ChainCatcher news, according to Coindesk, the crypto investment firm Sol Strategies (HODL), led by former Valkyrie Investment Company CEO and co-founder Leah Wald, has acquired four validator nodes for nearly $18 million in cash and stock.The Toronto-based company, formerly known as Cypherpunk Holdings, plans to acquire these validator nodes from Cogent Crypto. Cogent Crypto is a high-performance validator node operator operating within the Solana ecosystem. According to a statement released on Thursday, the total value of the investment is close to $18 million, divided into three phases: $1 million in cash and approximately $1 million in company stock will be paid upon completion of the transaction, with the remainder to be distributed in stock over three years, Sol Strategies stated.The company will acquire validator nodes for Solana (SOL), Sui (SUI), Monad (MONAD), and ARCH (ARCH) networks from Cogent Crypto, with most of the funds focused on SOL.

ChainCatcher news, the privacy public chain Namada announced that the Anoma Foundation is launching the Namada delegation program, with applications now open and a deadline of October 31, 2024. This program will be used to delegate up to 50 validator nodes. Accepted validators will receive a 6-month delegation from the Anoma Foundation to help with the network's decentralization, stability, and security.

ChainCatcher news, Hemera is building a programmable semantic data layer driven by an innovative account-centric indexing protocol. This data layer helps developers abstract the heterogeneity of smart contracts, allowing them to express new semantics through user-defined functions (UDFs).By leveraging AltLayer's Wizard and relying on Eigenlayer's infrastructure, Hemera is able to provide a verifiable data network in real-time. Hemera's complex state machine makes achieving verifiability through zero-knowledge technology impractical. However, with the shared security mechanism, Hemera's verification nodes AVS address this critical issue, making it a fully verifiable protocol network that provides Hemera's programmable semantic data network to all rollups and applications within and outside the Eigen ecosystem in a minimally trusted manner.Arthur Meng, founder and CEO of Hemera, stated, "AltLayer's Wizard product simplifies the development of AVS, helping development teams save months of engineering time and allowing developers to focus on building their applications. The AltLayer team possesses exceptional expertise and deep knowledge of the rollup and restaking ecosystem, assisting partner teams in tackling complex challenges from both technical and market perspectives. The Hemera team is very excited about collaborating with them in AVS development and other areas."Based on the Hemera protocol, developers can focus on specific business needs without the need to maintain an internal data team to handle on-chain data.

ChainCatcher news, Superfast founder Martin Tromp has launched a Solana validation node at the Teraco data center in Johannesburg. Solana is a fast, scalable blockchain platform that competes with Ethereum, and as a proof-of-stake (PoS) system, validation nodes play a key role in network security and transaction validation.Tromp initially deployed the node in Cape Town, but moved it to Johannesburg due to network latency issues caused by a submarine cable break. Despite being further from the coast, performance has improved at the new location thanks to hardware upgrades.

ChainCatcher message, according to tonscan data, the TON network has staked 646.9 million TON.In addition, the current staking APY is 3.9%, and there are a total of 386 validator nodes in the network.

ChainCatcher message, LayerZero Labs announced on the X platform that it will join the Humanity Protocol validator node network, using ZK proofs to authenticate credentials and ensure privacy. LayerZero also stated that it will launch on the decentralized framework Humanity Protocol.

ChainCatcher news, EigenLayer announced that it has lowered the staking threshold for EigenDA validator nodes from 320 ETH to 96 ETH.EigenLayer stated that this change will allow more new validator nodes to participate in EigenDA's AVS validation service; re-staking users can also choose to delegate their tokens to validator nodes with a lower total staking amount, thereby increasing the decentralization of the network; Rollups can achieve better performance support through a larger cluster of validator nodes.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the gaming guild YGG announced that the YGG token will be launched on Ronin on March 21, 2024. Once launched on Ronin, the YGG token can be bridged between Ethereum and Ronin. The snapshot of wallets staking RON tokens through YGG validators has been completed, and a total of 1,376,579 YGG tokens will be distributed to 8,861 eligible wallet addresses to celebrate the YGG launch on Ronin.It is reported that by UTC time March 11, 2024, wallet addresses that delegate and stake at least 1 RON token in YGG will be eligible to receive YGG tokens. The amount of tokens airdropped will be determined based on the number of RON staked and will be tiered according to the duration of the token staking.

ChainCatcher news, according to the LUNC governance forum page, LUNC validator Allnodes has relinquished its voting rights on LUNC proposal #12073, which aims to burn 800 million USTC and blacklist and destroy the Risk Harbor multi-signature wallet valued at approximately 25.9 million USD (according to proposals 11660, 11710, 11832).It is reported that Allnodes is the top-ranked validator node in the LUNC network, holding 14.89% of the voting power. This vote will end on the 26th at 10 PM Beijing time.

ChainCatcher message, Solana validator node Laine stated that Solana engineers are building a version that includes fixes, and further instructions will be released to validators once the build and testing are complete.Previously, Solana Status indicated that Solana network engineers are investigating the issues with the mainnet-beta.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, MetaMask has launched a validator monitoring service, where MetaMask will operate validator nodes on behalf of subscribers who deposit 32 ETH. MetaMask stated that it will run the nodes securely while reducing the risks of slashing and downtime.Consensys, the company responsible for managing this service, stated: "Despite managing over 33,000 validators with more than $2 billion worth of Ethereum, the company has never received any slashing penalties in over two years of operation."

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Google Cloud has joined the Flare network as its validator node and infrastructure provider.Flare claims to be the "blockchain of data," providing decentralized data access for developers through its Oracle system. In the blockchain field, an Oracle refers to an entity that connects the network with external systems, allowing smart contracts to execute based on external inputs and outputs. Google Cloud is one of the 100 organizations serving as Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO).

ChainCatcher message, the dYdX trading research team collaborates with Skip Protocol to publicly display the amount of MEV that each validator could extract using a dashboard, aimed at preventing MEV extraction behaviors and taking action against bad actors.In addition, dYdX has deployed a "bad validator node" on the public test network, which maximizes profits by sandwiching all eligible orders.

ChainCatcher news, according to official news, T-Mobile's parent company, the German business giant Deutsche Telekom, announced its entry into the Polygon network, with its subsidiary MMS becoming a validator node on the Polygon network, focusing on securing the Polygon sidechains and Supernets application chains. In addition, MMS will also provide staking services for the Polygon network. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, the Fantom community has proposed to lower the staking FTM threshold for validator nodes. The proposal states that when Fantom's mainnet was launched in 2019, the minimum staking requirement for validators was 3.175 million FTM, which has since been reduced to 500,000 FTM, and today it is proposed to lower it further to 50,000, 75,000, or 100,000 FTM.It is reported that this move aims to reduce financial barriers to allow more participants globally to join the Fantom network and enhance the decentralization of Fantom. (source link)

ChainCatcher message, the Ethereum Goerli testnet activated the Shapella upgrade on March 15 at 6:26, with a validator participation rate of only 29% at the block trigger. In a YouTube live stream, Ben Edgington, the product lead for the Ethereum client Teku, stated that the low participation rate might be due to validator nodes not upgrading to the Goerli fork in time.Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko tweeted that the Goerli testnet is processing deposits, but some validator nodes have not yet upgraded. A challenge in studying the testnet validator nodes is that, given ETH has no value, the incentive to run validator nodes / monitor them decreases. Another possible reason is that a large number of withdrawal credential changes were processed at the fork point. Since this is the first time people are submitting these changes, there is more to handle, which may lead to block/proof loss on low-resource nodes.In addition, Ethereum developers will hold a conference call on March 16 from 22:00 to 23:30 to determine the mainnet Shanghai upgrade date. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Google Cloud announced that it will become a validator node on the Tezos network, allowing Google Cloud's enterprise customers to deploy Tezos nodes.ChainCatcher previously reported that in September 2022, Google Cloud became a validator node for the Ronin Network. In November, Aptos announced a partnership with Google Cloud, which will support some of its validator nodes and other services. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, SoftBank will become the official network validator for the gaming blockchain Oasys, focusing on developing blockchain-based services for the gaming industry.Currently, Bandai Namco Research, SEGA, Square Enix, Netmarble, and 17 other companies are the 21 initial validators of Oasys. In the next batch of validators, 4 more companies will join the network, bringing the total number of validators to 25. (source link)