An upcoming decentralized finance project built on Polkadot (DOT) is looking to unlock liquidity that would be tied up in staking as part of its consensus mechanism. Called Stafi, short for Staking Finance, the project wants to implement liquid staking on Polkadot and potentially other blockchains as well. A drawback of staking funds for consensus is that they cannot be used for anything else while locked up. “Liquid staking” as implemented by Stafi would allow users to maintain the ability to transact with their tokens while also participating in consensus and receiving staking rewards on their money. Cointelegraph spoke with …

The long awaited Ethereum 2.0 network upgrade has taken one step closer to launch with a preliminary date announced for the final planned public testnet. The platform’s launch coordinator, Danny Ryan (@djrtwo) shared the news on the testnet’s discussion board on Discord. “After discussions with client teams, the next multi-client testnet (mainnet config including min validator numbers) will have a min genesis time of August 4th,” Further details would be made public in a couple of days, the Ethereum developer added. Phase 0 of ETH 2.0 has been running on various testnets since the genesis block was created for Beacon …

As the crypto community is anticipating Ethereum 2.0, a large number of Ether (ETH) holders already have enough ETH for staking on the network. Nearly 80% of total Ether (ETH) supply is being held by non-crypto exchange wallets exceeding the amount required for staking on Ethereum 2.0, according to the latest “Ethereum 2.0 Economic Review” report. Published on July 16, the report is by executives at the Ethereum blockchain infrastructure developer ConsenSys. The network accumulates ETH required for staking on Ethereum 2.0 According to the report, 77.7% of the current ETH supply, or about 86.6 million ETH, lives in wallets …

$16.7 million worth of decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity protocol Kyber Network’s KNC token have been locked up in staking within 24 hours of the service’s launch. The milestone was noted by Kyber co-founder Loi Luu, who tweeted to announce that nearly 10.5 million KNC had already been staked. Hype for the launch drove a major rally over the months leading up to the staking commencement, with the price of KNC more than tripling against the dollar since late-April. However, KNC has posted a 10% price retracement since topping out roughly one week ago. KNC/BTC since launch: Coin360 Kyber’s network also …

In a special announcement made at the Unitize conference on July 6, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Terra revealed a new DeFi savings product called Anchor that aims to offer dependable interest rates on stablecoins deposits. The companies involved in the creation of Anchor plan to launch it across their respective blockchains at the end of Q3 this year and scale across to other PoS blockchains in the future. Do Kwon, founder and CEO of Terra, explained in a prepared statement: “While DeFi staples such as Maker and Compound have been revolutionary in creating fully decentralized crypto money markets, the volatility of …

The Hashing It Out podcast recently hosted Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin. During the show, he explained how he would handle Ethereum’s creation differently if he were building it now. Buterin acknowledged the presence of a number of changes, both large and small, such as putting more thought into gas costs for example. “We didn’t really do a good job of setting those at the beginning,” Buterin said on the July 2 podcast interview. Buterin’s larger changes involve sharding and Proof-of-Stake After mentioning gas prices and other smaller alterations he would have made from the start, Buterin took a look at …

Elrond (ERD) believes it has what it takes to overcome the behemoths of the proof-of-stake, or PoS, world. This Romanian PoS blockchain raised $3.25 million in an Initial Exchange Offering, or IEO, in July 2019. Elrond CEO, Beniamin Mincu, told Cointelegraph that Binance’s IEO process was very tough. He explained though that through perseverance, the project was able to raise the necessary funds, and receive significant exposure. Ethereum 2.0 — ahead of schedule Elrond’s technological stack reads very similar to what has been anticipated for Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 — sharding, secure PoS, a virtual machine; however, Mincu drew a number …

Proof-of-Stake, or PoS, blockchain Qtum successfully completed a hard fork of its testnet in preparation for the launch of its mainnet hard fork. According to a statement sent to Cointelegraph, the upgrade went live on the testnet at block 625,000 on June 29. This event officially introduced offline staking in Qtum. Mainnet hard fork to happen in August or at block 680,000 The testnet event – scheduled to start on July 6 – is the last phase before Qtum launches its mainnet hard fork. This is expected to happen on August 28, 2020, or at block height 680,000. As of …

BRD recently updated its wallet compatibility, allowing storage of Hedera Hashgraph's HBAR coin. "In addition to the integration in the BRD consumer wallet, Hedera’s network data will be supported in BRD’s recently launched enterprise-grade blockchain data integration platform Blockset, which powers the BRD consumer wallet," said a June 25 statement provided to Cointelegraph. Blockset aids enterprise endeavors Aimed at the enterprise sector, Hedera touts itself as a proof-of-stake, or PoS, public ledger ecosystem, according to its website. The technology uses what it calls Hashgraph network consensus. The project's incorporation with Blockset plays on Hedera's enterprise lean. Essentially, entities looking into …

A recent post on Ethereum's blog shows the network's version 2.0 is still coming, noting several developments since its last update. "Aside from written updates [...] and other public summaries, client teams, contributors, and community members/prospective-validators have been busy," said a June 23 post on the Ethereum blog. Ethereum 2.0 still en route A long time coming, Ethereum 2.0, or ETH 2.0, still has not yet gone live with the network's transition into proof-of-stake, or PoS, consensus. The network's blog posted its 12th ETH 2.0 update recently, stating a team hard at work. The update showed a number of main …

Most people in the cryptocurrency world are aware that network validation often comes in one of two forms: proof-of-work or proof-of-stake. There are others, but these systems are common and power many of the most popular blockchains. They take the same basic problem — verifying transactions — and solve it in unique ways. However, both offer different solutions to the ongoing debate over scaling. Does one have a true advantage over the other, or are they just different philosophies? We’ll take a look at both. Proof-of-work, explained Most people have heard of Bitcoin (BTC) “miners,” but just what do they …

Alongside the ultimate scalability and security for the Ethereum network, the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 upgrade to a proof-of-stake model promises to bring additional, new benefits to its users, too. One of the main attractions, which encourages buying Ether (ETH), is a staking model that allows receiving passive income for the validation of transactions. And here, the users are able to choose between two different options: The first implies depositing 32 ETH and running a validator node software, and the second allows for staking without having to deposit or run nodes by joining third-parties’ pools. The numbers speak for themselves, as …