Stake.link Goes Cross-Chain, Enabling LINK Staking On Arbitrum For The First Time
London, England, February 28th, 2024, Chainwire
stake.link, the delegated liquid staking protocol for the Chainlink Ecosystem, has announced the availability of cross-chain staking on Arbitrum, the most widely used Layer-2 network on the Ethereum blockchain. The move enables stake.link to establish a second home on Arbitrum where it will be able to continue delivering the most refined Chainlink staking experience for users who will no longer have to pay exorbitant gas fees to stake LINK and earn rewards.
The decision to go cross-chain was approved by the stake.link Governance Council following recent Council votes. With the launch of cross-chain LINK staking on Arbitrum, stake.link is enhancing the cryptoeconomic security of the ETH-USD price feed and further contributing to the 45,000,000 LINK currently securing the feed.
Stake.link makes it simple for anyone in the Chainlink community to provide collateral in the form of LINK to 15 of the most prominent Chainlink node operators and receive rewards in the form of stLINK, the liquid staking receipt token of the protocol.
With stLINK, users not only earn a blended staking reward between both the Chainlink Community Staking Pool and the Node Operator Staking Pool, but can also interact in DeFi by pooling their stLINK in the Curve Finance stLINK/LINK pool–all while their staked LINK tokens continue to generate rewards from the node operators.
Chainlink staking has been live for 14 months on Ethereum mainnet, but with its growing popularity comes complications to everyday stakers. Ethereum is the most widely used L1 blockchain which brings with it traffic and high gas fees. For LINK stakers, this means staking, withdrawing, and claiming rewards comes at a steep cost to users.
This issue has become even more acute with the introduction of Chainlink Staking v.02, which not only expanded the available liquidity to secure the ETH-USD data feed from 25 million LINK to 45 million LINK, but also made it possible for users to withdraw previously-staked LINK. This highly anticipated development led to a dramatic increase in LINK staking activity as more users scrambled to participate, exacerbating the problem of Ethereum’s high gas fees.
Now instead of being forced to stake directly on the Ethereum mainnet, users now have the option of staking LINK on Arbitrum, the most widely-used L2 that’s designed to scale the world’s original smart contract blockchain. With this expansion, users can now stake both LINK tokens, as well as stake.link’s SDL governance token, on Arbitrum, and receive an NFT that represents staked SDL, known as reSDL.
In addition, users will also be able to bridge their stLINK receipt tokens and convert them to wrapped staked LINK, or wstLINK tokens onto Arbirtrum.
The decision to go cross-chain on Arbitrum paves the way for a more user and gas-friendly staking experience for the Chainlink community, increasing accessibility by reducing the costs of participation. At the same time, LINK stakers will be able to explore more yield-generating DeFi activities on Arbitrum.
The stake.link protocol also stands to benefit from its close association with Arbitrum, which offers a protocol-friendly grants program for projects that deploy on its network. In addition, stake.link plans to work closely with the Arbitrum-based decentralized exchange platform Camelot, which also offers its own grants program and also provides additional incentives for stakers via its native GRAIL token.
To date, stake.link is the only third-party liquid staking solution for the Chainlink ecosystem, offering the highest LINK staking rewards available.
Stake.link’s continued expansion is critical for the evolution of Chainlink, which has emerged as one of the most foundational components to the Web3 ecosystem, powering the vast majority of DeFi and Onchain Finance applications through an array of services, including cross-chain, compute, and data–these components that make up the Chainlink Platform are critical for the fundamental operation of the DeFi ecosystem. It’s because of this role that led to the introduction and expansion of the highly anticipated security mechanism of Staking for the Ecosystem.
About stake.link
stake.link is a first-of-its-kind liquid delegated staking platform delivering DeFi composability as an external protocol built on-top of Chainlink Staking. Built by premier Chainlink ecosystem developer LinkPool, powered by Chainlink node operators, and governed by the stake.link DAO, stake.link’s extensible architecture is purpose-built to support Chainlink Staking and to extend participation in the Chainlink Network.
Learn more: https://stake.link/
