On March 1st 2021, we announced that we would be acquiring and operating Cryptium’s Tezos baker and their validator nodes on NEAR, Polkadot, and Kusama. This deal enabled the former Cryptium Labs team to focus on their new project Anoma, a private, asset-agnostic bartering network, while allowing their delegators to keep earning staking rewards with a reputable staking provider. Shortly after, we also agreed to take over Figment’s baker to help them focus on their DataHub and Learn projects on Tezos and to allow Figment’s former delegators to continue earning XTZ staking rewards. The acquisition of the Cryptium and Figment bakers mark our first entry into the Tezos ecosystem.
Tezos needs no introduction, it is a self-amending blockchain that launched as one of the world’s first Proof-of-Stake networks in 2018, establishing one of the first ecosystems of node operators. Tezos differentiates itself from other chains through a sophisticated on-chain governance mechanism and formal verification of smart contracts.
Amongst other things, Tezos was the first blockchain that introduced ‘Liquid Staking’. Somewhat ahead of its time, before Decentralised Finance (DeFi) had garnered adoption, delegators on Tezos were and are still now able to earn rewards whilst having the option to undelegate at any time and transfer their assets elsewhere (in comparison to most networks where an ‘unbonding’ period is necessary to undelegate assets). This also allows tokens in smart contracts (e.g. collateral in Kolibri, a Maker-esque stablecoin system on Tezos) to be delegated and earn staking rewards simultaneously! Tezos is no foreigner to introducing blockchain concepts ahead of its time, on-chain governance and an automated upgrade schedule were also foreign concepts until Tezos introduced these. Tezos has established itself time and time again as a secure network with the potential to be one of the most resilient and adaptable Proof-of-Stake networks. Given its reliability, it is no wonder that Tezos is chosen continuously by financial institutions for it’s fork-averseness, staking economics and finance-friendly smart contracts. We see great potential for the future of Tezos and we are glad to finally have the opportunity to run a validating node on this vibrant network.
There are 1,419,320 accounts using Tezos. The 1D transaction average over the past 30D is ~100,000 transactions per day (which is ~365,000,000 transactions per year annualised) and contract calls on Tezos are growing ~120% MoM (since May 2020).
Network activity on Tezos is impressive to say the least. We are glad to be supporting a thriving network that has seen sustained growth since its inception. We are looking forward to actively participating in Tezos governance to foster ecosystem development in the future.
Tezos has had two upgrades in the past three months, namingly Edo 2.0 and Florence. Edo 2.0 targeted the application layer of Tezos by introducing privacy-preserving smart contracts, more composable smart contracts using ‘tickets’ that represent values in relation to addresses (similar to derivatives) and an ‘adoption’ period to create a longer time-buffer between when voting ends for an upgrade and when it is executed on-chain. The Florence upgrade doubled the maximum operation size of smart contracts), optimised gas and changed intra-contract calling to a depth first execution model, all of which enable developers to develop more complex smart contracts with higher certainty the smart contracts will behave as expected.
Tezos Staking FAQ: https://chorus.one/networks/tezos
Staking Guide: Tezos Staking Guide for Beginners by Baking Bad, Ledger Guide to Staking Tezos (Ledger Only)
Wallets: Kukai, Ledger Live
Block Explorers: TzStats, TzKt
Staking Reward Calculator: Staking Rewards
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to stake your CELO tokens using Anthem with a Ledger. We will need the following things:
The first step you will need to take is to install the Celo Ledger application on your Ledger device via Ledger Live. To do so, you will need to enable “Developer mode”, which can be found in the Settings under “Experimental features”. Once you have done that, you should be able to find and install the Celo Ledger application.
Now that you have the Celo application on your Ledger, you are able to store your CELO on it. You will be able to do so by signing into Anthem with your Ledger. Go to https://anthem.chorus.one and click on “Connect” next to Celo or by pressing “Sign In” at the bottom. Then choose “Sign in to Celo Network”. There should be a prompt that Anthem wants to connect to your Ledger device from your browser. Unlock your Ledger device, allow the connection through your browser by clicking on the device and then “Connect”, and open the Celo application on your Ledger.
Now, you will need to verify the address on your Ledger. A popup on your Ledger with your Celo address should appear that you can confirm using the Ledger buttons. Once you do this, your device will be connected to Anthem.
You should now see the Anthem dashboard for Celo. To send tokens to your Ledger device, copy the address from the bottom left, or by clicking on “Send/Receive” and then “Receive”. This address (or QR code) represents your Celo mainnet account. You can withdraw CELO from an exchange to this account by pasting in this address.
Once you send CELO to your Ledger, they should appear as “Available” on the Anthem dashboard. You will now be able to stake your tokens. Before you do so, a few words on staking in Celo:
Celo’s staking model is unique in that your tokens are never at risk and because you will choose to stake with a validator group, instead of a single node, as common in other networks. Furthermore, staking rewards for those staking CELO tokens and validator nodes operating the network are separated — there is no commission rate going to validators, as typical in other Proof-of-stake networks. Instead, validator nodes are elected based on their stake backing and then receive fixed cUSD stablecoin payments from the network. For these reasons, Celo is referring to staking as “Voting”, we will stick to this terminology from now on.
To choose a validator group to vote for, switch to the “Voting” tab in Anthem. You will see a list of available validator groups.
Anthem displays some pertinent information about validator groups, most importantly their “Capacity” and “Group Score”. Celo limits how many votes a validator group can receive based on how much CELO the group and its nodes are staking themselves. Anthem indicates how much capacity a validator group has left for votes by using color coding — a green dot signals enough room for delegations, yellow means there is little capacity left, and red means this validator is out of capacity. The “Group Score” indicates the percentage of staking rewards this validator group currently earns its delegators. It can be temporarily lowered, e.g. if validator nodes within that group go offline for prolonged periods of time. As an example, if the CELO staking reward rate is 6% (see here for current values) and your group has a score of 90%, your current APR would be 6%*90% = 5.4%. Though, one should keep in mind that group scores, and with them the APR, recover over time ( TheCelo provides visualization of validator group scores over time). Find out more details about Celo’s staking model here, or feel free to reach out to us if you have questions.
Celo is an EVM network with a smart contract-based staking design. You will need to go through multiple steps to earn staking rewards. We did our best to make this flow as straightforward as possible in Anthem:
First you need to create a contract address associated with your account to interact with the staking smart contracts. Anthem will prompt you to do this when you try to vote for a validator group for the first time. Confirm and send this transaction from your Ledger.
Now you need to lock your CELO tokens. Locked CELO can be used to vote in governance and to vote for validator groups. You will only receive staking rewards when your CELO is actively voting for a validator group. Make sure to follow through with this tutorial until you have “Active Votes”, otherwise you won’t receive rewards! Pick an amount to lock, make sure to leave some CELO available for transaction fees and confirm the transaction on your Ledger. After a few moments the CELO you locked should appear as “Non-Voting” on Anthem.
Once you have locked some CELO, you are able to cast votes for validator groups. Pick the validator group you want to vote for, e.g. Chorus One ;), and select the amount to vote with. You are also able to choose a validator group to vote for from a drop down list when clicking on “Vote” next to your “Non-Voting” balance. Follow the steps to confirm your vote.
A final step before votes start earning staking rewards is to activate votes. Note that this is only possible beginning from the epoch after you sent your voting transaction. This will mean you will need to return after one day (the length of a Celo epoch) to cast this transaction (learn more here). If you do not activate your votes, you will not receive staking rewards! This final transaction should move the votes you just cast from the “Pending” to the “Active” state. Congratulations, your CELO tokens are now actively participating in consensus and you will be compounding your CELO holdings.
Once you decide to stop staking, e.g. to sell CELO tokens, you will need to first revoke your active votes and then unlock the CELO tokens you want to have available. You are only able to unlock “Non-Voting” CELO tokens, so make sure to first revoke active votes before unlocking. Revoked votes must exist in a pending withdrawal state for 3 days before they become available to withdraw. This is enforced to protect the protocol against attacks. Anthem will display tokens that are in the process of unlocking as “Pending”. To stop voting and transfer $CELO tokens, the following steps need to be taken:
1. Revoke active votes
You first need to revoke your active votes from the validator group you are staking with.
2. Unlock non-voting, locked tokens
Once you revoked votes, you can instruct Celo that you want to unlock your tokens. This takes 3 days from the time you withdrew votes during which tokens will remain in a pending state.
3. Wait 3 days for pending withdrawals to become available
4. Withdraw pending tokens
Once the 3 days have passed, you are able to withdraw your pending tokens back to your available balance.
5. Send tokens
From your available balance, you are free to do whatever with your CELO tokens!
We hope this guide helped you understand CELO staking. For feedback on Anthem or questions, feel free to reach out to us via Intercom on the website or through any other channels.
Anthem is a multi-network staking platform designed to help you with your staking needs. Anthem is developed by Chorus One, a provider of staking services on decentralized networks including Celo, Cosmos, Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, and many others.
Anthem: https://anthem.chorus.one
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone
Celo is an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.
Website: https://celo.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CeloOrg
Discord: https://discord.gg/6yWMkgM
The following post will cover the mechanics of staking LOOM. It will explain the current implementation and cover the risks and expected returns including a basic reward calculator. The results provided by the calculator serve as a projection only, Chorus One doesn’t guarantee their accuracy.
Delegating on Loom’s PlasmaChain only went live last week and almost 10% of the circulating LOOM supply is already participating in staking. To many, this is the first time they actually use their tokens in some other way then simply holding them in a wallet. The concept of staking can be hard to grasp and Loom has a unique implementation that requires some digging into to understand the rewards and risks associated.
Staking means you are depositing your tokens and participate in securing and maintaining Loom’s PlasmaChain, for which you are rewarded in the network’s native tokens ($LOOM). You can delegate your tokens to a validator that will run the required node infrastructure for you in exchange for a cut of the rewards. This post specifically focuses on delegating, if you want to learn about the difference between validating and delegating check out our explanation of these concepts here.
Staking on Loom is unique because rewards increase with the duration you commit to lock your tokens up for. In exchange for being unable to withdraw your staked tokens during this timelock period, you will receive a larger share of the rewards paid out by the system.
At the same time, there is only a limited amount of LOOM tokens available to be paid out as rewards. Loom’s implementation limits staking rewards to a yearly maximum of 20% of the token balance set aside for staking rewards. In total there are 300mn LOOM tokens in the pool set aside for block rewards, meaning that no more than 60mn LOOM (20%*300mn) will be paid out to those staking in the first year.
The more LOOM holders participate in staking with long lock-up periods, the faster this cap will be reached, resulting in lower rewards for everyone. Additionally, there is an expectation of revenues from transaction fees and other sources, but these are currently unpredictable. We will monitor network conditions to accurately predict staking returns for delegators. Our investment thesis on the Loom Network features an analysis of how returns might evolve over the first four years based on reasonable staking participation assumptions. This post and the reward calculator will focus on the first year and assume a setting where the cap is not reached and where there are no rewards from transactions fees or other sources.
Loom’s current implementation distributes rewards once per election cycle (these are planned to last 2 weeks, but currently a new cycle begins every 10 minutes). Rewards from staking accrue in a separate reward pool (“Unclaimed Rewards” in the UI) and need to be claimed by the user, who can then decide to either stake those rewards or to withdraw them. There is at the time of writing no option to let rewards automatically compound and re-staking rewards resets the timelock (meaning you won’t be able to withdraw your total delegated stake with that validator for another timelock period when you re-stake). The only way to circumvent this limitation currently is to either re-stake with a different validator or to create multiple accounts.
The Loom team is working on both having an automatic compounding option and having different timelocks for portions of the staking balance. This article will be updated accordingly once these options are available. It is also important to note that once a timelock runs out, your staking balance converts into continuing with the shortest timelock possible (one election cycle, i.e. 2 week periods). This means that if you want to continue receiving bonus rewards from longer lock-ups, you will need to re-stake with your desired period once the timelock runs out.
Aside from the risk that the reward cap is reached lowering interest from block reward, there is currently no other risk involved when delegating LOOM tokens. The process is non-custodial, a validator can never access delegator tokens, they can only adjust the commission rate they set. Additionally, there is currently no slashing in Loom. At a later point in time, delegators will be penalized for their validator not following the protocol. We will cover this aspect in the future, as it is currently not implemented and thus irrelevant for the time being.
Staking returns in the first year will likely only depend on the chosen lock-up period, the commission rates set by validators, and whether delegators decide to re-stake the reward they receive. Type in the inputs in the fields provided at the top and choose whether you want to re-stake to compound your rewards. Keep in mind that re-staking currently requires you to claim and delegate your rewards after every election cycle (the calculator assumes an election cycle duration of 2 weeks) and also that this will reset your timelock.
The reward calculator will show your expected returns after a year of staking using the assumptions mentioned above. You can also experiment with different LOOM prices to see what that could mean in fiat terms.
form.jotform.co
If you feel ready and plan to delegate after reading this primer, check out our delegation tutorial that walks you through the official Loom Delegation Dashboard UI.
We will update this article to account for changes and provide other resources to our community of delegators to help them evaluate their staking investment. Please feel free to share this post and to ask questions on our Telegram or on any other channel.
Originally published at blog.chorus.one on February 22, 2019.
The following tutorial explains how to navigate the PlasmaChain Dashboard that LOOM holders can use to participate in staking by delegating their tokens to a Loom Network validator. This tutorial is also available in video form:
Chorus One is operating a validator on the Loom Network. Read our announcement post to learn why and how we plan to support Loom.
To find out more about staking and our operations visit our website at https://chorus.one (our Loom page will go online soon).
To be able to stake your LOOM tokens you need to have MetaMask installed. MetaMask is a browser plugin used for communicating with the Ethereum blockchain (watch this introduction to learn more about MetaMask and how to set it up). You will need to have the LOOM tokens you plan to stake and some ETH to pay for fees on your MetaMask account. The Loom team is working on Ledger integration, so you will soon also be able to delegate from your Ledger hardware wallet.
To start staking your LOOM tokens you need to go to the official website: https://dashboard.dappchains.com/. Always make sure you are on the right page to avoid phishing attempts by checking the URL and the TLS certificate (the highlighted lock symbol).
The delegation process starts by clicking the New User button, after which your seed phrase will pop up. This is the information that is required to access your delegations and to recover your tokens, make sure you follow the instructions. Copy the 12 words and store them safely!
After doing that and clicking Next, you will be directed to the My Account view once Loomy is done preparing everything for you. You are now logged into the PlasmaChain Dashboard. This is the interface through which you will control your delegations.
To be able to delegate your LOOM tokens, you will need to connect the address where you are storing them and allow the dashboard to access them. Make sure you are logged in to MetaMask and connected to the Ethereum Mainnet. Then press the Map Accounts button, and sign the MetaMask signature request.
Then you need to deposit your LOOM tokens to stake on the PlasmaChain. Enter the LOOM amount you want to stake with and press Deposit. Another MetaMask Notification will pop up asking you to grant access to the Loom’s delegation contract on Ethereum. Once this transaction is confirmed you will receive another prompt to confirm the deposit.
We will soon publish another article that explains Loom staking in-depth, so watch out for that if you are interested in knowing what exactly is happening and what kind of returns and risks are involved when staking LOOM, for now make sure to check out the Loom’s official guide on the staking economics.
When approved, your LOOM tokens available for staking will show up in the Account Details tab, and also at the top right corner of the UI.
Once your LOOM tokens are deposited, you need to decide on which validator(s) you want to stake your tokens with. To do that go to the Validators tab, which shows you a list of validators and information about them. Choose your validator(s) carefully, as they are the ones responsible for securing the network that you are invested in. The UI shows the validator’s name, their status, their total stake, and the fee cut (commission rate) a validator takes on staking rewards.
Finally, you are ready for the final step, which is to click Delegate and choose your desired amount and your desired lock-up period. If you are willing to lock-up your LOOM tokens for longer periods of time, you will be eligible for higher rewards. E.g. committing to stake for 1 year will yield four times more reward than if you would stake for a year with 2 week lock-up periods. Our next blog post will cover staking mechanics in detail. For now, you can learn the basics in this article from the Loom team.
Once you confirmed the delegation, the amount you delegated should show up under Updated Account. Once the next election cycle starts (the blue bar on the left), the delegation will move to Amount Delegated and the Timelock will be displayed. This is the time that is left until you are able to unlock your delegated LOOM tokens.
Congratulations, you are now participating in securing the Loom PlasmaChain! You can check your active delegations and the remaining timelock with a validator by going to that validator’s page in the UI and also in the My Delegations tab.
Furthermore, you can stop delegating (un-delegate), claim rewards, and withdraw your tokens through the delegation dashboard. Remember that your chosen lock-up period influences when you will be able to withdraw your staked LOOM tokens!
We will publish further step-by-step tutorials, explainers, and other updates around the Loom Network on our blog, so make sure to follow us on our social channels or subscribe to our mailing list below.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Medium: https://medium.com/chorus-one
Slack: https://chorus.one/slack
Telegram: https://chorus.one/telegram
Originally published at blog.chorus.one on February 15, 2019.
