[PoS Round-Up] Reddit Partners With The Ethereum Foundation, Polkadot Transitions to NPoS

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

stakefish

Jun 24, 2020 — 3 min read

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

Ethereum

Reddit took the crypto community by surprise by announcing The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off, a competition run in conjunction with the Ethereum Foundation to find a scaling solution that will enable the platform to bring its Community Points project to mainnet.

With 430 million monthly users, a site-wide program based on Ethereum could result in a significant boost in crypto adoption.

Polkadot

Polkadot has successfully made the transition from PoA to NPoS, an important step toward decentralizing the network. In short, this means that the network is now operated by a set of community validators instead of by the Web3 Foundation Team. Check out founder Gavin Wood’s blog post on this milestone for an overview of the process.

In other news, Interlay has released a proof of concept for a trustless bridge between the Bitcoin and Polkadot networks. A functioning Bitcoin bridge would be an invaluable asset for potential Polkadot DeFi projects. CoinDesk covers the story here.

Stake your DOT with us!

Tezos

In the wake of last year’s Financial Action Task Force guidance update advising nations to require crypto companies to store and disclose user data for transactions above a minimum threshold value, Tezos and Algorand are making efforts to simplify compliance with the new “travel rule.”

These projects are not the first to react to the guidelines, and it will be interesting to see which projects choose to follow in their footsteps.

Last week, the Tezos network also baked its one millionth block!

Storj

Storj Labs has announced a partnership with MongoDB, enabling MongoDB users to back up their data directly to the Storj Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage solution. MongoDB is one of the most popular database technologies.

Band Protocol

The launch of BandChain Phase 0 was successful, and the network is now live! Band Protocol aims to displace ChainLink from its leading position in the decentralized oracle space.

Oasis

On June 17, the Amber Network, a release candidate for the privacy-oriented Oasis mainnet, went live. Congratulations to The Oasis Team!

SKALE

Ethereum Layer 2 solution SKALE Network plans to launch its mainnet on June 30. Details about the three-phase launch process are available on the company blog.

Algorand

Motivated by the goal of reducing the incidence of costly bugs, Algorand and Blockstack have announced that they will be developing a cross-platform smart contract language called Clarity.

Cosmos

The Stargate testnet is expected to be launched on July 27. Among many significant upgrades, Stargate will bring Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) to the Cosmos mainnet, a major milestone for the entire blockchain community. For a detailed overview of Stargate, check out this blog post.

Tendermint has also announced the establishment of a board of directors headed by newly appointed CEO Peng Zhong, who became the company’s first employee in 2015.

stakefish

As the winner of the Cosmos Game of Zones Most Creative Zone award, we wanted to share with you our design process from zero to finished product, plus a little about our motivations for building our Tamagotchi Zone. Read the full story here.

We have also decided to delegate our GoZ winnings to our grant.fish program! We are committed to funding public goods infrastructure for the Cosmos ecosystem and hope to see the program continue to grow.

Read our grant.fish launch article for more information and to learn how to contribute.

Chainlink

The popularity of ChainLink’s decentralized oracles continues to grow. Some of the latest integrations include:

China’s national Blockchain Services Network, with technical support from IRISnet
Distributed energy resource trading platform Dipole
0x relayer Bamboo Relay
Credit scoring company Finscore
Charity-focused NFT project Wildcards
Blockchain and distributed collaboration platform Ontology

NuCypher

Privacy-focused NuCypher has announced the Aragon-based NuCypher DAO, the project’s new governance organization. Any staker, regardless of stake size, will be able to make a governance proposal.