The Future of Staking Podcast Series focuses on what we expect to see grow as important products and new ideas circulating in the Proof of Stake ecosystem in 2020 and beyond. 

This week we chatted with Jonas, Christian, and Mor of StakerDAO. 

StakerDAO is a platform for governing financial assets in a decentralized, secure, and compliant manner. STKR is the governance token of StakerDAO. Holders of the STKR token have primary responsibilities of submitting proposal ideas and electing members of the Staker Council.

Main Takeaways

Governance First

Borrowing a lot from Tezos, StakerDAO uses a representative governance model where STKR token holders vote for council members, and council members vote on proposals in four week cycles. 

StakerDAO sees governance as their core product, and they see governance models as being the most important factor in the long term success of blockchain networks. 

“Designing the right governance model is gonna be most important for chains going forward, and I think already you're starting to see winners and losers over the long term based on the governance models that they have in place.” Jonas Lamis, StakerDAO CEO

In terms of proposals, anything is fair game, even changes to how StakerDAO governance works. 

STKR Token

The STKR token is the governance token of StakerDAO. It is legally a security, but it is also seen as an asset manager by the StakerDAO team. STKR token holders essentially own a share of StakerDAO, and StakerDAO holds a collection of decentralized financial assets. 

“There's a lot of work associated with managing a proof of stake position. And so we wanna get rid of all the overhead needed to keep up with the industry, finding which token you want to be involved in, managing the delegation process, what validator to choose etc.” Christian Arita, StakerDAO Operations Lead 

BLND Token

The BLND token will be StakerDAO’s first financial product. It is a tracker token that tracks a basket of Proof of Stake tokens. StakerDAO uses a multi-factor model to determine which tokens will be included in the basket. Market Cap, liquidity, network participation, and reward ratio are all included in the model. 

StakerDAO will launch BLND with three tokens, Tezos, Cosmos, and Algorand. The StakerDAO team expects Polkadot and ETH 2.0 will be included in the basket once they launch. 

Long Term Vision

Currently, the number of STKR token holders is 25. The StakerDAO team expects that that number will grow into the hundreds or even thousands by the end of 2020. As the community grows, their goal is to bring more processes on-chain, such as proposal creation and asset management. 

StakerDAO hopes to bring more decentralized financial products, like BLND, to market. Small cap Proof of Stake baskets, single token trackers, stablecoins, and NFT baskets are being researched and discussed as possibilities within the StakerDAO community.