Liquid staking is one of the most popular topics. So what is liquid staking and who offers liquid staking? Let's delve into these questions.
Bitcoin’s genesis in 2009 will probably go down in history as one of the most notable technological events of all time. Today, just over a decade later, these industries are thriving. The total crypto market capitalization hit an all-time high of $3 trillion at its peak in November 2021. There are already more than 300 million crypto users worldwide, while forecasts suggest the figure may cross 1 billion by December 2022. Although phenomenal, this journey has merely begun.
Several factors have contributed to the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry’s success so far. But above all, it’s due to certain key features of the underlying technology: decentralization, trustlessness and data security, to name a few. Leading blockchain networks like Bitcoin are pretty robust as such thanks to their proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Globally distributed miners secure these networks by providing “hashing” or computational power. Similarly, in the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus that Ethereum plans to adopt soon, validators secure the network by locking up or “staking” digital assets.
However, the number of miners or validators matters greatly in PoW and PoS, respectively — more miners or validators means greater security. Thus, only the bigger, more established blockchains can benefit optimally from conventional consensus mechanisms. On the other hand, emerging blockchains often lack the resources to secure their networks fully, no matter their innovative potential.
Bolstering interchain security frameworks is one way of solving this rather pertinent problem. Moreover, with innovations like liquid staking, bigger PoS blockchains can help secure the emerging ones, ultimately facilitating a safer and stabler industry overall.
What is liquid staking?
For the uninitiated, liquid staking unlocks the liquidity of assets staked (locked up) in PoS blockchains or other staking pools. This is crucial because, otherwise, the staked liquidity remains underutilized. Users cannot use their staked assets in decentralized finance (DeFi), which restricts them from generating optimal yields. By offering tokenized derivatives of these staked assets, liquid staking allows individuals to reap the benefits of staking and DeFi simultaneously. This enables additional utility besides maximizing yield.
The more specific significance of liquid staking is that it broadens the scope for interchain security. The liquid-staked assets can represent the value of assets staked on any producer chain, which can then be used to share validators with mostly any consumer chain. In other words, what’s currently possible primarily on Cosmos can be widely accessible with liquid staking.
What is liquid staking and who offers liquid staking? Now you get it.
