What is Stride?

Stride is a blockchain (“zone”) that provides liquidity for staked assets. Using Stride, you can earn both staking and DeFi yields across the Cosmos IBC ecosystem. Stride is built using Cosmos SDK and Tendermint and created with Ignite. Stride allows users to liquid stake any IBC-compatible cosmos SDK native appchain token. Under the hood, Stride leverages the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, Interchain Accounts and Interchain Queries.

Read Stride’s “Meet Stride” blog post to learn more about why they built Stride. Stride is currently supporting ATOM, JUNO, and STARS as of October 7th 2022.

Stride has big plans to onboard more chains and tokens later this year are:

Cosmos Hub (stATOM), Juno (stJUNO), Secret (stSCRT), Osmosis (stOSMO), Kava (stKAVA), Oasis (stROSE), Axelar (stAXL), Akash (stAKT), Evmos (stEVMOS), Injective (stINJ), Regen (stREGEN), Sommelier (stSOMM), Band (stBAND), dYdX (stDYDX), Terra V2 (stLUNA), Stargaze (stSTARS), Kujira (stKUJI), Umee (stUMEE), E-Money (stNGM), Crypto.Org (stCRO), Comdex (stCMDX), Sifchain (stEROWAN), Crescent Network (stCRE), MediBloc (stMED), Persistence (stXPRT), Iris (stIRIS), AssetMantle (stMNTL), Sentinel (stDVPN), BitSong (stBTSG), Cheqd (stCHEQ), Chihuahua (stHUAHUA), KiChain (stXKI), Ixo (stIXO), Microtick (stTICK), Fetch.Ai (stFET), Konstellation (stDARC), Desmos (stDSM), Bitcanna (stBCNA), Lum Network (stLUM), Bostrom (stBOOT), Likecoin (stLIKE), Dig Chain (stDIG), RiZON (stATOLO), OmniFlix (stFLIX), Decentr (stDEC), Vidulum (stVDL), Altered Carbon (stACB), Shentu (stCTK), and others.

Many more tokens will launch in the cosmos ecosystem over the coming months and years. Stride plans to support all IBCv3-compatible tokens as “st”-Tokens.

Lets jump into Staking…

But first What is the Cosmos Network?

The Cosmos Network is a decentralized ecosystem of independent blockchains that scale and communicate with each other. Also, Cosmos Network offers an interoperable ecosystem of connected blockchains that are customizable and interoperable with other blockchains. (academy.morales.io)

Transaction fees: Transaction fees collected on the Cosmos Hub are distributed to staked ATOM holders which is a reason for staking alone vs. newly created (Minted) ATOM: The token’s total supply is inflated to reward the token stakers. The token holders that do not stake do not receive rewards, diluting their ATOM over time.

What is Staking?

Staking is passive investment as a way for crypto holders (stakers) to earn rewards by locking up a portion of their cryptocurrency of earning rewards for holding certain cryptocurrencies. In another way, staking allows crypto holders to earn rewards usually in the form of interest, or more crypto, without having to sell/trade their cryptocurrency.

What is Liquidity Staking?

Liquid staking is where a token is staked, and then another token is issued to represent that staked token. For example, a user deposits ATOM with Stride, Stride stakes that ATOM, and issues the user stATOM. stATOM represents underlying staked ATOM, and can be used to redeem that ATOM at any time. But unlike staked ATOM, stATOM is liquid, meaning it can be sold, transferred, or used in DeFi.

The Future Of Stride

Key Takeaways:

Stride is poised to become a leader in Liquidity Staking.
Stride has positioned itself in a growing DeFi ecosystem supporting a means for project development.
Stride recent capital raise during a Crypto bear implies it is a golden child in the space.

How it works?

Stake

Stake your tokens on Stride from any Cosmos chain. See your rewards accumulate in real time. No minimum. It’s that simple.

Proof-of-stake blockchains maintain their integrity through staked or committed assets. Liquid staking allows users to earn yield on those locked assets through an equivalent number of new tokens. Stride offers liquid staking, a network of proof-of-stake blockchains that interact with one another through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.

Mint

Receive stTokens when you stake. These can be freely traded, and can be redeemed with Stride at any time to receive your original tokens.
(+ staking rewards!)

The “Tokens” part of “stTokens” is a placeholder for the staked asset. For example, Stride currently offers staking support for Cosmos Hub – one of the first chains launched on Cosmos – and the native ATOM token is exchanged for stATOM. Stride plans to add support for more IBC-compatible assets by the end of the year.

DeFi

Stride lets you use your staked assets to compound your yield. Continue to earn staking yield, and earn additional yield by lending, LPing, and more. Set your own risk tolerance in Cosmos DeFi.

Stride lets users stake tokens from any Cosmos chain in exchange for stTokens. The staked assets can earn an auto-compounding staking yield and can earn additional yield through actions like lending and providing liquidity. The stTokens can be sold or used in DeFi (decentralized finance) applications.(coindesk)

Investing In Stride

First, it is our Fundamental thesis that you first invest in Bitcoin, then Ethereum and as regulation encircles DeFi as whole expand into ATOM (Cosmos) and (ATOM/USD) using your respective available currencies. Currently, the available ATOM (Cosmos) pairs are ATOM/USD, ATOM/AUD, ATOM/ETH, ATOM/EUR, ATOM/GBP, ATOM/USDT, ATOM/XBT.

If you would like to opening a starter position in Cosmos you can use Coinbase here: We suggest that you adhere to standard risk allocation. Just keep in mind, an ATOM (Cosmos) is an indirect investment and not as targeted as Liquidity Staking! In essence your supporting the underlying asset and are not going to experience the same multiples Liquidity Staking can offer. Additionally, I’d classify Liquidity Staking as higher risk of loss because many projects will fail in the coming years and Stride is not insulated from those losses as an intermediary which is why they are offering a higher yield.