Meta Pool

TL;DR

• Today, July 13th, is the official start date for Stake Wars Episode III
• Meta Pool is partnering with Pagoda to bring challenges and updates to validators and users
• We outline our goals and objectives for the competition

Pagoda Partners with Meta Pool

This summer has been a time of significant development for both Meta Pool, and NEAR protocol. While Stake Wars was being planned, Pagoda invited Meta Pool to be a core sponsor of the technical challenges and organization of the competition. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to engage the community in such a meaningful way, and hope to give our users some more insight to the structure of the competition.

Pagoda (formerly NEAR Inc) has been in charge of the technical development of the next stage of decentralization on NEAR, where we finally introduce chunk-only producers. Now, as the code is ready for deployment, they’ve been reaching out to the Community to take ownership of the next stages.

In the simplest terms, Stake Wars can be seen as a campaign designed to bring chunk-only producers to market. At its most basic level it aims to fulfill two core objectives: 

1. To battle test the code before Mainnet release, and;
2. To help select the next batch of active, committed and capable community members to run validators as we expand from the current 100 to up to 300.

The technical challenges required to achieve the above objectives are relatively straightforward. We take pride in partnering with and supporting the Open Shards Alliance over the past year as our organizations have worked together to scale the NEAR network while keeping it secure and decentralized. 

Bringing the Galaxy Together

We have made clear in previous posts that core infrastructure is very important to us. This is precisely why our founders chose to build on NEAR, because it provides a scaleable and secure solution that can help bring the power of DeFi to millions (and theoretically billions) of users. 

We believe that bear markets are great for builders. Only projects that have real technology and use cases shine on this voyage through the galaxy. We are set on a mission to ensure that Stake Wars is not just a catchy brand that only engages a few hundred technical people running validators and chunk producer nodes. We want to ensure this competition is fun and our goal is to educate and onboard individuals and organizations that want to improve decentralization and the censorship resistance of the NEAR Protocol network.

While Meta Pool is in a key sponsorship role, we will ensure that validators have the tools they need to validate, and the rest of us will engage in a coordinated push to inform our users about all the challenges. In short, we hope to run a massive user onboarding and activation campaign!

The Four Pillars of Stake Wars

Technical

The technical aspect of this year’s contest will be the most familiar to previous Stake Wars participants and is what most people would expect from a Validators’ competition. 

The core challenges under this track will include setting up a validator, monitoring, maintaining your seat, etc. and will be run by our partner Open Shards Alliance. Additionally, Meta Pool will also be releasing our own technical challenges – stay tuned for more on those soon. 

Education & Communication

The special challenges under this category will focus on encouraging validators to engage meaningfully with their communities while also supporting other participants and future aspiring validators. We will be releasing more challenge specific information very soon – so keep an eye on our socials. The objective of this track is to make Stake Wars, and NEAR’s unique sharding design, a trending topic that anyone can approach.

Builders

As NEAR begins to launch chunk-only producers, we need to stress test the network under real world conditions. Pagoda will be running a number of experiments that will help ensure everything is working as intended. However, as we make Stake Wars the core focus of the NEAR ecosystem over the next two months, we believe it is an ideal opportunity for all the builders on NEAR to deploy their dApps on Testnet and get attention, real users, and valuable feedback ahead of their Mainnet release.

Users

The last and most important piece of the equation are, of course, the users. We are envisioning a Stake Wars where amongst all the laser fighting and validator sharding we will be able to onboard a ton of new users. We believe that scaling is just one part of the equation, the other equally important part is to help people understand the value of NEAR and have fun in the process. 

Next Steps

We continue to collaborate closely with all our Stake Wars partners and other organizers and will be releasing more information soon. To stay in the loop, follow: 

• Pagoda
• Open Shards Alliance
• Meta Pool 

You can ask questions in the Stake Wars Channel on Meta Pool, and stay up to date on current developments and FAQs from the community. 

We will also be hosting a range of Twitter Spaces that we will announce this week. For now, NEAR Week will be hosting a space in the next 2 days with our very own AVB who will provide more details and information about the competition. 

Keep on Staking!

About Meta Pool & stNEAR

Meta Pool is the leading liquid staking solution for $NEAR and wNEAR token holders. With Meta Pool you earn NEAR staking rewards and maintain your liquidity to participate in DeFi protocols on NEAR and Aurora.

Users staking $NEAR and wNEAR with Meta Pool receive in exchange stNEAR (staked NEAR) tokens.

stNEAR simultaneously accrues staking rewards and unlocks users’ liquidity enabling them to participate in DeFi activities (e.g. lending, farming, borrowing) on NEAR and Aurora.

Stake $NEAR on Meta Pool

~11% APY

Get stNEAR

Yield-bearing token

Go DeFi on NEAR & Aurora

More APY and more rewards

Meta Pool also solves the problems associated with Proof-of-Stake networks staking: illiquidity, immovability and accessibility. Meta Pool also aims to distribute staking in multiple validators to improve censorship-resistance of the NEAR network.

With a TVL of ~9 Million $NEAR and growing, Meta Pool has become in just a few months a cornerstone element of the NEAR ecosystem. Meta Pool is making NEAR Protocol more decentralized and therefore more secure.

In February 2022 Meta Pool has been successfully audited by BlockSec, confirming the implementation of the highest security standards.

For more information visit https://metapool.app.

Join Meta Pool & stNEAR Community

If you have any questions or wish to be part of our project, don’t hesitate to join our official platforms and reach out to the team!

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