Today, we are excited to announce that we will acquire and continue operating Cryptium Labs validator nodes on Tezos, Near, Polkadot, and Kusama following their announcement to terminate their services to focus on other ventures.
This first of its kind acquisition will enable Cryptium’s delegators staking over $125M worth of assets to continue earning rewards through a professional (and likewise Swiss-based) staking provider.
“Cryptium Labs has been one of the pioneers of Proof-of-Stake. They were among the first professional validators and contributors to protocol development, especially on Tezos. It’s an honor for us to continue operating their nodes and ensure a continuous high-quality service for their customers. We have no doubts that the Cryptium Labs team will go on to do great work through their new venture and make major contributions to the crypto industry.”
Brian Fabian Crain, CEO and Co-Founder of Chorus One
“Looking back it has been a wild journey and while it’s sad to leave the validation game, the team is incredibly excited to share with the world what we have been working on. We started Cryptium Labs as one of the first Proof-of-Stake validation companies in the world with the simple premise to provide secure and available validation from the Swiss Alps. Chorus One has been there with us since the beginning and has been incredibly innovative in the PoS space. I am excited that they will continue providing high-quality validation services to all the original Cryptium Labs delegators.“
Adrian Brink, Managing Director & Co-Founder of Cryptium Labs
If you have been delegating to Cryptium Labs on Near, Polkadot, Tezos, or Kusama, you do not need to take any action. You should be aware that there will be a migration from Cryptium Labs’ to Chorus One’s infrastructure within the coming weeks. We will maintain the former Cryptium Labs validators with the same care we operate our existing validator nodes and will relocate all server infrastructure and migrate cryptographic material to our platform.
As a result of the acquisition, the display name, commission rates, and other metadata related to the respective validators will be adjusted. Validators will be Chorus One branded and, on networks we are already active on, commission rates will be brought in line with our existing nodes to remain consistent. On Tezos, where we do not operate a baker as of now, we will maintain the commission rate Cryptium established.
This acquisition serves as our entry into the Tezos ecosystem. Our initial focus on Cosmos and Tendermint resulted in us never launching a Tezos baker. With the acquisition of the Cryptium Labs baker, we are finally becoming a part of this long-standing and established Proof-of-Stake network and its community. We are thrilled to expand our portfolio of networks to Tezos and are hopeful to maintain and even improve upon the secure and stable operation Cryptium set up.
While Cryptium Labs is dissolving, its former team centered around Adrian Brink, Awa Sun Yin, and Christopher Goes will work on bringing financial privacy and sovereignty to everyone. Stay tuned for future announcements!
The Chorus One team wishes them the best of luck for their future endeavours; we are thankful for their contributions to the staking ecosystem and grateful to be able to continue their legacy!
Finally, we would like to welcome all former Cryptium Labs delegators into our community. Please don’t hesitate to reach out through our channels linked below if you have any questions or want to learn more.
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
Cover background photo by Isaac Struna on Unsplash.
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on March 1, 2021.
Happy New Year! Today, we are excited to announce the launch of our The Graph mainnet indexer node. Find us e.g. on the official dashboard (chorusone.eth). This post will focus on our journey so far and what you can expect when considering to delegate GRT tokens.
The Graph has become the industry standard for retrieving data from Ethereum applications, with prominent users including Coingecko, Uniswap, and many others.
We have experienced ourselves what it means to write custom code to retrieve blockchain data, to store it, and to service it for our staking platform Anthem. One of the reasons that makes us excited about The Graph is the potential to make extracting valuable information from any blockchain much easier, while at the same time not relying on a centralized party to maintain availability and to ensure integrity of the data.
The Graph is a core piece to enable truly trustless applications. By providing our infrastructure and expertise to the community, we hope to accelerate the growth of this ecosystem!
The Graph is one of the most complex decentralized protocols with various, highly interconnected elements. The intricate economic design that features multiple roles (check out a primer here) is designed to optimally provide indexing and querying capabilities through a decentralized network of participants.
As a GRT holder, one option to participate in the system is by delegating to indexer nodes that are storing and servicing data. By delegating, GRT holders essentially increase the power of their chosen indexer operator in the protocol. Indexers need to allocate stake to subgraphs and are required to service queries from data consumers, the volume of which is determined by their relative stake allocated to a specific subgraph. To compensate delegators for putting up their capital to back indexing nodes, they receive a portion of the query and inflation rewards earned by the indexer. Indexers can determine their reward cut (the commission taken on newly minted GRT from the protocol) and their query cut (the commission taken on fees from queries served).
The rest of this post will focus on the inflation and reward cut dynamics, since these are expected to have the majority impact on the staking rewards received, especially in this early bootstrapping phase of the network.
If you are seeking to find out how much you will earn at the start, when queries fees are still low, these are the things you need to consider:
There’s also a one-time 0.5% fee when delegating GRT that is burned lowering the circulating GRT supply. At the time of writing there is around 9% of the GRT supply staking meaning the APR for staking GRT is 30% (before commission). Since our indexer does not have many delegations yet, our effective commission rate is actually negative meaning you’ll earn an even higher APR until delegations fill up!
Fellow indexers and community members have already written delegation guides and built dashboards that are helpful if you want to put your GRT to work, here is a selection:
Official The Graph Dashboard: https://network.thegraph.com/
Staking Facilities Guide for Ledger + Metamask: https://stakingfac.medium.com/the-graph-staking-guide-5ec1455f4783
Graphlets Dashboard: https://graphlets.io/
The Graph Portal: https://thegraphportal.com/
Cover background image by Arash Ashgari on Unsplash.
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on January 1, 2021.
It’s been over 2 months since the decentralization of the SKALE Network ( mainnet phase 2) began. With an unique approach of requiring participating investors to stake a minimum of 50% of their tokens for a period of at least 2 months ( Proof-of-Use), the SKALE team focused on attracting long-term supporters of the project, as opposed to speculators looking for a quick flip.
In this post, I want to take a look at a snapshot of the on-chain data that shines light on how SKL holders are engaging with the network now that the Proof-of-Use period has come to an end.
SKL is an ERC-777 token (backwards compatible with ERC-20), so information about it is available on Etherscan. We can see that there are 4,083,530,877 SKL tokens, which are held by 3,903 different addresses. 166,857,860, or roughly 4%, of those were sold in a public sale through the Activate platform. For a detailed breakdown of the supply and associated lockups, check out this 1-pager.
I want to start this analysis by taking a look at token transfers. Visualizing the transaction counts and amounts, we can clearly see how the initial tokens were distributed to investors leading up to the phase 2 mainnet launch on October 1. We can also note an uptick in activity when the first SKALE staking period ended Dec 1 (as of now, tokens can only be staked for periods of 2 months). At this point, the first tokens unlocked and the SKL token gets listed, e.g. on Binance. On Dec 1, 6,358 transfers were carried out moving 267m SKL, or around 6.5% of the supply (see chart). Right after, activity declined significantly with on average around 500 transfers happening per day during the past week.
Looking at the total stake in the network, which e.g. can be found here, we see that the overwhelming majority of tokens are involved in staking. 74.5% of all tokens are delegated, which places SKALE in the company of established networks such as Cosmos (71.42%) and Tezos (79.44%, see Staking Rewards). In terms of addresses that are involved in staking, we see that there are 1,167 unique delegators. 30% of all addresses that hold the SKL token are also staking.
Furthermore, one may wonder how many SKL tokens have been unstaked or are planning to unstake at the next boundary (Feb 1). The official dashboard shows 112m SKL (~3.7% of the currently staked supply) have been unbonded after the first staking period. So it seems like a majority of token holders plan to continue staking (it should be noted that a majority of token holders like the foundation, team, and early investors have longer lockup periods and cannot transfer their tokens yet).
Generally speaking, the interest in staking seems to remain high. While this amount will likely increase as the month continues, we can currently see that 15m SKL tokens plan to unstake at the next boundary (Feb 1). This is three times as much as new delegations that are coming in (i.e. accepted and proposed), which amount to around 5m SKL tokens at the time of writing. If we assume constant growth and that this ratio will remain until the end of January, then the staked supply would decline by roughly 80m, which would barely impact the staking ratio.
There are currently 47 validator organizations running a grand total of 152 nodes, whose resources are distributed across elastic SKALE-Chains. The average reward per node, which is split between the node operating entity and its delegators, is 211,075 SKL per node. With 152 nodes, this means the SKALE Network is currently paying out 32,083,400 SKL (or 1.04% of the supply) per epoch.
Using the median commission rate across validators of 12%, this means the average SKL delegator is currently earning 0.9152% per month on his SKL, translating to an APR of 11.55% (including compounding).
Looking at the stake distribution among nodes, we can see that a majority of the stake is controlled by a small subset of validators with only 3 of the 47 entities controlling right about 33% of the stake (see chart).
SKALE’s design seems to have successfully incentivized an engaged base of holders that are interested in supporting the project through staking. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the project is still in a very early phase of decentralization, which can be seen both by looking at the token distribution among addresses (the top 100 addresses hold a majority of all tokens), as well as in the stake distribution across validators. For more on the importance of censorship resistance in Proof-of-Stake, check out e.g. this thread by the Solana team.
Chorus One is offering staking services and building protocols and tools to advance the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem.
We are an active validator on the SKALE Network. Support our work by delegating to us. Learn more here.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
SKALE is an elastic blockchain network that gives developers the ability to easily provision highly configurable fully decentralized chains that are instantly compatible with Ethereum. SKALE chains can execute sub-second block times, run up to 2,000 tps per chain, and run full-state smart contracts in addition to decentralized storage, execute Rollups, and machine learning in EVM.
Website: https://skale.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/skalenetwork
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on December 10, 2020.
On November 18, 2020 the Oasis mainnet transitioned to a fully permissionless platform with ROSE tokens becoming transferable on the network. This constitutes a major milestone for the Oasis ecosystem and we are proud to be part of the initial 75 validators that made this possible!
Oasis and its privacy-preserving technologies allow developers to build entirely new types of applications in which users remain in control of their data enabling a better Internet and a responsible data economy.
Coinciding with the official mainnet launch, we are excited to announce that we have finished our Ledger integration of Oasis in Anthem enabling ROSE holders to transfer and delegate their tokens to earn staking rewards to initially earn up to 20% APY (more on the economics here).
Connect your Ledger device or try out Anthem’s portfolio feature with any Oasis address at: https://anthem.chorus.one
At Chorus One, our goal is to improve non-custodial participation in the staking economy to strengthen decentralized networks and help them deliver on the promise of an open and transparent financial and user-owned Web3 ecosystem. Anthem is a tool geared towards helping users participate in these emerging networks.
To support our work, delegate ROSE tokens to our node and safely earn rewards. Learn more here: https://chorus.one/networks/oasis/
PS: A recent Chrome update is resulting in the Ledger integration not working on Chrome and Brave for some users. To fix it, you will need to go to chrome://flags#new-usb-backend and disable that flag.
Chorus One is offering staking services and building protocols and tools to advance the Proof-of-Stake ecosystem.
Chorus One is a grantee of the Oasis Foundation and a genesis mainnet node operator on the Oasis network. Learn more about us in our Node Operator Spotlight.
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
A better internet is only a matter of time. The Oasis network is trying to fix what’s broken by giving users back control of their data using a combination of secure compute and a proof-of-stake blockchain.
Website: https://oasisprotocol.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oasisprotocol
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on November 26, 2020.
