Smart Contract Staking Platform on Hedera! Gautam Midha of STADER / King Solomon (Part 1)

King Solomon interview Stader Labs as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Stader Labs – Gautam Midha - Growth
‍Yeah, sure, absolutely. Thank you, Solomon, and thanks everyone for tuning in. So, my name is Gautam. I lead the business side of our Staders Hedera solution, as well as some of the other solutions that we have across change. So, Staderr, as you mentioned, is a multi-chain liquid staking protocol, and I'll talk about, you know, Staders Origins first, and then I'll talk about my own Origins into Web3. So, Stader basically was founded on the principle, you know, like, like we were just kind of discussing, right? There's a huge amount of centralization in the, in the entertainment industry. And similarly, you know, we have co-founders which were like miners on bitcoin earlier, and they were sort of early adopters of ETH and some of the other blockchains or networks as well. And when basically we saw that there's this huge problem that even though you have like multiple validators and POS networks, but power is actually concentrated in relatively few, right? What we call the Nakamoto coefficient, where basically, how many validators or nodes does it take to kind of take over the network, right? So that was one problem. And then the other problem which was kind of correlated to that is that it's very difficult for an average user to look at Validator parameters, operational parameters, and constantly do that and then make an operational decision on which validator or node to stake on, right? And that typically leads to the fact that, hey, you just look at heuristics which is whoever has the largest stake, and you kind of stake there, and guess what? That increases the centralization problem even more, right? So, so, we set to solve this problem, right? And while we were kind of looking at the solution, we also looked at one of the major factors in traditional staking, which is a capital inefficiency, right? So, if you stake your L1 token, that token cannot be used in the ecosystem. It cannot be used in DeFi. It can be used to purchase an NFT. It's locked there, and as long as it's locked, it's earning yield and once you kind of take it out and use it, then it's not earning yield, right? So, liquid staking and Stader solution was kind of born, with the sort of aim to solve all of this, make it super easy for users to put their ADVANT tokens in one place,  make it algorithmically, you know, balanced out between decentralization, which is sort of sticking to multiple nodes or validators, and also getting the highest APY or the highest possible APY, and also making it super sort of one-click-to-click for the user, so they don't have to worry about or the operational inefficiencies of monitoring these validators themselves, right? Then on the other hand, we aim to provide like the most amount of DeFi integrations so people can go ahead and use our liquid tokens and get the most back for the buck, or the most deal for the risk levels, that might be suitable for their portfolios. So, that's a little bit about Stader we present across six networks and launching on ETH soon. So, that really has seven network. Hedera is actually our oldest Network at this stage, right, and we brought sort of I think pretty much be the first DeFi solution on the network, and we kind of came in because we obviously understood this very different approach that was taking which was very, very unique, and it was very, very interesting. I thought, you know, it would be pretty interesting to see how you actually introduced POS on a Hashgraph, and it's been amazing sort of interacting and building for and with the community since about April last year when we started this.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, I saw that you guys had just recently made an announcement that you'd partnered with Pangolin as well. Can you maybe touch base a little bit about that partnership as well as maybe discuss the differences between like if you're, you know, custodying your hbar on HashPack and you're, you know, natively Staking versus what you know the H bar X aspects look like, potential benefits, and if there's any risks as well, that'd be fantastic to hear.

Stader Labs – Gautam Midha - Growth
‍Yeah, no, absolutely right. So, first of all, I have to say, we don't custody anything, so it's completely sort of permissionless, decentralized smart contract. Just to kind of dive into the specific questions, yeah, so Pangolin is one of our Dex Partners, which we have integrated, and we have our H bar, H bar expool there, where you can provide liquidity. So, just to compare and contrast, what you can do say with the plain native staking on HashPack is, of course, point your account to a particular node and you will be getting 6.5 percent yield on that amount. But that amount will have to stay in your wallet to get that yield, whereas what we offer is a liquid staking solution. Where you can kind of give your HBar to a Smart contract, it will give you back H bar at the back end. What we do is pull out the edge bar from the users and stick it through our algorithm into multiple nodes, right? We collect the 6.5 percent. We have a little bit of a boost going on to increase DeFi activity on the network, so there's an extra two to three percent that you get from staking with us, plus what we also do is take or your say your rewards each day and take it back into the node, so there's an auto compounding effect that happens. Netnet you make about 10 APY across all of these factors or optimizations, but the real kicker is that now you can use your H bar X in a DeX like Pangolin and provide liquidity on our Xbox, which is a very low in permanent Law School, and earn more yields on that, right? So you get your staking yields, but your isn't really locked in. You can actually go ahead and use it in one of our DeX partners like Pangolin, and that's where the biggest efficiency of liquid staking is, versus Planar Protocol staking in terms of the risks, of course, if you do provide, you know, if you do follow the strategy, you're taking the smart contract risk from Stader, which is basically, you know, right at this stage, we've been audited twice, we've been on the network for about, you know, close to a year now, and we've had, you know, two or three upgrades. You know, we have a multi-sig, so there's security from a rogue actor perspective as well, and some of the institutions are also stayed with us in the past and currently as well. So this is a pretty robust contract, which is sort of undergone, I think, 10,000 plus transactions, or actually a hundred thousand plus transactions, it gives me ten thousand plus users. And obviously, if you put that HRX on Pangolin, then you're obviously taking on the Pangolin DeX risk, as well. So those are a couple of things that you need to be cognizant about when you're using some of these DeFi strategies.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍No, thank you, that's great. I really appreciate the transparent answer, and I have to give you a shout out too. By the way, Stator, I know that you guys have supported a lot of the interviews and stuff that we've been facilitating, so I just wanted to say, I see that on a daily basis, and I really wanted to just say thank you, that means a lot to us that we have your support. I want to get thanks, so I want to kind of open it up with Acme labs, and I know that we talked about the backgrounds and kind of why web 3 and why Hedera, but can you talk a little bit about first, I'm curious because I think you touched on it briefly during hashing times, like how did you guys gain access to the intellectual property of Chuck Jones through, I'm assuming, the estate, and then second after that, can you talk about the collection or collections that you have live right now and what those might represent down the down the line for, for the community?

ACME Labs – Jon Stock – Founder & CEO
‍Sure, yeah, happy to do it. So, yeah, so our, kind of, you know, the evolution of the relationship with the Chuck Jones estate. So back in like 2020, so in blockchain years, that's a decade ago, we first got connected to Chuck's grandson, Craig, who, you know, is the president of the Chuck Jones companies. Within the Chuck Jones family of companies, there are the galleries, so they own and operate, I think currently like three or four galleries throughout the US, and then they also have the Chuck Jones Museum and then the Chuck Jones Center For Creativity, which is, kind of a non-profit arm that is you know, kind of helping, uh, increase people's access to creativity and, and all of that fun, so that's kind of the Chuck Jones family of companies. Craig Costen is the president of all of those as well as is Chuck Jones's grandson and kind of leads point on, the estates, you know, evolution, and, he and I, got connected, specifically interested in talking about how we can virtualize art buying experiences. He's interestingly, he's not only a you know, Chuck's grandson and the president of the companies, he has a background in computer science and was an engineer for a while, so much more technologically inclined than, your average, art gallery owner. And so they've had their art business side for about 30 years. I think he's been running that side of it. And originally, we were doing some consulting and advisory around virtualizing an art buying experience. Kind of the core of that was, how can we take what it is to go into an art gallery, see some amazing art, learn about the history of that art, learn about Chuck Jones, learn about animation as a whole, and you know, talk to an expert and those sorts of things. How can we more, seamlessly provide that kind of an experience online? And so that's been one core component of what's been driving a lot of our early platform is how do we help specifically around this virtualizing and, you know, creating an art buying experience. And that is a fun project to do. We've also been virtualizing a museum project that's something that will be coming up here pretty soon. We'll be inviting people into to our Chuck Jones Museum virtually. And so it's through that relationship that, we basically, they became one of the early, you know, partners in our company. And we've, got this long-standing relationship related to their art gallery business, the museum business, as well as helping um evolve some of the IP. So, one of the interesting things that I discovered while you know, in the process of going through all of this was Chuck Jones was, and Josh did a good job explaining, like proper genius, one of the most innovative and creative, visionaries in the animation space didn't just create the most of the Looney Tunes characters we all know and love, the guy had a bit of a gift tapping into the ether and creating characters so he has been creating different characters all throughout his life. And there's essentially a the family vault, has all kinds of other IP that he's developed and created over the years that, to be frank, they just, there's been no new way to do anything with it. And so when we got to this level or layer of what we've been evolving and developing, you know, kind of the Acme Labs core mission is to work with creators and IP holders to evolve media in different ways, and that's everything from how do we monetize it, how do we do better IP controls like who owns what IP, what are they allowed to do with it or not allowed to do with it, and then what kinds of media experiences does that IP go into. So that's kind of our core mission. So we, when we think about how we do that with the Chuck Jones partnership, we help them with what IP do they have, what are the kind of rights and rules regulations around what can be done with it, how they would like it to be used, and then what are the new ways that we can bring these characters and these stories to life in new mediums. So that's the vision we're all up to. What we have started with is a personal favorite character of mine, Chuck Jones's lost rabbit. So that was one of the characters that when we first saw it, everybody just went, "This is an amazingly cool character." Rabbit had only ever been seen once before back in the 80s. Chuck let this rock band out of Canada use it as album cover art. So it was the one time the public ever saw rabbit was Canadian rock album cover art for a hot minute, and then he's been locked in the basement since. And so we thought about how would we take this new character, this new IP, what's a web 3 native kind of evolution of it? How would we launch this new character and story? And so what you'll see is Rabbit is a PFP project as the first kind of visual and collectible opportunity around it. You'll also see, if you go to our site, you can see Rabbit's backstory and some of the world-building we've been doing around the Rabbit character and the opportunities to evolve this character into all the other things that are possible, the other media forms formats. That's the next evolution of where we are with Rabbit.