[PoS Round-Up] eth2 deposit contract expected mid-November, Cosmos Stargate developments

PoS Round-Up is our focused biweekly report on the major news in and around the Proof of Stake ecosystem.

stakefish

27 Oct 2020 — 4 min read

PoS Round-Up is our focused biweekly report on the major news in and around the Proof of Stake ecosystem

Ethereum

Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract release date

The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract is expected to be released around mid-November, according to Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan, slightly longer than the estimate of “the next few days” published in the October 18 edition of What’s New in Eth2.

Vitalik continues call for L2 adoption

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin continues to push rollups as a critical component of the network’s scaling roadmap.

“If you’re listening to this and you are an exchange or you are a wallet or you are a mining pool or you are a major user — even just a regular — then you should be aware of what rollups are and what they do. Basically, what your strategy is, in terms of moving over to them.”

Vitalik speaking at ETHOnline earlier this month

Bits & Pieces

MetaMask released a Swaps feature to enable decentralized trades directly from MetaMask (there are mixed feelings about the 0.875% fee)
Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum Rollup’s public testnet has been released
A new Ethereum developer portal has launched
CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert has some very nice things to say about Ethereum

Stake with us! stake.fish/ethereum

Cosmos

Development of the long-awaited Stargate upgrade is now 97%-99% complete! The Big Bang Stargate testnet is now up and running.

Zaki Manian published a nice overview of the decentralized Stargate development process.

Stake with us! stake.fish/cosmos

Polkadot

Polkadot has announced plans to release a trustless wrapped Bitcoin asset called PolkaBTC in early 2021. Integrations are planned with high-profile ecosystem projects like Acala Network, Edgeware, and Moonbeam.

Stake with us! stake.fish/polkadot

NEAR Protocol

A validator vote has brought NEAR to Phase 2 of mainnet! As of last week, staking rewards are live.

“‘It is now possible for anyone to send or receive tokens, to create accounts, to participate in validation, to launch applications or to otherwise use the network,’ the team said in a release shared with CoinDesk.”

Stake with us! stake.fish/near

Solana

Non-fungible tokens can now be created on Solana. The first Solana NFT was sold yesterday on Project Serum!

Stake with us! stake.fish/solana

Mina Protocol

O(1) Labs, the team behind Mina Protocol, has raised another $10.9M in funding from a group of Asian investors led by Three Arrows Capital and Bixin Ventures. This brings the team’s total funding to date to $29.4 million.

stakefish

We published a new blog post to help you choose a validator to stake with when Ethereum 2.0 launches.

Our Head of Strategy and Operations Jun Kim gave a talk at Liquidity2020 on the convergence of staking and DeFi. The slides are available here.

Voting is open for CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2020! stakefish founder Chun Wang made the list “For encoding ‘History has repeated’ on the #Bitcoin halving block.”