Seeking Yield by Staked - Issue 83: ⛓️ Tracking ETH 2.0, ✅ NEAR Mainnet Phase II, 🖥️ Earning with BTC and ETH Webinar, 📊 Current Staking and Lending Yields, & More

This is the eighty-third issue of Seeking Yield by Staked, a weekly update about the most interesting things happening in crypto asset staking and lending.

⛓️ Tracking ETH 2.0

The purpose of this section is to track the progress of ETH 2.0 development.

• There were more than 150k ETH deposited to Zinken by 4,800 validators.
• The phase 0 mainnet deposit contract will be released during the next couple of weeks. The deposit contract will be open for ~3-4 weeks, followed by the mainnet chain genesis sometime around November.

If you hold ETH and would like to learn more about staking, please submit your information below. 

Learn more:

👉 Contact a Staked representative about staking ETH

👉 Our user-facing experience

👉 API documentation for launching lots of validators

👉 Sample code implementing the API

✅ NEAR Mainnet Phase II

Learn more:

👉 Find time to speak with someone from the Staked team here.

📜 Developer Docs

Interested integrating the Robo-Advisor for Yield (RAY) and/or staking-as-a-service into your business today? 

Integrating RAY is as simple as dropping in a few lines of code. Furthermore, partners looking to offer staking-as-a-service are able to integrate with our staking infrastructure directly through our API services.

Learn more:

👉 Staked Developer Documentation

👉 Reply to this email to speak with the Staked team about getting started today!

👉 Find time to speak with someone from the Staked team here.

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website   Twitter   Telegram   LinkedIn   Blog

August 2020 recap — Stay updated with Staked monthly updates!

This update covers our progress at Staked during August.

This past month...

Chain Updates

• Continued running validators on the ETH 2.0 multi-client testnet preparing for Phase 0. Details on ETH staking
• Launched support for the Cardano mainnet. Details on Cardano staking
• Launched Kyber staking claiming and reporting. Details on Kyber staking
• Continued to prepare for the NEAR unrestricted mainnet launch. Details on NEAR staking
• Launched support for The Graph Protocol incentivized testnet. Details on The Graph Protocol staking
• Launched support for the Secret Network testnet. Details on Secret Network 
• Joined the Chainlink network as an oracle node operator. More information about our participation in the Chainlink network
• Continued to support the SKALE mainnet in preparation for the next phase of launch. Details on SKALE staking
• Prepared for the NuCypher WorkLock and mainnet by running on the testnet. Details on the NuCypher WorkLock
• Continued to prepare for the Coda mainnet by running on the incentivized testnet. Details on Coda staking
• Continued to prepare for the Oasis mainnet launch. Details on Oasis staking

To get in touch with the Staked team about getting started, please reach out to sales@staked.us.

📊 Current Yields

📊 Robo-Advisor for Yield (RAY) Snapshot

If any of the above interests you or you would like to learn more, please find time to speak here or reach out to the team at sales@staked.us.

We look forward to continuing to provide our customers with best-in-class staking and lending infrastructure.

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

Due to record high gas prices on the Ethereum network, Staked will not be claiming Synthetix rewards for this week’s claim period. Gas prices have been 200+ gwei for the past week, and ~ 450 for the past 24 - 48 hours. Since the gas costs for the claims transactions are greater than the value of the rewards, it’s not economically rational to execute the claims transactions. Delegates can claim their own rewards until Wednesday September 2nd, 2020 at 4:30 AM EST via https://mintr.synthetix.io/. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

To set up Kyber rewards claiming and reporting, create a Staked account here. Next, click on Kyber from the token grid on the Setup Reporting page, and add the ETH public address used to delegate voting power to the Staked stakepool in the address input field. After clicking on the Add button, you will be redirected to Staked’s Reporting Summary.

If you already have a Staked account and are logged in, hover over the person icon in the upper right hand navigation, click on Holdings from the drop-down, and then add the ETH public address used to delegate to Kyber in the token grid. 

To claim your rewards for Epoch 1, 2 and 3, click on the Claim button for the corresponding epoch. When claiming rewards, make sure you are connected to the ETH address used for delegation to Staked, or the claim rewards transaction will fail. Rewards for epochs 1 - 3 will each need to be claimed separately.

Equally as importantly, we recently deployed an upgraded stakepool that enables delegates to claim rewards for all outstanding epochs in a single rewards claim transaction to save on gas costs.

To delegate to the upgraded stakepool, visit http://kyber.org, click on My Stake in the upper right hand navigation, and enter the following ETH address in the Delegate’s ETH Address field and click on the Delegate button:

0xe2Db444968A9D01F3473c065b8ece86838F0D8e5

Please make sure to update your delegation to the new stakepool before Epoch 4 ends on September 7th, 2020. Staked will stop voting and claiming on the old stakepool on this date.

** For details on how redelegation will impact your rewards (for the epoch in which you redelegate), please refer to the Kyber team’s walk through examples on voting power. In summary, you will not be eligible to earn rewards for the one epoch in which you redelegate. You will earn rewards by voting for the following epoch (n +1), and will be able to claim rewards for that epoch and all epochs going forward.        

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

To set up Kyber rewards claiming and reporting, create a Staked account here. Next, click on Kyber from the token grid on the Setup Reporting page, and add the ETH public address used to delegate voting power to the Staked stakepool in the address input field. After clicking on the Add button, you will be redirected to Staked’s Reporting Summary.

If you already have a Staked account and are logged in, hover over the person icon in the upper right hand navigation, click on Holdings from the drop-down, and then add the ETH public address used to delegate to Kyber in the token grid. 

To claim your rewards for Epoch 1, 2 and 3, click on the Claim button for the corresponding epoch. When claiming rewards, make sure you are connected to the ETH address used for delegation to Staked, or the claim rewards transaction will fail. Rewards for epochs 1 - 3 will each need to be claimed separately.

Equally as importantly, we recently deployed an upgraded stakepool that enables delegates to claim rewards for all outstanding epochs in a single rewards claim transaction to save on gas costs.

To delegate to the upgraded stakepool, visit http://kyber.org, click on My Stake in the upper right hand navigation, and enter the following ETH address in the Delegate’s ETH Address field and click on the Delegate button:

0xe2Db444968A9D01F3473c065b8ece86838F0D8e5

Please make sure to update your delegation to the new stakepool before Epoch 4 ends on September 7th, 2020. Staked will stop voting and claiming on the old stakepool on this date.

** For details on how redelegation will impact your rewards (for the epoch in which you redelegate), please refer to the Kyber team’s walk through examples on voting power. In summary, you will not be eligible to earn rewards for the one epoch in which you redelegate. You will earn rewards by voting for the following epoch (n +1), and will be able to claim rewards for that epoch and all epochs going forward.        

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

Staked is excited to announce that we have joined the The Graph Network incentivized testnet as a node operator. Enabling internet applications that are entirely powered by public infrastructure, The Graph has become the backbone of the burgeoning Ethereum and DeFi ecosystem. Today, a number of projects have built out subgraphs including Uniswap, RAY, Aave, Synthetix, ENS, and more.

The Graph Network decentralizes the query and API layer of Web3, removing a tradeoff dApp developers struggle with today: whether to build an application that is performant or to build an app that is truly decentralized.

Staked is currently participating in The Graph Network incentivized testnet, Mission Control. The testnet is designed to help validate economic design, test security, network capacity and indexer performance in the protocol. In Mission Control, indexers operate Graph Nodes and stake GRT to index and serve blockchain data, curators signal on subgraphs and stake GRT to indicate to Indexers which subgraphs are high-quality and should be indexed, and node operators compete as indexers that are rewarded based on contribution.

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

Staked is excited to announce that we have joined the Chainlink network as an oracle node operator. Staked's Chainlink node is live and actively providing reliable data feeds to over 25 DeFi applications built on Ethereum. We bring over three years of blockchain industry experience and provide secure backend infrastructure to power our Chainlink Node, further decentralizing and improving the security of the Chainlink Network. To view the Staked Chainlink oracle node operator, please visit the following link. 

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely and reliably access off-chain data providers, web APIs, on-chain randomness, enterprise systems, cloud networks, IoT devices, payment systems, other blockchains, and much more. By doing so, smart contracts can use external data to trigger their on-chain logic, as well as send outputs to traditional systems such as executing a bank payment.

The Chainlink protocol provides high availability and tamper-resistance to the delivery of off-chain data to the smart contract, as well as hardens data sourcing against any single source manipulation. Chainlink is the leading provider of highly secure and reliable oracle infrastructure to large enterprises (Google, Oracle, and SWIFT), leading DeFi dApps (Aave, Synthetix, and Bancor), and numerous layer-1 protocols (Ethereum, Tezos, Polkadot / Substrate).

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

About Chainlink

If you’re a developer and want to connect your smart contract to off-chain data and systems, visit the developer documentation and join the technical discussion on Discord. If you want to schedule a call to discuss the integration more in-depth, reach out here.

Chainlink is a general-purpose framework for building and running decentralized oracle networks that give your smart contract access to secure and reliable data inputs and outputs.

Website | Twitter | Reddit | YouTube | Telegram | Events | GitHub | Price Feeds | DeFi

July 2020 recap — Stay updated with Staked monthly updates!

This update covers our progress at Staked during July.

This past month...

Chain Updates

• Continued running validators on the ETH 2.0 testnet preparing for Phase 0. Details on ETH staking
• Launched support for the Elrond mainnet. Details on Elrond staking
• Continued to prepare for the NEAR unrestricted mainnet launch. Details on NEAR staking
• Planned support for The Graph Protocol incentivized testnet. Details on The Graph Protocol staking
• Launched support for the SKALE mainnet. Details on SKALE staking
• Continued to prepare for the Coda mainnet by running on the incentivized testnet. Details on Coda staking
• Continued to prepare for the Oasis mainnet launch. Details on Oasis staking
• Prepared for the NuCypher mainnet and WorkLock by running on the testnet. Details on NuCypher staking

More Updates

• We recently released an upgrade to RAY, which converted the protocol to the ERC-20 standard and introduced significant gas optimizations. Details on the upgrade

To get in touch with the Staked team about getting started, please reach out to sales@staked.us.

📊 Current Yields

📊 Robo-Advisor for Yield (RAY) Snapshot

If any of the above interests you or you would like to learn more, please find time to speak here or reach out to the team at sales@staked.us.

We look forward to continuing to provide our customers with best-in-class staking and lending infrastructure.

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

The purpose of Validator Views is to provide updates and information regarding proof of stake chain progress, timelines, and more. 

Polkadot Update - July 22, 2020

• The Polkadot network is now permissionless! The network recently completed Phase 3 (enable governance) and Phase 4 (Sudo module removal) of launch.
• DOT balance transfers will be enabled in the next phase of launch. Following this, core functionality of the protocol, such as parachain auctions and XCMP, will go live in the final phase of the launch.

Download the Polkadot Staking Guide

Please contact a Staked representative to learn more about Polkadot staking!

About Staked

Staked helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto by 5% — 100% annually through staking and lending. Staked runs validation nodes for proof-of-stake currencies and offers access to on- and off-chain lending options that provide an annualized yield of in-kind currency. Staked’s investors include Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, ParaFi Capital, Fabric Ventures, Global Brain, and other leading crypto investors.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Careers | Telegram

Due to the sharp increase in gas prices on the Ethereum network, Staked has implemented a minimum SNX delegation requirement of 2,000 staked SNX for our Synthetix rewards claiming and c-ratio management service effective today, Wednesday July 22nd.

Currently, Synthetix rewards must be claimed once per week. For each delegate, Staked runs 2 - 3 transactions. One to fix the c-ratio if it’s in penalty, one to claim rewards, and one to re-stake SNX rewards. At the current gas prices, each transaction can cost as much as .04 ETH, or $10, making the claim process as much as .12 ETH or $30 per week per delegate. Unfortunately, this makes the process uneconomical for lower value transactions. Paying materially more in gas costs to claim rewards than the rewards are actually worth simply isn’t viable.

As of today, all new delegates must be staking at least 2,000 SNX via Mintr in order to delegate to Staked. Staked will continue to claim rewards and manage the c-ratio for existing delegates with less than 2,000 SNX staked for the next two cycles ending on Wednesday July 29th and August 5th, respectively. The last cycle for which Staked will claim on behalf of existing delegates with less 2,000 SNX staked ends on Wednesday August 5th.

We encourage existing delegates with less than 2,000 SNX to undelegate all permissions (rewards claiming + re-staking) starting on Thursday August 6th to ensure they are ready to claim rewards themselves for the claim period ending on Wednesday August 12th. No action will be taken on accounts with less than 2,000 SNX that don’t undelegate, but no rewards will not be claimed either.

To un-delegate, please visit https://staked.us/v/synthetix, uncheck both permissions (claim rewards and re-stake rewards), click on Save Changes to initiate a MetaMask transaction, and confirm the transaction to broadcast it to the Ethereum network.

Staked is exploring the possibility of developing a pooled system for SNX rewards management that will accommodate holders with less SNX. 

Un-delegation Details

• Staked will stop claiming rewards for delegates with less than 2,000 staked SNX after the claim period ending on August 5th. Delegates with less than 2,000 staked SNX are encouraged to undelegate all permissions starting on Thursday August 6th.
• No action will be taken on accounts with less than 2,000 SNX that don’t undelegate, but no rewards will be claimed on their behalf by Staked either. Delegates will need to start claiming rewards via Mintr for the period ending on Wednesday August 12th.