Flare News: Weekly Roundup June 25 2023

Buckle up for this week's roundup because it might be the biggest one yet! It’s been a tremendous week with much unveiled giving us amazing insight into the current developments in the Flare world.

If you spent even a moment on Twitter in the past week you’ll have seen a sudden announcement of an entity called “Flare Labs”. A post from Flare Lab’s Twitter made their introduction noting that they’ve “been busy building” and “it’s about time they launched their website”. You might be curious why this is a big deal… if you’ve been following along on the F-Assets saga - which is a concept of token on Flare that enables smart contract usage of non-smart contract chains; you’ll also have heard from Flare that this protocol will be “built by a third party”. It doesn’t take much thought to put two and two together on this one realise who’s gonna be taking the charge on F-Assets.

We have been busy building. It’s about time we launched our website. https://flarelabs.org

Flare Labs

Now, if two and two turned out to be five in your head, there’s good news because there is even more evidence supporting Flare Labs will be behind the F-Assets protocol. With a bit of sleuthing through Flare Labs new website, we found a link to their Github account¹ which shows a code repository named “fassets”. This is a joyous occasion right!? Well yes, unless you’re among those that were angered by the repositories documentation noting the F-Asset system will support “Ripple, BTC, DOGE, and LTC”. Did you pick up on that? Yes, it mentioned Ripple instead of XRPL until it was changed soon after it was noticed. A little typo never hurt anyone so we’ll let this slide and eagerly await an official statement which is yet to come of this finding.

So F-Assets is big news, what else? Let's look at a blog post made by Flare on June 20 titled “Flare Staking Phase 1”. Yep, staking is coming to Flare with the aim to decentralise the validators from the currently closed set of 20 professional validators. It's a mechanism which will be rolled out in three phases with the first having no change for token holders regarding the economics of FTSO delegation or the FlareDrop.

If you weren't aware, Flare actually has three chains which shows its similarity to Avalanche which Flare bases its consensus protocol from. They are the C chain which is what is actively being used by FLR token holders as well as an X chain and finally the P chain which is dedicated for staking mechanisms.

So this means staking will need to be made on a chain separate to the C chain resulting in the inability to earn FTSO or FLR distributions on staked tokens - at least in this first phase. This of course means, with little to no incentive to stake to validators, we likely won't see a large amount of stake being made by general holders. The Flare Foundation will provide a majority of stake in the system initially by loaning 66.7% of its allocation of staking tokens to professional validators for staking purposes; and the remaining portion will be staked with validators who are onboarded from FTSO data providers.

During this first phase, 10 million FLR will be staked by the Foundation on behalf of each FTSO validator as part of their “self bond” requirements but they will be unable to earn or claim rewards on that amount. Their incentives do, however, follow on from previous arrangements during the network's Beta. To read more about Flare’s staking transition and key dates, read the official blog article.

Governance

The Flare Foundation hasn’t been shy pushing out new governance proposals with STP.05 landing in our laps this week. It’s a proposal that wishes to adjust the inflation parameters on Songbird and aims to improve reward availability, dampen inflation and make things more efficient for bookkeeping. The official proposal is available to read on Flare’s proposal repository.

We also have a small update on last week’s announced FIP.03 proposal that is now available for voting on the Flare Portal.

The FTSO management group has jumped back into action this week starting the discussion on three new accusations.

We have Coffee FTSO reported as a clone of Love FTSO², a previously accused and acted against data provider, Sirius and HXK Oracle reportedly using the same dev or algorithm³ and finally BestFTSO, tSovereign and WorldFTSO accused of the same⁴.

These all are still in the discussion phase with no official proposal made yet given the opportunity for the accused to defend their services.

Ecosystem

Flare has announced two new partnerships this week. The first announcement was with Oracle Daemon, who is also an FTSO data provider, that aims to develop a suite of tools to enhance user experience including multi-wallet management, advanced data provider analytics and providing a reward auto claiming service.

The next announcement was with Atriv, an AI-powered platform for digital art with the goal to bring no-code NFT art generation with easy user prompts.

If the new partnerships weren't enough, Enosys has taken center stage to unveil an awe-inspiring bridge between Ethereum and Songbird. This groundbreaking development enables the seamless transfer of USDT to the shores of Flare, making it the very first stable coin to grace Flare's domain. Hold onto your hats because Enosys has even more surprises up its sleeve – a liquidity pool will soon be unleashed on their DEX, igniting a trading frenzy once sufficient liquidity is available.

Without a shred of doubt, this week was an exhilarating rollercoaster ride that showcased Flare's unstoppable momentum. Brace yourselves, for the future is ablaze with endless possibilities! Join us next week as we unveil an electrifying roundup of adventures yet to come!