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.
We are about to witness a wave of high-profile Proof-of-Stake projects launch their main networks. At Chorus One, we have spent more than a year researching the ecosystem, designing our infrastructure, and most importantly, actively participated in multiple PoS networks. This led us to experience different approaches to bootstrap a staking community.
A key question is how to transition from testnets to a permission-less, decentralized network with millions of dollars of value at stake. This post summarizes the problem statement and introduces the concept and value proposition of incentivized testnets. Another follow-on post will cover more concrete insights, learnings, and recommendations on how to ideally bootstrap a staking community utilizing testnet competitions.
The goal for a PoS network is to be maintained by a multitude of independent, geographically diversified entities (validators). Voting power should (ideally) be somewhat evenly distributed across these validators to minimize the likelihood of a small number of actors wielding outsized control over the network. A genuinely decentralized network will also assist with network stability and favorable regulatory treatment.
Operating blockchain nodes costs money. There are costs related to provisioning and configuring the infrastructure. But there are also, often overlooked, costs associated with the time and skill (human capital) that is required to set up, operate, and maintain a validator.
Proof-of-Stake networks have a token that is supposed to compensate validators for these costs. But rewards are only paid out once the network is live. Who is incentivized to run nodes on a testnet with no compensation?
One approach is to assume that the community aka investors holding the token will run nodes themselves and will prepare adequately for the mainnet by participating in testnets. In reality, it is likely that the best node operators aren’t already invested in the project. The skills and capacity for investing capital in early-stage projects can be totally orthogonal to the skills required to operate a node well. Also, having investors as node operators will probably result in a more centralized network, especially considering concentrated token distributions.
Some node operators will participate in testnets in expectation of delegations on the mainnet. This implies the existence of some form of delegation mechanism. But what about validator skin in the game? Many projects emphasize the need for validators to have some economic stake in the project. This mostly translates to requiring a minimum buy-in for validators, which narrows the set of potential node operators to those that have enough capital to invest relatively large amounts themselves.
Additionally, because there are no economic incentives to participate in testnets, operators won’t put in too much effort to seriously test the software or optimize their architecture and operations. Finally, the choices of networks to validate on for node operators are increasing. Joining a testnet has associated opportunity cost for validators. In conclusion, PoS projects need a way to convince good and dedicated node operators that will increase the value of the network to join their ecosystem.
As a summary, the high-level goals to accomplish before launching a PoS mainnet are:
An emerging trend is to run an incentivized testnet competition that rewards participants with tokens based on their performance during the competition. The idea is to bootstrap a community of high-quality node operators while at the same time testing and improving network performance, robustness, incentives, and other features in adversarial conditions that resemble a live network.
The project that first established and carried out such a competition is Cosmos with their “Game of Stakes” (GoS). Multiple PoS projects are currently exploring their own testnet competitions. We’re aware of the Enigma incentivized testnet and many others that didn’t announce their plans publicly yet.
The common thread across these competitions is the desire to battle test the protocol’s cryptoeconomic design, network performance, and features such as governance and delegation. Often additional rewards (bounties) are offered to participants that scrutinize each part of the system to uncover code or incentive flaws.
Going back to the PoS network launch goals stated above, we can see that an incentivized testnet competition is an amazing tool to realize them:
Another positive side-effect of a testnet competition is that it enables project teams and validators to test and establish communication channels and coordination processes that will persist to the mainnet. This can include announcement and discussion channels, upgrade processes, call schedules, etc.
While GoS worked out incredibly well on many fronts, we believe that there is room for improvements for future incentivized testnet competitions. We’re always happy to share our experiences and feedback, reach out to us to learn more! A follow-on post will go into detail covering learnings and recommendations gathered from the GoS experience, our research, and conversations with validators, protocol designers, as well as other players in the staking space.
Dear Loom community,
We are excited to announce the launch of the Chorus One Loom validator today!
What drives us at Chorus One is the mission to create a more efficient and open world, where people have control over their own actions and assets. Gaming has become a big industry over the last decade and it is growing at a rapid pace. Many games have become their own little closed-loop economies. Players can buy and earn in-game items and this is becoming the primary way to monetize games.
But the assets of gamers in games aren’t truly theirs. The game economies created tend to be closed. You can’t move assets out of a game into a different game. You’re at the mercy of a company that can seize assets at will. You can’t just sell them to anyone. Or have a community fund and own a game collectively.
Blockchain, in the end, is about enabling human collaboration on a massive scale. We believe that gaming could be the bleeding edge in exploring the future of collaboration and creation. But the issue with games is that there are a lot of actions with relatively small monetary value. The low throughput and high costs of blockchains so far have made that adoption by games a big obstacle.
Loom plans to change that. Loom is a platform built on top of Ethereum that allows building large-scale decentralized applications. And the first area of focus for Loom is to create the blockchain platform for gaming. A place where games can issue assets, assets can be traded, games can become interoperable with each other and the emerging internet of blockchains.
This is a vision we believe in and we are excited to support it going forward. But besides the compelling vision, what else attracted us to Loom?
The Loom team is building cutting-edge technology, but they’re also pragmatic. They recognize that the goal is to bring blockchain capabilities to gaming, not to build fancy systems for their own sake. We think the tradeoffs the Loom team is making are solid.
It was only in January 2018 that Loom closed its funding round. Since then, they have made a massive amount of progress including launching CryptoZombies, a gamified course on Solidity that attracted an astonishing 370,000 signups.
Loom is using many technologies that we are interested in and bullish about. They are building one of the first Ethereum Plasma chains. They are using Tendermint as their consensus algorithm for the Plasma sidechain. They are planning to be one of the first blockchains to connect to the Cosmos Hub via IBC.
Now, you may ask yourself how we will be supporting the Loom Network. Here is what we will do:
We will be running a Loom PlasmaChain validator. We are scheduled to go live within the next two weeks and you will be able to delegate your LOOM to our validator in the very near future when the Loom Delegation UI is launched. Any LOOM holder will be able to earn tokens by delegating to our validator.
We will be participating in Loom’s governance and help steer the project to long-term success.
We will help the Loom team with making sure the network is stable, issues are ironed out and contribute tools for building a robust validator ecosystem.
We will publish regular updates about Loom to keep people informed about the project. These will include monthly video updates, but we also have an in-depth Loom Investment Thesis, which we will publish in the coming week.
Before we wrap up, a few words about Chorus One:
The company was co-founded by myself and Meher Roy. We have both been working in the blockchain space for many years. You may have heard us as co-hosts on Epicenter, which is one of the longest running and most popular blockchain podcasts. My involvement with Tendermint also goes long back. In 2015, I worked for Monax (then Eris Industries), which was the first user of Tendermint. In 2017, I became COO of the Tendermint team and helped run the Cosmos fundraiser and scale the organization. And just about a year ago, we decided to build a company to operate infrastructure for Proof-of-Stake networks.
Since then, we’ve assembled an outstanding team, which includes expertise in distributed systems, DevOps and information security, scaling tech companies and economic research. We are one of the leading Cosmos validators and will be launching staking services on many networks in the future.
We’d love to work with you make Loom reach the moon. Sign up for our email list and we’ll keep you up-to-date when we publish new content and when delegation on Loom goes live. You can also check out our blog for a lot of staking related content, follow us on Twitter, or join our dedicated community channels on Slack and Telegram. We would love it if you stop by and introduce yourself!
Brian Crain and the Chorus One Team
Photo from Unsplash by Matteo Vistocco.
Originally published at blog.chorus.one on February 11, 2019.
