The current state of DeFi in the Cosmos ecosystem is underutilized and inefficient. Users are forced to make a tradeoff between staking their tokens for passive yield or participating in DeFi, exposing themselves to greater risk for greater yields.
This doesn’t have to be the case.
Many other proof-of-stake ecosystems, including Ethereum and Solana, have staking tokens to solve this problem. Now, Cosmos does too.
We are incredibly excited to bring you Stride, the state-of-the-art multichain liquid staking experience! Stride will allow users to liquid stake their tokens on any Cosmos chain.
Origins
Like so many of you, we’ve loved participating in DeFi the last few years, and are incredibly excited by the pace of innovation and novel mechanisms being developed across the ecosystem.
We are particularly compelled by Cosmos. We believe IBC will be the future of multichain communication – even outside Cosmos. We also believe app chains are the future – they’re more efficient, scalable, and secure than smart contracts. This conviction led us here 12 months ago. Since then we’ve built large, thriving communities on Cosmos and have seen firsthand how incredible the people in the space are. We also started running staking infrastructure in the Cosmos ecosystem, and have grown familiar with the technology and tradeoffs involved.
We realized that staking in Cosmos has a problem: users are forced to choose between the rewards offered from staking, or the yield offered from DeFi protocols. Staking your tokens secures the network and earns passive yield, but requires you to lock up your tokens; participating in DeFi lets you get a higher yield, but exposes you to more risk.
However, after IBCv3 launched earlier this year, this tradeoff no longer has to exist. All of the technology required to support multichain staking is live. Enter Stride...
Mission
Our mission is to deliver the best and safest liquid staking experience to users in Cosmos. Stride allows you to stake and participate in DeFi.
We come to liquid staking with rounded backgrounds in quant finance, DeFi, product, and engineering: we have built robust trading infrastructure, worked at some of the earliest DeFi projects, built 100% uptime validator infrastructure, and scaled top Silicon Valley startups.
Our experience led us to prioritize the following three areas to ensure security whilst continuing to drive innovation:
- Keeping DeFi safety top of mind. Always. We’re currently being audited by Certik and Oak Security, two of the leading blockchain auditors. We’re also taking innovative measures with our governance modules and rate limiting to make sure stakers’ funds are secure. (Detailed blog post coming soon!)
- Making stTokens the base tokens of Cosmos DeFi, with one-click integrations to money markets, DEXs and other existing Cosmos DeFi products – we will have entirely new features coming after launch. We want to use liquid staking to supercharge Cosmos DeFi.
- Offering users an incredibly simple, vertically integrated App UX. By the end of the year, we aim to offer liquid staking for 15 Cosmos L1 tokens, all within Stride. Cosmos has some of the most innovative tech in all of crypto, we want to make sure it also has industry-leading UX.
We’ve partnered with some of the top validators and investors active in the Cosmos ecosystem, including Imperator, Everstake, Staking Facilities, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, 1Confirmation, Pantera Capital, and many others to build Stride in alignment with the Cosmos ethos.
Roadmap
We’re moving fast, and are excited to bring you our public testnet very soon!
- Public Testnet Launch: 6/27 until mainnet launch.
- Mainnet Launch: first half of August
Community
We have many more exciting announcements coming up, so be sure to follow us and join the community!