Thank you once again to everyone who tuned in for our call on Thursday! It was a great pleasure to tell you about our plans and answer your questions, and we cannot wait to have another call soon.
Meanwhile, below is the summary of everything that was mentioned on the call, along with the link to a Zoom recording and the relevant materials.
1. We are approaching mainnet in great shape.
Our infrastructure has been gradually improved for security and stability over the 7-month period of public beta (since May). The only remaining improvement is to fix a bug in the Prysm client, which causes a 2–5% loss in performance when running at a large scale. We expect the solution to arrive before our first validators start attesting but are working on our own solution as we speak. Either way, we expect nothing but a perfect performance in the mainnet!
2. We have wrapped up the beta and have all eyes on launch.
Over 1,400 unique addresses took part in the StakeWise v2 beta since early November, and over 7,000 validators were created in total since August 2020. We want to build on this foundation for the mainnet launch and see everyone who took part in the beta in the ranks of our loyal community!
3. We will be transitioning to a DAO structure shortly after the launch.
We have seen the Decentralized Finance ecosystem develop rapidly over the course of 2020 and want StakeWise to become a part of it. That is why we excited to announce that StakeWise will become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization very soon!
Becoming a DAO means that the users of our protocol will have an opportunity to receive governance tokens and guide the main parameters of our system. This means that you as users will be able to take control of the platform. Holders of governance tokens will be able to vote for the protocol’s parameters and participate in the Insurance Fund, an entity created to protect the Pool from losses experienced in slashing events. As such, governance token can be staked in the Insurance Fund to enable voting and insure the protocol, in exchange for commissions generated by the Pool.
Among the parameters that can be voted on are staking commissions, fees paid to node operators, inclusion & ejection of new and old node operators and oracles, Insurance Fund rules, governance token distribution mechanisms, re-staking patterns, withdrawal procedures etc. StakeWise team will get to scouting and vetting the potential node operators shortly after the launch.
We want to use several governance token distribution mechanisms to encourage staking with us, provision of liquidity for our tokens, and removal of the discount for rETH2 token in the secondary market, which would allow compound staking. The proposed token distribution mechanism is the following:
i. Stake rETH2 in the special contract and earn governance tokens. This rewards all users of the platform proportionally to their capital contribution & loyalty, removes part of rETH2 from circulation in the secondary market and potentially eliminates the discount to ETH due to a stream of governance tokens one can expect to earn by staking rETH2.
ii. Provide liquidity for sETH2 and rETH2 in a DEX like Uniswap, Sushi or Curve. This rewards those who commit extra capital to enable a market for our tokens and make staking with us liquid.
Despite speaking with investors about the sale of a portion of token supply, we are committed to ensuring that community has the majority allocation and shall remain at the helm of StakeWise in its mature state.
Note that the exact details of these mechanisms are not yet finalized and remain our current best thinking. The official documentation on these processes and mechanisms is being prepared and shall be released in a couple of weeks. We welcome all ideas regarding the potential distribution structures and the DAO and look forward to seeing your suggestions!
4. We want to find an equitable way to distribute a portion of governance tokens to early adopters.
Early community around the project shall take early ownership of the protocol through an airdrop and/or a retroactive distribution. Ideally, this would mean that beta participants could be airdropped governance tokens, but several technical challenges stop us from guaranteeing this. We are exploring ways to deliver on this, but an airdrop remains TBD.
5. We have committed to launching on the 28th January 2021.
We are ready to launch, yet withdrawal key creation remains the key bottleneck. Our horcruxes, the 6 prominent figures in the Ethereum community that we chose as part holders of our key, are in different time zones and are notoriously busy. In response to scheduling difficulties with an online ceremony, we upgraded our bls-horcrux tool to support offline ceremonies, so we are confident we can deliver on the specified launch date.
Once again we thank the community for tuning in for our call and look forward to building an exciting future for StakeWise together with you!
All eyes on January 28th!
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Link to the presentation used during the call: https://docsend.com/view/797gizi3s7hfrdka
Link to the Zoom recording: TBD
