Statement

“We want everyone, at Bison Trails and in our communities, to feel safe, secure, and healthy. Bison Trails also stands in solidarity with communities impacted by systemic and institutionalized racism. Black Lives Matter.”

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Company News

1. Bison Trails + Eth2

As Ethereum transitions to Proof of Stake, we are excited to announce our suite of products to interact with the eth2 Beacon Chain and enable network participants to easily add validators and scale their infrastructure automatically:

• Private, secure, and reliable read and write nodes to connect and interact with the Beacon Chain (write available in Phase 1.5)
• A secure validator management API enabling the creation and management of validators and Beacon Chain nodes
• A fully featured Participation Cluster product allowing our customers to manage their Beacon Chain and validators from within the Bison Trails platform
• A fully indexed eth2 Beacon Chain reporting API to call information including staking rewards, validator information, and more

Read more in our announcement post, or check out the coverage in Decrypt, Coindesk, and Modern Consensus.

“The transition to Eth2 is incredibly important for the crypto ecosystem because it allows one of the most important and most adopted blockchains—with millions of users & tens of thousands of dApps—to introduce new scalability options for the protocol...”—JOE LALLOUZ, CEO OF BISON TRAILS IN COINTELEGRAPH

2. Run a Dedicated Polkadot Managed Controller with Bison Trails

Our dedicated Polkadot managed controller is non-custodial and provides DOT holders with two options unique to Bison Trails: 1) run Polkadot validators OR 2) easy nomination management for a "staking only" approach. Learn more

“Bison Trails offers a unique way for large-scale DOT holders to optimize Polkadot participation. Bison Trails’ managed controllers can nominate your own Polkadot validators and fall back to a Bison Trails staking-as-a-service node in the event that you don’t have enough DOTs to run your own validator in a given epoch. This relieves one of the most challenging parts of managing your Polkadot nominations and is a huge benefit for easily optimizing your participation on Polkadot.”—AARON HENSHAW, CO-FOUNDER AND CTO OF BISON TRAILS

3. Bison Trails + NEAR

We published a comprehensive guide to NEAR including details of NEAR's innovations, its focus on developers and usability, and what you need to know about how the protocol works. We also published a follow-up on NEAR’s Token Economics covering the protocol’s consensus method, validator rewards, stake distribution, and participation incentives.

"It’s been great working with the Bison Trails team, learning from their hands on experience with other PoS networks to improve our own staking experience and protocol design. Bison Trails has been on the forefront of what is now considered the professional validator industry, making participation in blockchain networks more accessible and helping to provide more high quality operators to the network." —ILLIA POLOSUKHIN, NEAR CO-FOUNDER

Read more in Modern Consensus, Cointelegraph, and Coindesk

4. Bison Trails + Keep Active Participation

We posted a detailed guide to Keep active participation. If you choose to bond ETH on Keep, it is critical to understand how collateralization and liquidation work, and what to do if a deposit you are securing becomes undercollateralized.

More from the Herd

• 📺 Joe and Viktor joined Dieter Fishbein, Head of Ecosystem Development at the Web3 Foundation, and Will Pankiewicz, Master of Validators at Parity, for our first video event “Building for the Future: Polkadot + Bison Trails” to discuss Polkadot’s vision, learnings from Kusama, and the intricacies of running infrastructure for Nominated Proof of Stake networks.
• 📈Check out Aaron’s thoughts on the impact on the blockchain ecosystem of Paypal’s rumored support for digital assets in Cointelegraph
• 🎧 Joe joined Scott Melker on The Wolf of All Streets podcast: “Blockchains and crypto are an inevitability. Products and services will be built on top of blockchains and crypto… As everyday users we won’t even notice.”–Joe
• 🎇 NFTs "allow for real-world assets to be properly digitized and stored while simultaneously keeping them secure, ultimately revolutionizing the compensation, storage, legality and the security of property." –Trinity M., Bison Trails Protocol Engineer, in Cointelegraph
• 🎧 Listen to Joe’s wide-ranging interview on Abel’s Abstracts podcast, a podcast for product teams to keep up to date and learn from the best products in web 3.0 and DeFi
• We published delegation instructions for Solana. Learn more about delegating to Bison Trails’ other community nodes. Coinbase Custody customers can now delegate directly from within the Coinbase Custody application!

“Blockchains and crypto are an inevitability. Products and services will be built on top of blockchains and crypto… As everyday users we won’t even notice.”—JOE LALLOUZ, ON THE WOLF OF ALL STREETS PODCAST

Ecosystem News

• 🚀 Polkadot successfully launched Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS). Check out our guide to Polkadot Token Economics, instructions of how to bond DOTs to our community nodes, and our post on our Polkadot Managed Controller product.
• 🎉 Celo reached their millionth block and the first Celo stablecoin, Celo Dollar (cUSD), is now live! Celo Dollars can be freely exchanged with anyone without using banks or paying intermediary fees. We’ve also updated our guide to Celo with all the info you need to participate: https://bisontrails.co/celo/
• 🕵️‍♂️Our very own Protocol Engineer BisonD was featured in the Celo Discord Validator Digest #10 in a discussion on missing signatures.
• 🚀 SKALE launched: the network’s smart contracts & initial set of nodes are up and running!
• 🚀 Amber Network, a fully decentralized release candidate for Oasis Mainnet, launched!

Thanks for reading! ✨
– Mark Forscher / Head of Brand & Design

View all our supported protocols.

Bison Trails: Pioneering Blockchain Infrastructure™

Bison Trails is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service company, based in New York City, specifically focused on blockchain participation. We’ve built a platform for anyone who wants to participate in new chains effortlessly (e.g. by running Cosmos Validators, Tezos Bakers, and Libra Validators, etc.)—without having to invest time and resources into developing any of the engineering, protocol, dev ops, or security competencies in-house. Our goal is for the entire blockchain ecosystem to flourish by providing robust infrastructure for the pioneers of tomorrow.

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