t do as part of the network.
Ethereum only allows a small number of validators to start or stop validating at a time to maintain the stability of the validator set. Once you are part of the “Active” set, you start accruing rewards by voting (”attesting”) every six minutes with the occasional proposal. The majority of these rewards are added to the balance of the validator.
At any point, you might want to stop validating and take out your ETH, in which case you would want to join the voluntary exit queue. On the other hand, you might have been a validator for some time and want to utilize the excess ETH, considering the average validator balance is ~34 ETH.
Withdrawals close the validator cycle and mark the end of the PoS transition that started with the Merge in September 2022. Before then, the two chains were unaware of each other. Specifically, the Execution Layer didn’t communicate at all with the Beacon Chain until they merged. Withdrawals stand opposite to the deposit process, crediting your ETH from the Beacon Chain on the Execution Layer to finally close the cycle.
There are 2 requirements for withdrawals to be processed:
For every block, the network scans the validator set for the first 16 validators that satisfy those two requirements. Then, those withdrawals get processed as part of the block in a gasless transaction.
According to the most recent estimate, ~300,000 validators are on the old credentials, meaning the majority of validators will need to change them (it involves digging for those mnemonics created over 2 years ago). This change can only be done once.
Chorus One developed a tool called “eth-staking-smith” that enables the user to generate those signed messages and easily update their withdrawal address.
The process after that is fully automatic. Meaning, you don’t have to do anything else to start spending those rewards, they will be credited to the withdrawal address without your intervention. If all of those validators properly change their credentials, a complete run through the active validator set would take about 4 and a half days. Meaning, you can expect to receive your rewards to the withdrawal address in that cadence.
Please check the official ETH Withdrawals FAQ to learn more about withdrawal mechanics and enabling withdrawals for your validator.
We have previously elaborated on why staking is the most attractive risk-adjusted source of yield in crypto. We believe in its force to provide value at the base level to stakers, deliver competitive results and guarantee that networks such as Ethereum continue to operate as the backbone of a decentralized financial system.
However, the inability to withdraw staked assets on Ethereum has been a risk consideration that stakers had to make before committing to the task for the past years. Not anymore. This massive unlocking of liquidity is sure to make big waves in the coming months and impact the staking panorama of Ethereum. Staking has also made the news with the recent news of regulations in the United States. As a non-custodial staking provider, we continue to believe in this thesis.
With an increasing number of ETH being staked post-Merge, along with growing adoption of the Ethereum network and a rising ETH price, we believe that 2023 will be an even stronger year for Ethereum staking post-Shanghai. However, we must get ready for some changes.
We made our bet on the Ethereum staking ecosystem last year, when we finally unveiled OPUS: our API and Portal solution to significantly speed up institutional staking operations.
Since then, we have been working on many exciting features, including enabling MEV rewards, with more in the pipeline to be rolled out in the coming months. We plan to support withdrawals in our infrastructure as soon as it's safe after the upgrade, and we are working to create the simplest staking and unstaking process in the market for all kinds of institutional clients.
We have been testing this process and will continue to do so on the available testnets for increased security. We also provide a suite of options including the mentioned update of validator withdrawals addresses and a full Portal to consult all rewards accumulated.
Reach out to sales@chorus.one to know more about how OPUS can help you start staking or offer staking to your customers with minimal setup.
About Chorus One
Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 35+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.
For more information, please visit chorus.one
We are excited to announce that we have onboarded Gnosis Chain as validators. Gnosis is one of the first Ethereum sidechains in existence and has kept close to its values from inception. Gnosis Chain is EVM-based and secured by over 100k validators around the world. It hosts a very diverse validator set and it is propped up by the community governance of GnosisDAO to ensure it remains credibly neutral at a much lower price point than Ethereum mainnet. It powers an ecosystem of DApps including POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol, the original NFT protocol), Dark Forest (a fully decentralized strategy game, built with zkSNARK technology), Giveth (public goods, peer-to-peer direct funding platform), and much more.
Gnosis has a long history of working alongside Ethereum, although Gnosis Chain is technically a new blockchain. It first specialized in prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, and wallet solutions, and joined expertise with xDAI Chain in 2021 to provide fast and inexpensive transactions. This newer chain has some great features including a block time of 5 seconds (making it ideal for everyday payments), a native stablecoin, a low-fee system (gas fees cost .01 xDAI per 500 transactions), Ethereum compatibility/interoperability, and much more. Gnosis Chain already successfully went through its Merge upgrade and on December 08, 2021, became a full Proof-of-Stake network.
Gnosis Chain runs on a dual-token framework: xDAI, which is a wrapped version of MakerDAO’s algorithmic stablecoin DAI, is the payment coin of the network. By using a stablecoin for payments and calculating gas in xDAI, Gnosis Chain can keep fees extremely low. On the other side, GNO is the staking and governance token for GnosisDAO, allowing validators and delegators to secure the chain. Currently, there are 342k GNO staked for on-chain voting, making Gnosis Chain the third most decentralized blockchain after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Chorus One is thrilled to support Gnosis Chain in our quest to expand the PoS economy.
Block Explorer: https://gnosisscan.io/
Validating Rights: The minimum requirement to run a validator is 32 mGNO (1 GNO). Gnosis follows Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake rewards system. You can learn more here.
Staking yield: 15.78%
Slashing: Staked tokens are subject to slashing.
To stake GNO or to set up a whitelabel validator, reach out to sales@chorus.one
Mars will bring a multi-chain lending market to the Cosmos, enabling yield-seeking and margin trading applications like shorting and leveraged longs on any integrated Cosmos SDK chain, starting with Osmosis.
Mars started as a lending protocol on the Terra chain and has been working to launch its own Cosmos chain after the Terra LUNA and UST collapse. Users who held MARS on Terra may be eligible to claim a newly minted MARS token after the launch of Mars Hub. These MARS tokens will be available via Station, Terra’s new interchain wallet, and Keplr as soon as Mars Hub is live. More information about the airdrop is in the blogpost.
Below, we explore some of the new concepts associated with Mars v2 to address the diverse use cases of borrow & lending, trading and yield farming protocols, that usually disperse users’ capital and, consequently, dry up liquidity.
Mars’ innovative Hub and Outpost architecture allows the protocol to be deployed onto every Cosmos chain. The outposts comprise of two main applications, Red Bank and the Rover. The Outposts can be seen as bank branches, where users can deposit chain-specific tokens for lending that will generate yield. Optionally, the deposit can serve as collateral to borrow assets to be used on other Cosmos chains. Yield is generated from interest accrued from Red Bank borrowers. This revenue stream is paid out to Red Bank depositors, Mars Hub stakers, and the Safety Fund atop Mars Hub.
The Red Bank is engineered to lend not just to individuals but to specific whitelisted smart contracts too. This feature is known as contract-to-contract lending (C2C).
In summary, Mars outposts are managed by Mars Hub but are deployed onto other Cosmos chains. Mars’ first outpost is scheduled to launch on Osmosis in early February with borrowing and lending support for ATOM, OSMO, and axlUSDC (Axelar USDC). The community will then be able to propose further assets to be listed via governance.
Rover is a new credit primitive that allows a user to benefit from the cross-collateralization of different positions within a sub-account. Represented by NFTS, they will provide a user with a centralized exchange style platform in a decentralized manner. The cross collateralisation enables all the positions a user has taken to be considered when determining the health of the account and thus enhances capital efficiency.
The Fields of Mars is one feature within a Rover account and consists of Vault strategies such as LYF and LLP. These Vaults via the Rover, borrow from the Red Bank and provide the leverage for the given strategy. Fields of Mars is pre-authorized to borrow without posting collateral directly into the Red Bank. It can be seen as they have a virtual ‘credit line’. It’s not that collateral doesn’t exist, but that the Fields application controls the collateral instead of the Red Bank itself.
The fields of mars allow users to, for example, leverage yield farm positions by using rover credit accounts. Users can LP assets borrowed from the local Red Bank, with the LP shares held as collateral by the smart contract. If the debt-to-collateral ratio were to exceed a safety margin, the contract would liquidate the LP share.
Source: Mars Protocol v2 whitepaper
The MARS tokens are planned to govern Mars Hub and its outposts throughout the Cosmos. Token holders would be able to stake MARS tokens and participate in on-chain governance directly on Mars Hub.
Our specialized research team actively follows up and contributes to the governance of protocol. A weekly summary of proposals and votes for the Cosmos ecosystem is released every week on Chorus One’s Twitter handle.
We also recently released a report that goes deep into the subject of governance on Cosmos. You can download it here.
Climate change is not a new phenomenon and no country is spared from its pangs. Governments & institutions have been slow in tackling it and the results are for everyone to see. The devastating hurricanes in the Atlantic, the extended droughts in the West, and the horrific floods in South Asia are all examples of the increased intensity of natural disasters due to climate change. Though there has been a gamut of initiatives that have promised to fight climate change, one of the most promising ways has been the use of carbon credits.
Carbon credits are a type of environmental commodity or certificate that companies and individuals can trade that represent carbon dioxide that’s kept out of the atmosphere by some act of conservation like reforestation. By putting a price on carbon emissions, carbon credits can help to internalize the costs of climate change and encourage businesses and individuals to find ways to reduce their emissions. Additionally, carbon credits can be traded on a market, which allows for the flexibility to find the lowest-cost emissions reductions and to reward those who are able to achieve the largest reductions. But the carbon credit market has long suffered from issues like lack of transparency, double counting, and/or creative accounting.
Tokenizing these carbon credits on the blockchain is obviously a better solution since the credits can’t be sold/traded once they’re retired, the data is publicly verifiable, and immutable too. That’s why Chorus One collaborated with Regen Network, a platform that originates digital carbon assets unlocking regenerative finance in the world of web3 to offset our carbon footprint for the years 2021 and 2020. We run and operate nodes for Proof-of-Stake networks that are extremely energy-efficient compared to, say, Bitcoin, but that’s not the end of it. We calculated our approximate CO2 emissions for the last 2 years by estimating our team’s device usage, travel to company retreats and conferences, emissions by the data centers we utilize, etc.
This also contributes to the Cosmos ZERO Carbon Campaign, an Interchain Foundation initiative for the entire Cosmos ecosystem to achieve net-zero carbon emissions for their network validator node infrastructure and operations.
CosmosZERO is the first all-ecosystem governance process, and not only keeps Cosmos at the cutting edge of competitive advantage with protocol governance leading the way across the ecosystem to offset our carbon but also is helping usher into the IBC ecosystem the new asset class of interchain carbon credits, which many believe will be uncorrelated with the crypto cycles —
Gregory Landua, Co-founder, Regen Network
We arrived at a total of 130 tons and used the Regen Marketplace to retire an equivalent amount of CO2 via The Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project and The Kasigau Corridor REDD Project. Regen Marketplace was recently launched and allows individuals and institutions to buy, sell, and retire on-chain ecological assets in a few clicks. You can view Chorus One’s portfolio of retired eco credits here.
We hope to encourage more organizations to retire their carbon offsets on-chain. At the end of the day, we have to remember that this planet is the only one we have and we have to do our part to protect it.
We are excited to announce that we have onboarded XPLA network as validators. XPLA (“Explore and Play”) is a proof-of-stake, Cosmos-based, gaming-specific L1 developed by Metamagnet in collaboration with its primary partner, the Com2uS Group, one of Korea’s leading public gaming companies. C2X, a blockchain gaming platform, was also created by Metamagnet. While C2X will remain as a gaming platform, XPLA intends to be a gaming mainnet that serves as a center for any third-party studio to make games and create media content. Game developers can quickly transition their Web2 creations to Web3 using the XPLA SDK.
With the advent of the Blockchain industry, applications that use NFTs have taken over the planet, some of which are money grabs and, in the worst instances, frauds. Because of these uses, the NFT market may pose significant dangers to both users and investors. The XPLA chain was created to address these issues and to establish the benchmark for the long-term, sustainable development of blockchain applications. XPLA chain is designed to be a platform that may embrace the blockchain media content ecosystem, with a focus on gaming, content, and entertainment that will continue to progress in the future.
Tendermint serves as the basis for XPLA, also powered by the Cosmos SDK and a PoS algorithm. The XPLA chain is designed to support not just the Cosmos ecosystem but also the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which will boost XPLA chain ecosystem usage by enabling Ethereum-based blockchain and dApps. Validators like Chorus One operate full nodes, contribute to consensus via vote broadcasting, validate new blocks on the blockchain, and participate in blockchain governance. Validators may vote on behalf of delegators, and their voting power is weighted according to the total amount staked. The validators and delegators will earn a portion of the transaction fee as compensation for new block verification and will participate in the mainnet operation with the shared objective of developing the ecosystem by managing the mainnet node. The top 130 validators enter the active set.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators is determined by the amount of staking tokens bonded as collateral.
Token distribution: The maximum supply is $2Bn XPLA tokens. Refer to the whitepaper for a detailed overview of the tokenomics.
Inflation rate: 0%
Slashing: Pledged tokens can be slashed.
Chorus One Commission: 7.5%
Re-Staking: You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns hence additional delegation is needed for compounding.
We are excited to announce that we have onboarded Teritori Network as validators. Teritori is a multi-chain hub aimed to link IBC and non-IBC communities, trade services and NFTs, start new projects, and expand current ones. To facilitate trade, Teritori allows users to affirm their Web3 identity & protect their reputation. The center prominently contains daily-use dApps such as an NFT launchpad, a marketplace, and social features for people and communities: Innovate, Trade, and Organize. The network will also include a DAO tooling suite, a job board, and a multichain dApp store.
Following the bull run, the Teritori team examined the ecosystem and addressed existing concerns: despite the desire to decentralize everything, most of the technologies we use on a daily basis remain centralized, resulting in scams and security vulnerabilities. Builders, on the other hand, have struggled to locate the people to execute the right job in their projects. Because the majority of our interactions are driven by community approval, protecting our identity and reputation has become critical. Teritori also plans to introduce Berty Protocol to offer a decentralized alternative to the existing Web2 communication tools we all use on a daily basis. With the transparency that’s provided in tool sharing and identity verification, Teritori seeks to solve these pain points.
Teritori is based on the Cosmos SDK chain and the governance/utility token TORI. TORI is initially very inflationary. The Teritori DAO and TORI holders will be able to vote on the blockchain’s future direction as well as the next features/dApps to be added to the ecosystem. 40% of tokens released per block will be in the form of staking incentives given to validators like Chorus One and delegators who assist to protect the chain. Validators and delegators are critical to the Teritori network’s security. At genesis, there will be 100 validators according to their stake. Additionally, Teritori is monitoring the latest developments on GNOLand in order to be among the first projects to deploy the dApps on this new ecosystem when live.
Validating Rights: The weight of validators is determined by the amount of staking tokens bonded as collateral.
Token distribution: Similar to Bitcoin’s ‘halving’, issued Tori tokens are reduced by ⅓ every year. 200M Tori tokens were issued at mainnet genesis.
Inflation rate: 126.59%
Staking APR: 491.40%
Slashing: Pledged tokens can be slashed.
Chorus One Commission: 5%
Re-Staking: You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns hence, additional delegation is needed for compounding.
Will Ethereum become a deflationary cryptocurrency, now that The Merge has happened? The answer to this question, in short, can be given in two words: “it depends!” Its long form, however, would offer you a better understanding of whether Ethereum will indeed remain inflationary (albeit only slightly as miners have packed their bags) or become a deflationary asset as time goes on.
At 6:42 AM UTC (2:42 AM EDT / 8:42 AM CEST) on Thursday, September 15, 2022, Ethereum’s long-awaited transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, dubbed “The Merge”, was finally completed. As Chorus One and the rest of the ecosystem could confirm, the operation — after years of blood, sweat, and delays — was successful.
Having started out as a network relying on Proof-of-Work, thus fast shaping into the “hub” of miners as Bitcoin’s biggest competitor, Ethereum soon encountered scalability issues with its Execution Layer. Too much energy consumption between competing miners to process transactions and not enough security for the network, after all.
The Beacon Chain was, therefore, introduced in December 2020 as the network’s Consensus Layer. This innovation could be seen as Ethereum’s spine, master coordinator, or watchful lighthouse tower, with its key functions set to store data, and manage the network’s validators. Functionalities also included scanning the network, validating transactions, collecting votes, distributing rewards to performing validators, deducting rewards of offline validators, and slashing the ETH of malicious actors.
This Proof-of-Stake blockchain ran alongside the PoW network with the objective to — one day — merge and transform Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake only network. A win for decentralization and the environment!
That day happened on September 15th, 2022. But before that, Ethereum was inflating at roughly 3.67% — with a ~ 4.62% issuance inflation rate. We will break down the calculations behind this inflation rate, shortly. But first, let’s go back to the drawing board to remind ourselves about the definition of inflation and deflation, in the first place.
Inflation happens when more bills are printed (FIAT money) or more tokens are minted (cryptocurrency) for circulation in the system. The value of the currency then decreases. In FIAT, this means that more bills would be needed to afford things. In certain cryptocurrencies, this means that the price of the currency goes down.
Deflation, on the other hand, happens when tokens are removed or destroyed from the system through “burning”. By logic, the value of the currency is supposed to increase. There are, however, much more complicated dynamics to this. Those won’t be our point of focus, today.
Before The Merge, Ethereum rewarded the capital-intensive mining activity with up to 2.08 ETH approximately every ~ 13.3 seconds. This rounded up to roughly ~ 4,930,000 ETH/year in miners rewards. The network also had around ~ 119.3M ETH in total supply. (Source: Ethereum.org)
We can find the inflation rate by summing up the Executive Layer and Consensus Layer inflation rates.
Then, we move to the Consensus Layer issuance, based on the amount of ETH staked. We’ll round up that number to 13,000,000 of staked ETH presently.
That’s almost Net Zero!
Summing both figures, we had an issuance inflation rate of ~ 4.62%, pre-Merge. In other words, miners made approximately ~ 89.4% of issued ETH whilst stakers got ~ 10.6% of the pie as ETH’s issuance inflated at ~ 4.62%.
Goodbye miners. Stay on, stakers!
We’ll get to understand how not addressing high gas fees could actually be a plus for “Deflationary Assets” or “Ultra Sound Money” advocates.
As we go back to the drawing board for the second time in our walk-through, let’s revisit the difference between inflationary, deflationary, and disinflationary crypto assets.
Some cryptocurrencies’ tokenomics are set-up to increase token supply over time. From the start, they are “programmed” to be inflationary. Other cryptocurrency projects, which propose unlimited coin supply, are inflationary as well — as unlimited supply is bound to outweigh demand, decreasing the currency’s value over time. An example of a coin with unlimited supply is DOGECOIN.
With its halving mechanism until the last 21 millionth Bitcoin is minted, Bitcoin is a disinflationary cryptocurrency. It is set up for a chronological decrease in its issuance. A disinflationary cryptocurrency can, in other words, be described as “an inflationary cryptocurrency with disinflationary measures” in the sense that the demand may, over time, become greater than the diminishing issuance of new tokens.
A good example of a deflationary cryptocurrency is the Binance Coin. BNB’s initial supply saw 200,000,000 tokens in circulation. At the end of Q3, nearly 40 million BNBs had been burned as part of the plan to halve the initial supply from 200 million to 100 million.
Look at tokens in circulation as a balloon and issuance as air: BNB’s mechanism is to deflate the balloon till 50% of air in it remains whilst Bitcoin’s mechanism is to keep inflating its balloon with a set maximum air supply, but doing so with a little less air at every pump.
So what about Ethereum, now that The Merge has basically rendered a close to Net Zero inflation rate? Why is it touted as a potential deflationary coin?
Enter EIP-1559, the mechanism that burns a portion of ETH gas fees during transactions on the network. With the inflation rate already dropping to 0.49% as explained above, EIP-1559 has the potential to decrease ETH supply — but only on the condition that the gas prices are above 15 Gwei.
Consequently, it is no surprise that ultra sound money advocates would plead users to set their ETH transaction fees to a minimum 15.1 gwei.
Ultrasound.money tracks Ethereum’s supply in real time. A negative figure reflects how many ETHs have been burned since The Merge. In other words, a negative figure showcases deflation, whilst a positive figure showcases inflation.
32 hours into The Merge era, Ethereum had issued over 376 more ETH. Inflationary.
A month on and the figures keep rising…
Or maybe not… a wider perspective shows us that there has actually been a decrease since October 8th, when the issuance peaked at over 13,000 ETH.
Ethereum — Deflationary or not?
Ultrasound.Money projects gas fees to be above 70 Gwei, registering a -3.40% supply decrease across the next two years.
As we’ve witnessed now, four weeks since The Merge, we’re bound to see periods of a deflationary ETH and periods with a low but healthy inflation — both of which would be vital for an economic equilibrium.
