TL;DR: Bity will decommission its Cosmos node on the 11th of November 2019. You have until the 20th of October to safely unstake from our node.

Bity's journey with Cosmos.

Sometime ago, we jumped onto the Cosmos train. One of our main partners, a crypto-fund, caught our eye when investing a significant amount during the ICO. We followed the evolution of the project and became increasingly convinced that inter-chain systems would be a part of the answer to Bitcoin scalability. Meanwhile Bitcoin continued to be improved, and layer 2 solutions like the lightning network or other chains like Ethereum uncovered new use cases and dimensions of cryptocurrency. The idea of having a more-or-less decentralized effort to connect chains was appealing to us.

So next to the business opportunity proposed by our partner, we became interested in the vision that was being created by projects like Cosmos or Polkadot.

We began to silently follow the testnets and host our own test servers. While we did not actively participate in the Game of Stake, we gained insight about the type of companies in the space, the expertise that was present, and the lack of group communication in the project.

Bity was present from day one of the mainnet and we were in the top 30 in terms of voting power. Currently with 71 missed blocks, we are in the top 8 of the nodes with the best uptime for nodes available since April 22, 2019 at 17:00 UTC.

What changed?

Several elements evolved; the crypto-fund had to review its own strategy for its own reason and started unstaking parts of its assets. We had diversified with a few other stakers but not enough. It was becoming clear, quickly, that the incentive of the stakers was defined more by the low fees than the uptime of the node. As long as we were not directing users to our node, staking in Cosmos would not be sustainable.

Unfortunately our frequent ROI calculations showed that the return would have remained negative for too long before we could develop what we wanted.

What now?

We will be decommissioning our node on November 11th 2019. Before that we will signal on the network that no one should stake with us.

WARNING: If you are staking on our server, we recommend you to unbound all your stake from our node on the October 20th 2019, latest. After that, your stake might be at risk.

We might be back.

As a crypto-currency broker, our key product is an Open exchange API where you can swap crypto-currencies for fiat up to 5000 CHF per day without KYC. This product is primarily intended for Wallets that can integrate this service to add value for their users and at the same time monetize their efforts. Our goal with Cosmos, and our POS strategy in general, is to provide easy on/off ramp for POS coins, but also to provide directly a place to stake where the Wallet can get a share of the profits. We believe that a lot a users around the world would benefit from being able to buy and stake small amounts of coins.

Today the network is far from being operational and we did not build those additional services yet. We were of course focusing on the Cosmos node itself before building anything else. But when the network will be useful, we might be back.