COMDEX AND VALIDATORS: HOW FAR WE’VE COME.
It has been a while since I released an article, while I took some time off from articles, I watched closely and I noticed that Comdex, a synthetics protocol that makes the flow of capital from DeFi to CeFi seamless by unlocking access to a vast set of commodity debt assets and liquidity, has thrived and has made giant strides, thereby achieving various milestones in the crypto space.
Therefore, I prepared this article, which seeks to highlight some of these milestones and discuss one out of many factors responsible for this progress.
That being said, let’s talk about it……
Comdex is one of the “fresh off the block” projects that exists on the Cosmos ecosystem. Known for its synthetic assets protocol, Comdex aims at developing financial markets providing investors more access to various asset classes and at the same time, making safer investment options available.
Comdex has made tremendous progress within the last 2 years as the team behind its Synthetic assets protocol have created a vision which is to develop a suit of solutions that will improve the access of users to financial goods and services and have laid a path for implementing this vision.
As earlier stated, Comdex has made tremendous progress since its humble beginnings in 2018, some of the huge milestones achieved in recent times include but are not limited to:
- $CMDX Airdrop in which $LUNA, $ATOM, $OSMO & $XPRT holders were/ are eligible. Currently this airdrop website is live and you can check for eligibility, as well as claim your airdrop here.
- The Comdex Mainnet launch on the 20th November which was a huge success.
- The $CMDX liquidity pools incentivized on Osmosis.
- The surpassing of 15,000 wallet addresses, thus indicating more and more adopters and a huge growth of the community.
- The $CMDX listing on CoinMarketCap and Coingecko.
- Comdex becoming the 25th member of the InterBlockchain Communication gang IBCgang.
Several factors come into play when putting into consideration how Comdex was able to come this far. One of these factors is the protocol’s ability to execute transactions competently and without any security risks. This is where validators play a part. Blockchain networks propose blocks with transactions, these blocks need to be validated.
With this in mind, let’s get into the world of validators shall we….
Every blockchain basically needs some kind of consensus where different actors that are decentralized within the protocol need to agree on the next bunch of transactions that will be included in the block. And as a validator, there is need to take on this role.
(To digress a little)- From the Bitcoin network, we have the miners who are able to look at transactions, propose transactions and propose blocks. They get rewarded for being able to propose transactions and propose blocks and write those blocks.
Miners in the Proof-of-Work (PoW) network have to solve cryptographic puzzles, if they have enough computing power and they’re able to solve these puzzles fast enough, they can propose the blocks and get the rewards for these proposals.
Now in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks which is a change to the PoW consensus mechanism, there are validators which are similar to miners, they basically propose blocks and get rewarded for it.
But in order to participate, they do not need that computing power to solve cryptographic puzzles, instead they need to show that they have the stake, hence it’s called Proof-of-Stake. With this, they can participate in the validation of transactions.
In PoS, stakers delegate their stake to validators, at every point in time, they remain the owners of their assets, they keep custody of their assets, they have their keys, and if they want to unstake (to take their funds back), its completely possible and no permission from validators is needed to do so.
PoS is an evolution on the revolution brought about by blockchain.
PoS is regarded as a better way of reaching consensus because of the negativities associated with PoW:
In mining, there are lots of inefficiencies involved as excessive energy is consumed due to the many miners who have to compete in terms of harsh power to propose these blocks. This consumes lots of energy (When solving the cryptographic puzzles), sadly only the one that validates the block gets the reward, laying waste to the rest of the mining power.
This is different with PoS because you don’t lose your stake if you’re unable to validate a specific block or transaction, making it more efficient as it conserves more energy.
As a very good example, Ethereum started off as a PoW mechanism, just like bitcoin, and then later the community realized that PoS is a better way of doing things.
Comdex has a total of 94 validators on Mintscan, out of which 64 are active. Comdex’s top 10 active validators on Mintscan are:
· Sentinel
· Figment
· Forbole
· Capx
The images below show these top 10 Validators on Comdex’s Mintscan:
You can also explore MintScan on Comdex here.
Particular attention should be drawn to Audit.one since it has more in common with Comdex, in the sense that they’re both products of the Persistence chain.
Audit.One: Validators of today, Auditors of tomorrow
To start with, an Audit in simple terms is an examination of a business and their financial transactions to see that they are true and correct.
The concept of auditing was introduced long ago to ensure that transactions are properly verified and their findings are clearly communicated to stakeholders.
But now how we see it is that in a future where a lot of transactions are actually permissionless and so many transactions are happening on chain and can actually be validated the moment they occur instead of waiting for a whole year (like most organizations do) to elapse before auditing takes place.
This functionality of being an auditor (audit transactions a year after they have occurred) becomes irrelevant. You can actually do transactions and validation at the same time. This is one of the interesting features that makes PoS really awesome.
Hence, this idea of auditing transaction (validating in PoS terms) immediately they occur is the reason why Audit.one which is Persistence’s validating arm adopted the slogan: “Validators of today, Auditors of tomorrow.”
You might be wondering why there are so many validators on Comdex’s Mintscan (even though a lot of them are currently inactive), It is because more validators reduce security risks owing to the fact that it makes it more decentralized, and creates an atmosphere for stakes to be easily distributed.
With all that has been discussed so far, you can see that there’s no magic, just a great job properly executed by the Comdex team to see that the project meets up with all expectations.
To stay up to date with all the interesting developments in the Comdex ecosystem, kindly utilize the links below:
