Proof-of-stake gives us a real opportunity for change
It’s July 2021, the height of Summer here in the UK and we have just resurfaced from the Crypto AM 3rd birthday and summer unlocking party hosted by the wonderful founder and editor-at-large of Crypto AM, Mr James Bowater.
We were proud to not only sponsor and headline the event as, through James, we were presented with the opportunity to work with the team behind Slammer – a British Sci-Fi thriller that is screening for the first time on the September 10.
While it may be holiday season for many and a growing sense of ‘life back to normality’ here in the UK and a number of countries overseas, the crypto and blockchain industry continues to drive forwards at pace.
Let there be no doubt, it’s a race! There are thousands of start-ups around the world, innovating within a still nascent industry, fighting against market cycles, changing regulations and multiple competitors operating within the same product niche area. The option to slow down is off the table.
That being said and, in the midst of all the madness, it’s never been more important to do things the right way. Blockchain is moving into the mainstream and millions of people and businesses are waking up to the realisation that there is a new way to move money, earn money, collect rare art and memorabilia. The internet itself is transforming.
“The blockchain industry, as a new industry, has the golden opportunity to lead by example and not only promise greater inclusion to the World’s population and democratise currently monopolised services such as cloud computing, but also to drive sustainability.”
Our planet simply cannot afford a new technology with an exponentially increasing appetite for electricity. This is the case of blockchain 1.0 with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other proof-of-work (PoW) networks are growing to a size where cumulatively their energy consumption is more than large countries like Argentina.
Reality of fossil fuels
Proponents of PoW will argue that a high percentage of that electricity consumption is sourced from renewables such as hydro and solar, but the reality is that a high percentage is still powered by fossil fuels.
A consortium of industry leads – aptly named The Bitcoin Mining Council – recently released a report showing that 56% of Bitcoin’s overall network hashrate, is powered by renewables.
The closing down of mining farms in China, where the majority of energy consumption was sourced from coal – the dirtiest power source of them all – will have an enormous impact on reducing the network’s carbon footprint further, but there is still a long way to go.
Enter blockchain 2.0, and the opportunity to change the approach. Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a consensus mechanism whereby the network is secured by token holders staking their tokens for a proportionate share of the network’s revenues, rather than contributing their computer power as they would with a PoW network. By design, this means that blockchain networks can run far more efficiently without having to continuously add power hungry specialist machines. In fact a PoS network is upwards of 99% more efficient than a PoW network.
Cudos is doing exactly that, rolling out a PoS network with the incentivised ‘Project Artemis’ as part of our Somniourum testnet this quarter. At time of writing, Cudos has already received more than 17,000 developer sign-ups for Project Artemis, named after NASA’s next mission to the moon in collaboration with SpaceX.
“We’re not stopping there though, 99% increased power saving efficiency over networks like Ethereum is incredible, but we’re on a mission to be 100% carbon neutral from day 1.”
Enter the partnership with ClimateTrade, providing Cudos with the onchain platform for offsetting the network’s carbon footprint. Now anyone building on and consuming the Cudos Network, will be safe in the knowledge that any transactions over the network are carbon neutral.
Beyond environmental sustainability
The benefits of PoS go beyond environmental sustainability. PoS networks can operate faster as fewer nodes need to reach a consensus, and they can also significantly reduce the cost of transactions, commonly known as ‘gas fees’. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as all new technologies commoditise over time as they mature and grow in adoption. A single GB of data transfer over the internet is millions of times cheaper now, than it was in the late 90s, with high speed fibre networks encircling the World.
Firstly though, before the launch of Project Artemis, Cudos onchain staking is launching on August 2 and holders of CUDOS tokens will be able to delegate their stake to one of the network’s validator nodes, receiving staking rewards of ~30% APR.
Later this year, the Cudos Ingenii mainnet will launch and all stakers will transition to the mainnet, where they will start to earn a share of the network’s revenues in addition to a variable APR for continued staking rewards. You can currently purchase CUDOS tokens via AscendEX, KuCoin, Gate.io and Uniswap exchanges.
The Cudos Network is a layer 1 blockchain and layer 2 computation and oracle network being designed to ensure decentralised, permission-less access to high-performance computing at scale and enable scaling of computing resources to hundreds of thousands of nodes. Once bridged onto Ethereum, Algorand, Polkadot, and Cosmos, Cudos will enable scalable compute and Layer 2 Oracles on all of the bridged blockchains.
For more information, please visit www.cudos.org or join our Telegram and Twitter communities.