This newsletter is supported by Chorus One, an operator of validating nodes and staking services on Proof-of-Stake networks.

STAKING ECONOMY @ DEVCON
Chris attended Devcon 5 this year. He organized the first-ever Staking Economy meetup the Tuesday at Devcon week. What started as a brief mention in the last issue turned into a 50+ member Telegram channel and a lunch with about 25 attendees with attendees from Solana, Coda, Harmony, Skale, Livepeer, Matic, Althea, NuCypher, Incognito, Forbole and Chainflow. Thanks to everyone who attended!

ARAGON COSMOS CHAIN - Ethereum project Aragon focused on creating and managing decentralized organizations is going to launch its own Proof-of-Stake chain using the Cosmos SDK toolkit. They made this decision following a feasibility reportcarried out by Chainsafe comparing multiple scenarios and the state of development of Polkadot versus Cosmos.

OPEN & CLOSE LIBRA - Devcon also saw the announcement of OpenLibra, an initiative to fork Facebook’s Libra and development project to port the MoveVM to Tendermint (Movemint). Additionally, some of Libra’s most prolific fintech partners left the association (eBay, Mercado Pago, Stripe, Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa).

ETH2.0 TRANSITION, COMPOSABILITY & SHARDING DESIGN - Vitalik Buterin went on a research spree during Devcon and published six research posts related to Eth2.0 covering the transition, composability of DeFi applications, a proposed update to the sharding design, and 3 other topics.

ATHEREUM - AVA Labs announced their friendly fork of Ethereum (EVM + current state as an AVA subnetwork with 99% ETH and 1% AVA). Check out the Chorus One Podcast episode and AMA with Kevin Sekniqi if you’re eager to learn more about AVA and their feature-specific subnetworks.

ETH2.0 STAKING CALCULATOR - A community-led UI to calculate returns for staking once Ethereum Proof-of-Stake goes live teased during Devcon. Looking forward to seeing the live version of this.

COSMOS GUARDIAN EVENT - A Cosmos-focused event with around 50 attendees. Topics included an Iris Network introduction, Adrian's Brink validator business plan talk, and a wide-ranging panel discussion. During the event, Sikka also announced their fee increase fee from 0% to 3%. The Cosmos Ocean party happened afterwards. It brought together various members of the community including Tendermint team members, validators, delegators and other projects building on the Cosmos SDK.

TRUSTWALLET STAKING PLATFORM - Trustwallet released their staking platform with support for Cosmos and Tron. Through the platform you can stake with a curated set of validators using Trustwallet or other wallets that support WalletConnect. In the near future, Ledger and Trezor, as well as other PoS blockchains (Tezos, Waves, IoTeX) and DeFi applications (Compound) will be supported as well.

NUCYPHER FINAL COUNTDOWN - Proxy re-encryption network NuCypher announced their $10.5mn “professional staking” round in which a variety of companies including PoW miners (Bitfury, Bitmain) participated. These players committed to locking their acquired stake (8% of the initial NU supply) for 2 years. NuCypher is in public testnet phase and will host an incentivized testnet followed by their WorkLock token distribution and mainnet launch ~Q1 2020.

STAKING SECURITY MODEL - Bison Trail’s Viktor Bunin wrote about the cost of attack comparing PoW and PoS making the point that attacks in PoS are more likely to result from hacks and thefts than from someone buying up the staking token.

COLD STORAGE INTERACTIONS - Coinbase detailing how they build a solution that allows their customers to participate in MakerDAO governance from cold storage. Including key management recommendations for protocol designer of blockchains that require participation (staking, governance,...).

NETWORKS NOT APPS - Chris published a post discussing how staking networks are building networks more like apps instead of networks. He makes the case for staking protocols to add DevOps resources. His take is that this will create a more balanced development approach and bridge the gap between project teams and their validators.

STAKING RESOURCES - A wave of posts from staking provider Figment Networks, e.g. covering how to evaluate networks and slashing risks. Find more of Figment’s content here.

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Staking Economy is written by Felix Lutsch from Chorus One with assistance from Chris Remus, operator of the Chainflow validators. Opinions expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Chorus One. All content is for informational purposes only and not intended as investment advice.

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