Quicksilver: Liquid Staking for the Interchain

Josh Lee

• 2 min read
Quicksilver: Liquid Staking for the Interchain

This blog post was originally published on Keplr's Medium blog on December 17, 2022.

In this next installation of Keplr's partnership interview series, we learn from Roea Mortaki, co-founder of Quicksilver, about Quicksilver's liquid staking platform.

About Roea Mortaki

Roea Mortaki is one of the three co-founders of Quicksilver, the Cosmos Liquid Staking Zone, and also co-founder of Ingenuity, the development company building Quicksilver. With a background in traditional finance, Roea was introduced to crypto and started working for a staking service provider, gaining deep knowledge of Cosmos and liquid staking.

The Quicksilver Team

Quicksilver is a fully distributed team of seven people across four continents. Vish, Joe, and Roea met while at Chorus One. Joe designed the first liquid staking implementation during the 2019 Hackatom, but Cosmos technology back then couldn't support that design. When Interchain Accounts were announced, Joe's vision became possible. After attending Cosmoverse in Lisbon in November 2021, the team decided it was time to start building Quicksilver.

What Is Liquid Staking and Why Is It Important?

At a basic level, liquid staking is the mechanism through which delegations bonded through staking are made liquid — a way of securing a chain through staking while still taking advantage of the full potential of your assets.

It's important because it solves the 'Stakers' Dilemma': for quite some time in Cosmos, staking and DeFi were mutually exclusive, forcing users to choose between securing a chain or earning higher DeFi yields. Liquid staking removes this constraint, and Quicksilver does it while providing users with a frictionless UX and keeping them empowered to make their own decisions.

How Does Quicksilver Work?

Quicksilver is a sovereign Cosmos-SDK zone that provides liquid staking for the Cosmos ecosystem. It's scalable to any IBC-connected, ICA-enabled zones, and enables users to signal their intent to delegate to validators of a native zone while retaining their voting rights when liquid staking.

Users on the protocol can mint a qAsset — a voucher representative of their staked asset. Unlike the original asset, the qAsset is liquid and can be used in DeFi protocols.

Lessons from Other Liquid Staking Protocols

Key learnings integrated into Quicksilver include:

  • Restricted validator sets lead to concentration of stake among a handful of entities, which is detrimental to chain health.
  • Users losing their governance rights is unimaginable in the Cosmos ecosystem where community and governance participation is paramount.
  • Traditional liquid staking solutions had poor UX with unbonding periods — Quicksilver designed a frictionless UX and integrates the Liquid Staking Module to mitigate unbonding periods.

Ensuring Decentralization

Quicksilver implemented decentralization through innovative features:

  • Intent Signalling: Allows Quicksilver to allocate stake to validators based on users' intent.
  • Participation Rewards: Incentivizes users to delegate to decentralized, performant validators that are active in governance.
  • Launched with a healthy and diverse validator set of 150 validators.

Looking to the Future

With the chain launched, the team is rolling out the protocol's user-facing interface and the full range of features through Q1 2023. Plans also include enabling CosmWasm on the chain later in the year, allowing other teams to build DeFi products on top of Quicksilver and leveraging the chain's unique features.

How Can Cosmonauts Get Involved?

  • Use the protocol to liquid stake assets and unlock their full potential.
  • Learn about Liquid Staking, Interchain Accounts, the Liquidity Staking Module, Interchain Queries, and provide feedback.
  • Join Quicksilver's social media platforms to interact with the team and community.

Thanks, Roea, for sharing more about the Quicksilver protocol and the team's thoughtful approach to liquid staking for the Interchain. 🔭