[PoS Round-Up] Polkadot, NEAR & Celo Launch Mainnets

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

stakefish

27 May 2020 — 4 min read

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

With mainnet releases of the NEAR and Celo networks and the long-awaited launch of the Polkadot network, it’s been an exciting few weeks for the Proof of Stake ecosystem!

Other highlights include Tezos overtaking EOS in several important metrics and a proposal to bring multi-chain smart contract capabilities to Cosmos.

Cosmos

CosmWasm

Confio, the creator of CosmWasm, submitted the 25th Cosmos governance proposal, which passed today with 99.99% approval. This means community-funded development will begin on integrating CosmWasm into the Cosmos Hub, enabling (limited) smart contract functionality. Multi-chain smart contracts would be a novel and potentially very powerful tool for creating robust decentralized applications.

Cosmos governance proposal 25 passed with 99.99% of the votes

Game of Zones

Game of Zones, a competition designed to stress-test Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), is in full swing. Out of 183 registered participants, about 130 (including stakefish!) successfully launched testnet chains during phase 1, which kicked off in the first week of May. Phase 1b is currently underway.

Zcash

The Zcash Foundation teased a plan to utilize privacy-coin heavyweight Zcash to bring privacy features to Cosmos.

Tezos

Overtaking EOS

In late April, Tezos overtook EOS in volume, price, and value locked in staking, becoming the number-one Proof of Stake cryptocurrency for these metrics.

Integration with Chainlink

ChainLink has added Tezos to the growing list of blockchains it provides decentralized oracles for. Decentralized price feeds should help smooth the way for Tezos’ burgeoning DeFi ecosystem.

Polkadot

As of today, the initial phase of the long-awaited Polkadot mainnet is officially live! In the words of founder Gavin Wood:

“Polkadot allows every coder to also be a businessman. They just place an algorithmic service online and it’s a self-sovereign, autonomous, economically strong business. The world, in some sense, belongs to coders.”

Chainlink

Verifiable Random Function

In addition to supporting Tezos, Chainlink has introduced VRF (Verifiable Random Function), a provably fair and verifiable source of randomness. Historically, on-chain sources of randomness have been susceptible to manipulation by miners, so VRF is a welcome solution.

Popular no-loss savings game PoolTogether has already announced that it will be using VRF for its winner selection.

Kava Integration

Kava Labs has announced that Chainlink’s price oracles are actively being integrated into the Kava blockchain, which means any Cosmos chain will have access to them. The team hopes this addition will spur on the development of a robust Cosmos DeFi ecosystem.

NEAR Protocol

Hot on the heels of raising $21.6M in a token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEAR announced the limited launch of its mainnet on May 4.

NEAR is a Proof of Stake blockchain that aims to use sharding to enable the development of highly scalable and performant decentralized applications.

Some hint that NEAR may be a serious rival to Ethereum, which has dominated the crowded decentralized application platform space since its launch in 2015.

Celo

On May 18, Celo announced the launch of its mainnet, which means the Celo network’s native Celo Gold tokens (whose CoinList auction sold out, raising $10M) are now transferable on-chain. Congratulations to the Celo Foundation team!

Celo’s goal is to “bank the unbanked” by providing a Proof of Stake blockchain platform together with a set of open financial tools accessible by anyone with a smartphone.

Cardano

Smart contract platform Cardano has begun its transition to the Shelley era, a move to increase the degree of decentralization of the network. A detailed write-up is available on the Cardano blog.

Solana

On May 9, 54 days after the genesis block was created, the Solana network mined its 10 millionth block!

Congratulations to the Solana team!

Oasis Labs

The Oasis Team has teamed up with UC Berkeley and the National University of Singapore to develop tools for privacy-preserving contact tracing, an important element in managing the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Ethereum 2.0

To help ecosystem participants prepare for the eventual launch of Ethereum 2.0, Consensys has put together a report surveying ETH holders’ “motivations, preferences, concerns, and pain points when it comes to staking on Ethereum 2.0.”

Survey results on ETH holder staking preferences

stakefish

Last week, we announced the news that we will be halting our Loom Network and BOS validators to free up some time to better meet the needs of our community members and partner projects.