Company News

1. Bison Trails Hires Elizabeth Ralston As General Counsel

Former BlockTower Capital Legal & Compliance Director—and ex-Goldman Sachs Vice President—Elizabeth Ralston joined Bison Trails as General Counsel. Read more: Bloomberg Law, Reuters.

“Given that thoughtful regulation is integral to mass adoption, I look forward to setting a regulatory precedent that paves the way for this budding ecosystem. I am determined to fiercely advocate for this transformative industry and effectively engage with regulators on behalf of Bison Trails.” —ELIZABETH RALSTON, GC OF BISON TRAILS

2. CoinList Partners with Bison Trails to Launch CoinList Pro

We’re thrilled to share the news of our partnership with CoinList to launch CoinList Pro, a “full-featured crypto spot exchange, built on trusted, compliant infrastructure and backed by some of the biggest names in the space." Learn more here or read CoinDesk’s coverage.

3. How Bison Trails’ Participation Clusters Optimize Participation on Protocols

Running nodes that participate in blockchain networks is very difficult to do yourself. Bison Trails enables you to run your own Participation Cluster – a dedicated validator node and the supporting infrastructure for staked participation in multiple Proof of Stake networks – without technical knowledge or an in-house team of engineers. In our illustrated explainer, learn how Bison Trails customers earn participatory rewards for helping secure networks.

4. Bison Trails Publishes Governance Proposal to Adjust Livepeer Inflation Rate

The company’s first governance proposal aims to help sustain the Livepeer network until it gains greater adoption. Read our Livepeer proposal Q&A with Viktor Bunin, Protocol Specialist at Bison Trails.

“Livepeer is one of the very first networks Bison Trails supported, starting with very active participation in the Merkle Mine, Livepeer’s token distribution mechanism. We love the protocol and the team, and we want to do our part to help. We see monetary policy as a critical issue for Livepeer to address at this time. We strongly believe that swift action is warranted to help the Livepeer team realize their vision and for the network to achieve greater adoption.” —VIKTOR BUNIN, PROTOCOL SPECIALIST AT BISON TRAILS

5. Celebrating Ethereum’s 5th Birthday with #ethereum5words

To celebrate Ethereum’s 5th birthday, we challenged the community to describe Ethereum's impact on the world in 5 words using hashtag #Ethereum5Words. We retweeted some of our favorites. For a 5-tweet thread on Ethereum’s impact, check out this thread from Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails.

6. Meet the Herd: Q&A with Engineering Manager Sasha Semenyuk

An interview with Bison Trails’ first employee: how Sasha got into blockchain, his interest in creating a culture of learning at the company, and his thoughts on what protocol teams have done well. Check it out.

“The best protocol teams I’ve worked with were the ones that put in extra attention into building their communities, creating robust documentation, and being open and responsive to community input.” –SASHA SEMENYUK, ENGINEERING MANAGER AT BISON TRAILS

More from the Herd

• 📺 In June, Bison Trails and Web3 Foundation teamed up for an in-depth conversation on Substrate, Polkadot’s parachains, and scaling infrastructure. The conversation ranged from learnings on Kusama to the intricacies of optimizing infrastructure for Nominated Proof of Stake networks. Watch a replay of the event!
• 🎧 Joe joined the one-and-only Anthony Pompliano on the Pomp Podcast to discuss blockchain infrastructure, advice for founders, and innovation in the blockchain space. Listen to the wide-ranging discussion.
• ☝️Aaron Henshaw, Co-founder and CTO of Bison Trails, shared his perspective on the Coda protocol testnet's 1-year anniversary.
• 📺 Viktor Bunin joined Tom Shaughnessy on the Chain Reaction Podcast to discuss all things blockchain and how protocol specialists at Bison Trails collaborate with protocol teams around the world.
• 🌍 The @BisonTrailsEng Twitter account debuted with details of a bug we discovered in the core Celo client that prevented validators from correctly signing blocks. 🐜 An incident report includes our recommendations to improve the Celo client and node operator processes.
• 🙏 Bison Trails is honored to be included in Business Insider’s list of "next generation breakout b2b stars" as a blockchain infrastructure provider.
• 👄 Our guide to Keep Active Participation was translated into Mandarin and French by the Keep Community!

"Work on things you care about. Make sure you care about it enough that when it’s not going well you don’t give up." –JOE LALLOUZ, SHARES ADVICE FOR EARLY-STAGE FOUNDERS ON THE POMP PODCAST [link]

📣 Ontology token holders can now delegate to our enterprise-grade infrastructure. All you need is a single $ONT. Follow our #OWallet #ONTO delegation instructions.

Did you know that you can also delegate to Bison Trails’ public enterprise-grade validators on Celo, Cosmos, Edgeware, Kusama, Livepeer, Polkadot, and Solana?

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

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.

Like this newsletter?