When the Cosmos Network launched, we set our initial commission rate to 15%. At the time, that was around the median commission rate and we were able to attract many delegators.
Since then there has been significant downward pressure on commission rates. As a result, today our rate is no longer competitive.
To make sure we are giving our loyal delegators a great deal, we have decided to reduce the Chorus One fee on Cosmos.
Our new commission rate on the Cosmos Hub will be 7.5%!
We are convinced that with our reduced rates, we have one of the most compelling offerings on the Cosmos Hub:
We run a best in-class validator security architecture including automated failover, enterprise-grade key management utilizing HSMs, validation nodes distributed across continents, and external security audits. There are few who have invested as heavily in security and architecture as we have and none who give you as much insights to verify yourself. You can check out our validator architecture document here. If you are looking to minimize the risk for your ATOMs, staking with Chorus One is the way to go.
Sleep soundly knowing your ATOMs are protected.
We are the leading validator when it comes to producing high quality content and educational materials about Cosmos, Proof-of-Stake and the internet of blockchains. We help you learn about the network and are doing crucial work to help the Cosmos ecosystem grow and thrive.
Check out some examples of our work:
Stake with Chorus One and help grow the pie for everyone by building a vibrant and educated community.
We have partnered with Regen Network and estimated our carbon footprint. We are offsetting approximately 3x our estimation to ensure that Chorus One’s operations have a climate positive impact.
Our community voted to support the Rainforest Foundation. Learn more about how we are turning our validator climate positive. 🌴
With Proof-of-Stake we have a chance to build a new social and financial fabric leading to more abundance and opportunity for everyone.
By staking with the first climate-positive validator, you’re helping blockchains be a force for environmental sustainability and regeneration.
We are at the forefront of researching improvements to Proof-of-Stake and Cosmos. For example, we have been driving work around delegation vouchers and won the Berlin Cosmos Hackathon together with Sikka with our delegation voucher implementation. We think delegation vouchers could enable the Cosmos DeFi wave and unleash permissionless innovation for the internet of blockchains.
Help Cosmos evolve and innovate to become the foundation for the internet of blockchains.
We have been building a web application for the advanced crypto investor. It will allow you to perform all the basic actions such as staking, sending coins and voting in governance. But in addition, it will also have quality data and provide human-readable insights into the performance of your holdings. A first version is scheduled to launch this quarter! Stay tuned.
Stake with Chorus One and support better tools and user experiences for Proof-of-Stake and decentralized finance.
If interested, get in touch at hello@chorus.one, stop by our Telegram group, or join our recently formed Discord channel!
PS: We adjusted our commission rates today, but based on our maximum daily commission rate change of 2% it will take a bit under a week until we actually reach 7.5%.
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on August 7, 2019.
Blockchain fees are an underexplored topic that plague the UX of decentralized applications. Currently, Ethereum users need to hold a balance of ETH to pay for gas fees. There are many workarounds like meta transactions to make onboarding users easier. An often discussed concept is “economic abstraction” — letting users pay fees in other tokens aside from ETH. The Cosmos multi-token fee model aims to embrace this concept. In this model, validators are able to accept different token denominations as fees by whitelisting tokens and configuring minimum fees they are willing to accept per denomination. But using this model also comes with UX implications for the network, especially for stakers that will receive paid transaction fees as compensation.
In the Cosmos ecosystem, transactions will be routed through the Cosmos Hub via the inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC). Since transaction fees are paid out as rewards to stakers, a world where users pay in multiple tokens also means that those staking will, by design, receive a fraction of these tokens as rewards.
In this world, the UX problem lies on the side of those providing their capital and services to secure the network. Small delegators might end up with tiny balances of fee tokens worthless to them. So how do we get rid off this dust? 🧹
As part of the Cosmos Seoul hackathon, we conceptualized a solution to this problem and won third prize with it. Babelfish is a protocol designed to accumulate fee tokens across a period of time (number of blocks) and to automatically auction them off in a batch. Our design uses Atoms as the auction pair. It distinguishes between individual auctions for popular payment tokens and basket auction for niche tokens.
The hackathon implementation uses a first price open bid auction. The following will walk through a hypothetical cBTC (BTC on a Cosmos peg zone) auction:
For a more detailed description and discussion of potential issues check out our in-depth writeup on Babelfish here.
Babelfish could provide a business model to the Cosmos Hub to offer fee auctions as a service to other blockchains. Additionally, the protocol also enables delegation vouchers to work in a multi-token environment. There are quite possibly some alterations and alternatives to this design. Making use of second price, dutch, or closed auctions is possible. An interesting alternative to our solution could also lie in an automatic conversion of fees using a Uniswap-style DEX. We are excited to contribute our research to making a user-friendly internet of blockchains a reality.
About Chorus One
Website: https://chorus.one
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone
Telegram: https://chorus.one/telegram
Discord: https://chorus.one/discord
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on August 5, 2019.
Today, we are proud to announce our joint effort with Regen Network to lay the groundwork for a sustainable Proof-of-Stake validation ecosystem. As the first step of this partnership, we estimated our carbon footprint and will offset it with support from the Regen Network team. To do this, will instantiate an agreement leveraging a pilot project with the Rainforest Foundation on the Regen Ledger (Regen’s public blockchain network).
Our focus on advancing Proof-of-Stake is largely driven by the desire to create a more sustainable, efficient, and scalable way of achieving consensus in a permissionless decentralized network. To illustrate the urgency: empirical analysis shows that the Bitcoin network’s range of yearly carbon emissions currently lies between those of nation-states Bolivia and Portugal ( MIT CEEPR 2018).
Proof-of-Work is the perfect example of an economic concept called negative externalities or external costs. A miner’s potential to turn a profit by spending resources on energy creates costs that society has to bear. We are positive that there are more scalable ways of creating secure, sybil-resistant, permissionless networks using cryptography, mechanism design, and cryptoassets as collateral.
We estimated our carbon footprint taking into account all of our node infrastructure in data centers and supporting infrastructure in the cloud, as well as other factors relating to the operation of our business, e.g. airline miles traveled. Our calculations yielded an estimated 72.69 tons of CO² since Chorus One started operating. Since our estimation is based on multiple assumptions and because we are committed to having a climate positive impact, we will offset an equivalent of 200 tons of CO², about three times as much as our estimation.
Currently, the Regen Network team is working with a few different ecological projects around the world. We carried out a poll to get our community’s feedback on which one of 3 pre-selected projects we should support to turn our validator operations carbon negative. The Rainforest Foundation and their efforts to save the Amazon rainforest got the most support with 42% of all votes. Learn more about this initiative here.
We aim to continue to collaborate with the Regen team, validators and other players in the ecosystem to reduce the impact operating distributed networks has on earth’s climate through estimations and working out how to best perform the offsetting using verifiable contractual agreements on the Regen Ledger.
We hope to inspire others to offset their emissions and plan to work out a proposal to allow the Cosmos validator ecosystem to become climate neutral, potentially utilizing the community fund. If you are a validator interested in offsetting your carbon emissions, please contact me (@FelixLts on Twitter and Telegram) and I will assist you with estimations and the overall process.
Cover photo by Jakub Gorajek on Unsplash.
Links:
Carbon Offset Pilot Program Survey: https://form.jotformeu.com/91782610629361
Chorus One Podcast Green Validator Episode
Chorus One Podcast Regen Network Episode
Regen Network: https://regen.network
Regen Network Community Telegram
Chorus One: https://chorus.one
Chorus One Community Telegram
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on July 22, 2019.
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the Chorus One Podcast. This podcast hosted by our team members will focus on ideas, protocols, and projects that facilitate the creation of a permissionless, open financial system.
You can find the first three episodes, as well as future weekly episodes, on all major podcasting platforms: Libsyn, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Google Play, and Stitcher.
It’s no secret that researching and publishing content to educate, generate awareness, and to publicly participate in questions of network governance is the cornerstone of the Chorus One vision to foster “ a community of engaged token holders that work together to shape the future of decentralized networks “.
With the Chorus One Podcast, we are structuring this effort and aim to provide a consistent outlet that covers relevant topics and projects tangential to Chorus One on a weekly basis. This intersection involves staking, blockchain governance, interoperability, and decentralized finance in general.
We aim to experiment with different formats, so it won’t be a standard interview-only podcast. Some episodes will explain specific concepts, others will feature a discussion with stakeholders, e.g. around a relevant governance topic, and some will just be interviews with projects from the space. What you can be sure about is that there will at least be one of our hosts/team members ( Brian, Meher, Brendan, or Felix) and lots of pertinent, in-depth information on the emerging open financial system.
The first episode is an introduction to the podcast. It is structured as an intro to our company, the podcast, and hosts covering what currently excites us most about the crypto space.
The second episode is an interview with Alfonso Cevallos conducted by Felix. Alfonso is a researcher from the Web3 Foundation working on the Proof-of-Stake implementation that is going to be used in Polkadot (Nominated Proof-of-Stake).
The third episode is an interview in which Meher dives deep into the Terra stablecoin protocol with Nicholas Platias, Head of Research at Terra Money.
We’re looking forward to having you as a listener and releasing weekly episodes each Monday. Please join our Telegram if you have suggestions for who or what to feature on the podcast!
Originally published at https://blog.chorus.one on July 2, 2019.
