This is a soft proposal aiming to gather some community feedback around a potential sunset of certain chains supported by Stader.
Although it’s true that Stader liquid staking approach has always leaned towards being multichain, it’s important to take into consideration that the greater the number of supported chains, the higher the maintenance, cost and risks involved.
The chains proposed to be sunsetted are Near, Fantom and Terra2.0.
Motivation
Stader launched their liquid staking in these chains approximately in Q2 2022, when the sentiment around them was overall positive and promising, as they were thriving in terms of development and DeFi adoption.
However, this has considerably changed during last year, influenced by different causes in each case, and generally greatly impacting not only on their token price or their DeFi TVL, but also on their ecosystem development in terms of dApps and DeFi protocols that have survived the bear market or that are currently being built.
Also Stader has recently launched in Ethereum. The complexity of the architecture and the high dev maintenance needed for it (constant client updates, smart contracts upgrades to polish and introduce new features, DVT pool coming soon, etc), will require much more dev effort than the rest of the chains combined.
All this factors combined, makes the sunset of these chains the most conservative approach, as the risk and effort is not worth the potential rewards even in the most optimistic future scenarios, given current situation of those chains and the whole DeFi ecosystem, highly balanced towards Ethereum.
If we look at Stader LSTs, it is clear that Fantom, NEAR, and Terra, are not making money.
They have a combined TVL of $4.5m.
Considering a staking rate of 5% and a commission of 5%, means it is netting Stader 11k USD in revenue per year.
I think the dev work, the team effort, etc is not worth it.
ETHx got 10x that TVL in just 3.5 months since launch. It is clear to me where we need to focus efforts.
I fully support sunsetting Terra 2.0 due to its evident underperformance and lack of TVL on Stader. However, I believe it’s premature to discontinue support for Fantom and Near. Both projects have promising roadmaps, particularly Near, and we are in a volatile market phase that may see increased interest in these blockchains. Monitoring their progress over the coming months seems like a more prudent approach before making a decision to sunsetting both.
Totally agree. My opinion is that L1s will have a very limited space in crypto in the comming years with the appearance of L2s scaling ethereum. Everything will pivote around Ethereum Network in the future and very rarely other L1s will succeed.
Focus reward distribution in Ethereum and Defi around ETHx.
Fantom has Andre C. which is constantly developing and it seems he wants to make possible that you can run nodes with mobile - New Sonic. At least double thought should be given to Fantom.
I would be inclined to sunset Terra 2.0 and possibly even Near, however, I share the sentiment of my colleagues that a second thought should be given to sunsetting Fantom network as well. I will cast my vote in favor, but I’m not in favor of sunsetting all three.
Given the L1 wars state and the already proven blockchain market condition of winner-takes-all (practically), we already know that next bullrun will be rollup centric and there won’t be any ETH killer (which is what all these L1s pretended to be). Therefore, it makes no sense to keep wasting human and economic resources on these chains.
As it has been pointed out, they used to be really promising and active in terms of development, but let’s be real, the possibility of them coming back in the next cycles is really small, we could even say negligible. Multichain incident was devastating for Fantom, and Near ecosystem is dead right now. Even if they end up gaining momentum again, the decision to sunset them is the only rational outcome of this, as is is the best ROI choice for the whole project.
Let’s keep in mind where the money is, and where the biggest opportunities are. ETHx product is genuinely one of the best of the Liquid Staking Ecosystem, and it still has room for improvement, and the LRT potentially has the first mover advantage in a new promising Restaking ecosystem.
So let’s funnel all the resources into these fields.
