On Mar.18, 2020, PlatON and HashQuark hosted its online strategic partnership event. More than 500 members joined in this event, Chief Economist of Wanxiang Blockchain and PlatON & HashQuark Advisor Dr. Chuanwei Zou shared the business model of staking, HashQuark CEO Leo Li introduced the product line and development plan of HashQuark, PlatON founder and CEO Mr. Lilin Sun shared the design and vision of PlatON as the infrastructure for privacy-preserving computation network and distributed economies. Leo and Mr. Sun announced the strategic partnership between HashQuark and PlatON in the event.
Business Model of Staking
Dr. Zou : Decentralized Economy, also known as DeCo, is introduced by founder of Wanxiang Blockchain and PlatON Dr.Xiao. We all know blockchain applications are not only about technology, but also highly relevant to the designs of economy and governance mechanism. DeCo, with blockchain as the infrastructure, supported by decentralized economic model and governance mechanism, and governed by community, has gone through 3 stages: DeCo 1.0 — economy activities in public blockchains; DeCo 2.0 — decentralized autonomous organizations; DeCo 3.0 — stablecoins and DeFi.
We see the potential of DeCo 4.0 with the development of global stablecoins and central banks coins. Concerning Deco 4.0, top-level design comes first, incentive compatibility should be a must to ensure the economy connotation and value capture mechanism, then should fit the regulation requirements. In addition, compared to a token that plays different roles in the economy, different tokens should serve as different roles to apply the traditional economy design, organization forms and marketing in DeCo.
In DeCo 4.0, blockchain will serve as the settlement protocol of massive business use cases.
Development Trends of Staking Economy around the Globe
Dr. Zou : Staking is indispensable in PoS-based public blockchain, and professional staking service providers such as HashQuark join in the consensus of PoS-based public blockchains under the delegation of supporters, and share the interests with supporters after getting reward.
Professional staking service providers is the guarantee of efficiency and fairness in PoS-based public blockchains, and play an important role in the upgrade and dealing with disagreements by being a part of community govrannce.
With Ethereum 2.0, PoS-based public blockchains will get more and more important, and we will see a more complicated and competitive collaboration among professional staking service providers, and the integration of crypto wallets, custody service and DeFi.
From a long-term view, what come more important for staking service providers are: firstly, the improvement on community governance will takes priority over the block production capacity, secondly, the role that exchanges play in staking, such as whether if exchanges should share profit with users, whether if exchanges need to the authorization for governance from users.
In my opinion, the combination between staking and DeFi is a trend of staking economy. From the serious leverage and liquidity issues of DeFi in the last week, the risk management of today’s DeFi has serious flaws undoubtedly and needs to be improved. The combination is just the solution.
As the Designer of Business Models and Economic Proposals for Both PlatON and HashQuark, is There Any Relevance?
Dr. Zou: There are two aspects of relevance between the two business models and economic proposals for both PlatON and HashQuark, which happen to be two positive-feedback mechanisms. Firstly, the nodes need to collaborate for the block production when verifying to improve the efficiency; Secondly, the economic model should prevent the nodes from collusion.
In order to make the economic models be attractive for nodes partners and sustainable in business, when finished the design, we need to invite the nodes to evaluate the incentive and restrictive mechanisms.
HashQuark has been involved in the staking of many mainstream public blockchains deeply, and it shared both the advantages and flaws to PlatON team to help with the development of consensus mechanism. Furthermore, we’ve done a complete research on the mainstream PoS-based public blockchains, and extracted the rules and methods on economic and governance mechanism that PoS-based public blockchains should follow. Then, we shared the achievements to HashQuark and completed the research and plans on staking for some collaboration programs such as Polkadot.
Layout and Principles for Designing the Business Model for HashQuark, and the Strengthens when comparing to other PoS Service Providers
Dr. Zou: Staking is more than a technology problem, we should dig more values from an economy and finance standpoint.
What make staking more valuable are: the role to facilitate the community governance efficiently, and the relationship with crypto wallets, trading and DeFi. To be honest, after better understanding staking based on asset allocation, the combination of staking and the liquidity transformation and staking profit handling under financial engineering, there are plenty of new issues and a huge innovation space, homogeneous and fierce competition and less profit among staking service providers.
Finally, from a higher-level view, HashQuark, a professional staking service provider that shows business cooperativity, and provides differentiated service, has more cutting edges.
Rules for Designing the Economic Model for PlatON and the Strengthens Compared to PoS-based Public Blockchains
Dr. Zou: With regard to the rules for designing the economic models for PlatON, we treat PlatON and the ecosystem based on PlatON as a whole distributed economy that includes the economy activities, DApps, DeFi, and data and computing power circulation marketplace.
We define all members involved in the economy from an economic standpoint including the products and service they provide, the demands they ask for, the intermediate they use in transactions, and their objective functions. And then, in the economic model of PlatON, we ensure the long-term profit for all members in PlatON ecosystem with an incentive compatibility mechanism, and encourage all members to be the hosts to protect the infrastructures with a distributed way to make PlatON ecosystem sustainable. What’s more important, we designed the economy coupling mechanism, a value feedback mechanism based on DApp, DeFi, and data and computing power circulation marketplace.
Product Introduction and Development Plans of HashQuark
Leo: We noticed the evolution of blockchain consensus mechanism in an early stage, and realized that PoS consensus mechanisms has become mainstream. Then, we started the staking attempts in late 2018, and succeed. Thus, we started HashQuark and announced products on Dec.5, 2018.
HashQuark is a professional Staking + ecosystem service provider of HashKey Group. We provide staking ecosystem building and service of PoS, DPoS and other consensus mechanisms on top of security, transparency and high efficiency. Plus, we collaborate with world’s leading crypto wallets, custody, exchanges and investment institutions to provide stable and secure staking service to both individuals and investment institutions worldwide.
HashQuark product line consists of three services:
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Highly efficient and stable node service that enables users to get profit by voting for our node clients;
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Collaborate with crypto wallets such as HashKey Hub, MyKey, imToken, etc, to provide comprehensive staking solutions ;
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Staking operation service that helps build nodes quickly to facilitate a flourish staking ecosystem for individuals, teams and institutes,.
So far, we’ve get involved in the building of more than 40 public blockchains, and rank top on StakingRewards. In addition, we are the only node of Klaytn and Factom in China, and one of the first trust nodes of ChainX.
Further Details of HashQuark Business and Staking + Ecosystem Service Provider
Leo: Recently, we made a clearer definition for HashQuark and introduced the concept of Staking + Ecosystem service provider. In general, our staking services consist of:
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Infrastructure services , namely, secure, stable and highly-efficient node services that focus on the infrastructure deployment service to help clients deploy nodes for PoS-based public blockchains quickly, and supporting services such as Dashboard around the globe. Currently, we’ve served clients in Asia, America and Euro;
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Staking platform service . With our staking API, crypto wallets and exchanges can quickly develop their products to provide staking service for their clients. By doing so, we wish to empower the whole staking ecosystem with more members involved in.
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Applications of staking ecosystem , such as deploying nodes for KOLs, and providing the ecosystem incubation and media services for HashKey to hep monetize their traffic.
Plans and Outlook of HashQuark in 2020 that is Full of Opportunities and Challenges
Leo: 2020 is the year of Staking in blockchain industry to the great extent, and the year of transformation of public blockchains. Promising public blockchains such as PlatON will release their main nets, and Ethereum will transform to be PoS-based public blockchain from PoW-based public blockchain. 2020 is also the year of blockchain applications, such as privacy-preserving computation, oracles, DeFi, etc. With the growth of users, there will be higher requirements on the innovation and breakthrough of blockchain applications. Thus, we introduced Staking+ strategy to add more roles including public blockchain, community, node, security, incubators, etc. in the ecosystem through staking.
So far, we’ve released PolkaCube and won the funding of Grants from Web 3.0 Foundation, and we’ve released Ethereum 2.0 test — EtherPocket to help users experience the staking of Ethereum 2.0 in advance. Plus, we’ve applied for the funding of LatticeX Grants, please stay tuned for further details.
PlatON: An Infrastructure for Privacy-Preserving Computation and Distributed Economies
Mr. Sun: Privacy-preserving computation will surely be the great support for the infrastructure of the whole digital era in the future, while the infrastructure for distributed economies mainly refers to the public blockchains in today’s blockchain industry. Blockchain is born to be the financial infrastructure for facilitating the circulation of digital assets around the globe. It is an cross-ID, cross-account, cross-institute and cross-industry super clean house. Thus, PlatON, as the infrastructure for privacy-preserving computation and distributed economies, has gone through the development and improvement of basic technologies and economic model for the role of super clean house, and prepared for the core apps of super infrastructure for privacy, for 4 years.
The Best Part of PlatON’s Economic Model
Mr. Sun: PlatON’s economic model has been led by Dr. Feng Xiao since the very beginning, and designed with the joint effort of PlatON advisor team that consists of world’s renowned economists, and then get polished after Dr. Zou joined us. Finally, we released our Economic Blue paper and the basic practice last year.
The reason why we chose to be a PoS-based public blockchain are:
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To avoid excessive consumption of energy;
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To stop bribery and collusion by decreasing the dependence on the behaviors outside chain
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To provide support for the value of token
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To ensure the decentralization and security by restraining the expansion of mining pool.
Thus, we apply PPoS consensus algorithm.
Profit of Validtaors in PlatON Consensus Mechanism
Mr. Sun: We provide four kinds of rewards for validators in our economic models:
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Block production reward: 50% of the bonus pool will be used for rewarding;
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Staking reward: the rest 50% will be used for staking reward.
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Transaction fee: the block producing validators will get all the transaction service fees taken place in the blocks they produced;
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Super-agent reward: when other apps deploy, the validators will become the super agents to share the income.
Introduction of PlatON Galaxy Rally and Rewards Accordingly
Mr. Sun : We’ve prepared 5M LAT in the bonus pool of PlatON Galaxy Rally to reward the staking winners, lucky validators, lucky delegators, validators, contributors, etc. Also, to ensure a stable and secure new Baleyworld test net, we also launched other testing campaigns such as Ultra-High Pressure test, Flash, etc. to all node partners and community members.
Strategic Partnership Between PlatON and HashQuark
Leo: PlatON is promising public blockchain with very solid technology and perfect economy and governance models around the globe and also the best partner of HashQuark. We’ve applied PlatON’s solutions to guarantee the security of data and asset, and they works very well.
From a product standpoint, PlatON serves as the infrastructure for data exchange and collaborative computing, while HashQuark serves as the infrastructure for block producing nodes. PlatON is located at the upper layer, while HashQuark is located at the lower layer, both of us are indispensable in the blockchain ecosystem, and are very complementary.
Mr. Sun: As a world’s leading node service provider, HashQuark is the most reliable team with its solid staking technology and service. We believe that HashQuark is the support of our consensus mechanism to provide the stable and secure service for PlatON network.
In my opinion, I wish HashQuark to be the AWS that provides the app stores and tool market in the block era. And the scalable network and community building worldwide of HashQuark will facilitate the development of PlatON network.