Rise, challenges, and expectations: What are the highlights in the "mainnet launch year" of PoS?

The topic of PoS and staking has been discussed extensively over the past year. After brewing in 2019, more than 10 well-known PoS networks will concentrate their efforts in 2020 and launch the main network one after another. Multiple incentivized testnets are launching or will soon be launching to test the waters for mainnet performance and participation. With the rise of the staking ecosystem, DeFi products that break through the bottleneck of development will also be launched.

Faced with the "takeoff" of the PoS network, how should we gain insight into new trends and prepare for new challenges?stakefishimage description

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The main network will be launched soon

Many friends have summed up 2019 and predicted the hot spots in 2020. Today, I want to share my views on a focus topic that most crypto funds and investors pay attention to this year-will 2020 be the year of the PoS blockchain? How are these projects going?

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Incentivized testnet ready to go

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Funny and apt "puns" are used repeatedly, and it is getting more and more difficult to name the incentivized testnet.

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The rise of staking ecology

• Community interest in staking has risen significantly.

Binance and Coinbase have announced support for staking in exchange wallets. Both exchanges have a large number of encrypted users, and can well reflect the market sentiment of the community, but this has also aroused debate on the impact of exchanges participating in staking on PoS network security.

• It is undeniable that the entry of exchanges, wallets, and encrypted asset custodians will become a new feature of the staking ecosystem, and the upcoming PoS network can benefit from these new entrances.

• The past year has seen the rise of a new entity: professional validators.

• The basic job content of these teams is to run high availability and high security infrastructure. The role of professional verification nodes is not limited to this. They provide various forms of participation from providing verification services to contributing code, guiding governance discussions, providing best practice consultation, conducting market research, growing communities, and promoting new user education. Get involved in the ecology. Verification nodes have become a vital role in PoS blockchain networks. These professional verification nodes who have experienced 2019 have accumulated rich experience and produced a lot of opinions and data, which will provide guidance for the release of the new protocol.

• Many interesting DeFi products built around staking have also been launched.

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Many challenges ahead

• However, while there are many signs of a thriving staking ecosystem, the challenges ahead are also evident — there are just too many base-layer protocols in 2020. One therefore needs to face several major challenges.

• Projects will have a hard time attracting builders or product teams.
  

• For the current market, simply having advanced technology is not enough. The term "the next Ethereum" has hardly been mentioned in the past year, and from this we can see the current market situation. Perhaps a better strategy would be to try to attract developers who already exist in decentralized protocols such as Ethereum or EOS. Even so, proper grants and developer community support are necessary to incentivize a steady stream of new builders and product teams to join.

• Attracting many professional validators is no longer an easy task.

• The newly added professional validator nodes are becoming less and less. The professional verification node business is not as profitable as the mining business in the past, and professional verification nodes without strong funds or encryption fund partners will not expand their business on a large scale. Unless there is a bull market that makes commissions a lucrative source of income (and even then a short-term profit). There may be many validators who will not participate in new projects without the support of belief or substantial economic incentives.

• Market liquidity is under pressure.

Considering the number of projects being launched, the market demand is far from enough to absorb the supply of tokens that will be unlocked soon. A possible sustained price drop in the face of selling pressure will lead to a vicious circle as individual coin holder morale, project team funding, developer attention and validator revenue will all drop simultaneously.

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set rational expectations

People expect that the centralized launch of the PoS network will set off a wave of enthusiasm. However, 2020 will also be extremely challenging for these project teams to attract widespread attention. Probably, most projects will not launch the mainnet in the first half of 2020. More projects will be postponed until the end of 2020 to solve technical problems, wait for the bull market to launch projects, or spend more time properly addressing the various challenges mentioned above.

If you want to know more, or have any questions, please contactstakefish. In addition, if you are interested in these upcoming PoS protocols, I hope you discuss with the validators. I believe that the validator community can share many in-depth observations and insights on upcoming blockchain projects.

Thanks to Ric Garcia and Red Luo for compiling the material for this article.

Original Medium:The year of Proof of Stake blockchain launches