Radstakes Performance Summary
As we look back on the first 1000 epochs of the Radix mainnet, it's not been without a few dramas and disputes. A certain debate (which should never again be spoken of!) has kept us busy over the past few weeks, not to mention a large scale DDoS attack against the Radix foundation nodes has left many without wallet access temporarily. But fortunately for the Radstakes validator - it's been a much more harmonious experience!
We retain our position firmly in the middle of the Validator table (number 43 to be precise) with 0.94% of the total stake. Once again, many thanks to all our delegators who have entrusted us with their stake. Over the past 1000 epochs we've made an impressive 93261 consensus proposals, with only 3 missed, giving us a total uptime of 99.997%.
Token Unlock
For anyone who is following the Radix social channels, it will have been hard to miss the token unlocking debate. For those who participated in the Radix presale at the end of 2020, eXRD and XRD were locked using a price vesting mechanism, meaning tokens were only unlocked when certain price thresholds were reached. A few weeks ago, the Radix team initiated a survey to gauge the community's interest in unlocking all tokens and a large majority of 67% voted in favour. A second survey is currently running which is likely to follow the result of the first. If the second vote is passed, from September 15th all tokens will be unlocked.
So what does that mean for staking? The likelihood is that a large majority of these unlocked tokens will be staked. Whilst this does reduce returns for existing stakers, the network will be much more secure as a result - something which Radstakes are fully in favour of! Many open market buyers of XRD (of which we are too!) are understandably concerned about the short term implications of a sudden increase in supply. However, we stand by the democratic will of the community and believe that in the medium to long term, this will help remove much of the confusion and psychological barriers preventing new investors from joining Radix.
"Radstakes will continue to serve the community irrespective of the outcome of the unlock survey and look forward to a long and prosperous future for Radix and all who have staked with us"
DDoS Attacks on Radix Foundation Nodes
In other recent news, many of us found that we could not access the Radix explorer or wallet for intermittent periods. This was the result of a huge DDoS attack on the Radix Foundation nodes which serve the explorer and wallet with information from the Radix ledger.
Whilst this does prevent users from accessing the wallet and explorer, the integrity of the Radix network has not been compromised. Validator nodes were not affected by this attack and consensus continues to operate effectively.
"But isn't Radix supposed to be decentralised?" I hear you cry. That is absolutely right, and there are in fact many nodes which can serve the wallet but currently there is no easy way of pointing the wallet to these alternative nodes in circumstances such as this DDoS attack. This is likely to be updated in a future wallet release to provide this important functionality.
So what if validators are targetted in future? At Radstakes, we only utilise cloud servers which provide DDoS protection as standard. Whilst this offers no guarantees, we also operate a back up node in a completely separate data centre. In the event of our primary validator being attacked, we have the ability to switch our validator to the backup, greatly minimising any downtime and lost rewards for our stakers.
Bitfinex
Whilst stakers have previously been dependent on Instabridge to swap eXRD for XRD, Bitfinex recently added XRD to their currency conversion tool, meaning holders of eXRD can now instantly swap XRD on the Bitfinex platform. In addition, they opened a market for trading XRD with both Bitcoin and USD pairs. To top it off, they also currently allow withdrawals of XRD for 0 fee!
For those still selecting validators to stake with, we do hope you will give Radstakes your consideration. As always we welcome any questions and contact with the community. You can contact us directly via email, the chat function on our website or find us lurking in the Radix Telegram and Discord channels.