Built to Support the Decentralization of the Network by Improving the Rewards System for Collators and Delegators, and Giving Control to Token Holders
Boston, MA โ June 9, 2022 โ Moonbeam, the top destination for multi-chain applications on Polkadot, has completed the necessary milestones to receive a grant from the Web3 Foundation for the development of a custom parachain staking pallet. This pallet fulfills a functional gap in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems and serves as an alternative to the existing Substrate consensus, which is not suitable for the needs of parachains. Moonbeamโs open source parachain staking pallet now provides Substrate-based parachains with the ability to define criteria for an active set of eligible block producers and use network token rewards to incentivize staking participation.
The parachain staking pallet is a delegated Proof of Stake (dPoS) implementation, designed specifically for Substrate-based parachains. Instead of on-chain elections, the customized pallet uses direct delegation, which means token holders are able to select collators that produce blocks. In this system, token holders are able to specify how much of their total stake (funds) is delegated to each collator, which gives them the control of who performs block production in the form of approval votes. This means that token holders are the ultimate decision-makers.
The parachain staking pallet was originally created for the Moonriver and Moonbeam parachains and allowed Moonriver to become the first live parachain to have an open and permissionless collator set powered by a custom parachain staking pallet. Moonbeam followed a similar path, adding third-party collators to the network just days after it began to produce blocks. These permissionless collator sets are critical to ensuring censorship resistance and decentralization of their respective networks.
Today, Moonriver and Moonbeam each have 64 collators in their active set, which will continue to be expanded when possible, as demand merits. The Moonbeam launch in January 2022 was supported by an initial set of 40 collators who were selected from the highest-performing collators on the Moonbase Alpha TestNet and gradually added in during the Moonbeam launch process.
The Moonbeam parachain staking pallet allows parachains to reserve a portion of inflation for a future parachain bond. Each parachain network has the ability to set the percent and account of the reserve bonds. In addition, token holders will be able to earn staking rewards that are funded by the network inflation. This new pallet allows parachains across the Polkadot ecosystem to improve the distribution of rewards on their network.
The grant submission also includes a Polkadot.js parachain interface for users to interact with the staking pallet. This customization included writing a custom middleware that fetches the data to improve the user experience by providing a user-friendly interface.
Learn more about Moonbeam and Moonriver on the official project website: https://moonbeam.network/
About the Moonbeam Network
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Like Moonriver, its sister parachain on Kusama, Moonbeam is expected to accumulate developer and user activity from the 100+ projects building DApps and protocols on the network. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot Relay Chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/.
