Let me tell you a piece of news first. At the beginning of February, Staked.us, a start-up company focused on providing services to institutions in the PoS field, completed a seed round of financing of 4.5 million US dollars. The well-known blockchain investment institution PanteraCapital led the investment, and Coinbase and other capital parties followed.
Don’t underestimate this news, it actually reflects the potential business opportunities and possible rich scenarios behind PoS. The capital side involved in the investment jumped out and said: In 2019, PoS consensus projects will reach 25% of all projects, and Staking will bring 2.5 billion US dollars in revenue, and there is huge room for growth.
Indeed, the early PoW consensus created major mining pools (such as F2Pool and AntPool) and mining machine businesses (such as Bitmain). Now, PoS-related services are also emerging.
Please note that the word "Staking" will be mentioned more and more in 2019, you must understand what it means now. Staking is a unique action in the PoS consensus, which means that the holders implement the rights and interests related to the coins they hold through "Staking".
Ethereum is about to shift from PoW consensus to PoS consensus. The current scene of using mining machines to mine ETH will gradually disappear. Instead, all Ethereum token holders will mine through the action of "Staking". Not only Ethereum, but also blockchain participants who have been investing and observing for a long time must have noticed that in the first half of 2018, the EOS-based DPOS consensus has brought out the discussion of entrustment and dividends, which is actually the equity dividend under Staking. Because DPOS itself is a deformation of PoS. In the near future, the market will see that star projects such as Cosmos, Polkadot, Cardano, and Difinity will all adopt PoS consensus after they go online.
Abroad, a group of teams are ready to show their talents in the PoS field and explore the business opportunities in it. The two most direct directions in the PoS field, one is to provide operational services for institutional nodes, such as the startup Staked.us just mentioned, as well as stakecapital, P2P validators, etc., and the other is to provide agency services for individual investors. Such as Wetez, Cryptium Labs, Figment, Staking withus, etc. These two directions are through running node services, and charging about 5-25% of service fees from the demand side of Staking services.
In the field of PoS, the economic system of most projects relies on the issuance of additional tokens of the chain as rewards, through which tokens are used to motivate different nodes to maintain the network and encourage more people to participate in ecological construction. In the projects we observed, most of the additional tokens will be shared with the holders instead of the nodes, and the nodes only charge the most basic handling fees.
As long as the token holders participate in the staking process, they can enjoy different proportions of rewards issued by different chains, ranging from 7% of DASH to 150% of Livepeer. As a general investor, in addition to the long-term currency appreciation return of the original investment token, because of the annual issuance of PoS, there will be an additional fixed income like a bond. This will be the source of the new economy of cryptocurrency, and all changes will come about. .
So in China, which institutions have noticed the ecological changes brought about by PoS and started business?
1. Huobi Mining Pool
The number one player is Huobi. In addition to the basic exchange business, Huobi opened the service of Huobi Mining Pool on March 30, 2018. In addition to being compatible with traditional PoW mining pools, Huobi Mining Pool also added PoS business features. For example, when EOS was the most popular in June last year, Huobi provided entrusted voting tools for each EOS node. Token holders can vote for each EOS node on Huobi, and voting can earn points, which successfully attracted a group of flow. In addition to EOS, Huobi Mining Pool also supports relatively well-known Tron, ONT and CMT. Huobi uses a new token HPT to package this entire business system. We speculate that Huobi will deeply enter the staking market driven by PoS, which is gradually taking off, to enrich the value of HPT and the flow of Huobi ecology.
2. Cobo Wallet
Cobo Wallet has received USD 13 million in Series A financing, led by Danhua Capital, and has broken through many multi-chain wallets. Cobo has a big core difference. It calls itself a "profitable" wallet. Behind this is actually a scenario created by providing users with PoS rewards. At present, PoS mining projects such as DASH, VET, and DCR can be seen on the Cobo wallet.
3.Wetez
As the largest Tezos node in China, Wetez has been paying attention to PoS-related projects and has made a node reward wallet designed for PoS. The wallet starts from Tezos, a well-known foreign project. On the Wetez wallet, general currency holders can entrust to different nodes and see the rewards of each cycle in the wallet. The future development roadmap of this wallet will include high-quality PoS projects, such as Cosmos, Cardano, Polkadot, etc.
4.Hashquark
Wanxiang's Hashquark also cut into the PoS node service earlier. HashQuark is a blockchain mining pool that focuses on POS and DPOS mechanism public chains. Currently, it uses centralized coin deposits and establishes a membership system to accumulate user coins to run nodes and allow users to get rewards.
In addition to the teams mentioned above, there are many other teams, such as Bixin Wallet and Babbitt’s Matpool, who are also working on this. In the future, PoS elements will be seen in more exchanges and wallets.
The era of PoS has quietly arrived. With the launch of star projects, different teams in the community will come out to start proxy services and educate users on what staking is. The successful transformation of Ethereum will be a great catalyst in the PoS field, and every cryptocurrency investor will recognize the trend of Staking.
The tokens holding the PoS consensus are not just as simple as rewarding income. Each token is a representative of the rights and interests of users on each chain. The characteristics of the chains are different, and the rights and interests are also different. Whether it is reward income, voting, resource use and leasing, etc., they can all be called equity.
Businesses based on rights and interests will gradually emerge, such as: CPU and RAM rental services on EOS, fixed-income products for wallets, HPT points rewarded by Huobi, and businesses related to future blockchain governance and voting.
