Update:

• LOOM staking for delegators is officially live. Read how you can stake you LOOM from both desktop and mobile wallets.
• Basechain was formerly known as PlasmaChain. Read the official announcement.

As of today, Basechain is live and in production, third-party developers have started building on the initial testnet, and we recently announced support for delegators.

Now, we’re moving onto one of the most critical pieces in this entire puzzle — onboarding external validators.

As we’ve written previously, validators hold the supreme responsibility of ensuring the health, performance, and security of the network. It’s fair to say — the success of Basechain largely depends on them.

So when we set out to begin opening the network to the community, we knew we had to attract the absolute best of the best.

…and we’re happy to report we’ve done just that!

Over this past week, we’ve onboarded the first set of external validators to Basechain testnet.

As you’ll see outlined below, this initial group brings the deep expertise and experience that will help propel Basechain to the next level.

Over the coming months, we will continue bringing additional validators onto the network, so if you’re interested in participating — drop us a line here.

Mythos

Mythos is a crypto investment company, investing directly in cryptoassets as well as running infrastructure services to operate the underlying crypto networks themselves.

Taking an active approach, Mythos leverages its assets to perform validator services and to participate in governance within those networks. Their overarching idea is that putting assets to work will increase the value of the network and ultimately produce better returns.

They have built out a secure and professional grade infrastructure, and will be targeting larger Basechain delegators by providing a unique suite of services including 24/7 support, community bulletins, and third-party audited security reports.

Mythos is led by Ryan Sean Adams, a prominent voice helping drive the Ethereum community forward, along with his team of blockchain infrastructure experts who have proven exceptional in running professionally-managed staking and validator services across several other large-scale networks.

More details on the Mythos Loom Validator here, including how you can stake your tokens.

Bitfish

Bitfish has quickly emerged as one of the leading staking projects in the space.

They are creating a platform that will let anyone stake their crypto, contribute to network security, and share in the value being created.

In paving the way toward a more decentralized future, the Bitfish team is focused across three distinct pillars:

• Experience: Dissemination of knowledge decentralizes power. Bitfish aims to be the go-to place for anyone new to the blockchain world, by providing well-researched educational content that’s accessible to anyone.
• Gifting: Gifting leads to getting. Bitfish is fostering a gifting culture internally and will gift knowledge, code, and time externally to help distributed ledger technology “cross the chasm” and become integrated into everyday life, so that it will improve the lives of those who need it, as opposed to only those who are building it.
• Collateralization: Collateral incentivizes action. Bitfish will design and support games that leverage collateral to circumvent local maxima, creating better outcomes for all parties involved. They are starting by validating stake-based blockchains, which use collateral to incentivize “good behavior”, and creating other collateralization-based products.

The founding members are Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, a mining pool that has mined the most Bitcoin blocks in the world and is the second largest Ethereum pool 😲; David Knott, a research scientist for OmiseGO, one of the top Ethereum-based projects implementing a currency agnostic decentralized exchange; and Mia Liu, a startup wonder woman.

Shoutout to David (along with Vitalik) for convincing us to build Plasma Cash in the first place — and for guiding Plasma as a whole 🙏

In addition to the team’s extensive record and technical chops, Bitfish has also been incredibly active in building a community through a continuous series of educational events.

Bixin

Bixin is a world-class blockchain platform, creating a comprehensive suite of tools that enable users to easily hold, safeguard, and utilize their blockchain assets.

Since 2014, Bixin has grown into a global company with core capabilities extending across the entire continuum of the blockchain industry — including mining, validator services, exchanges, payments, vertical media, security, etc.

Their mining division, Bixin Pool, is one of the most prolific across the industry. At the time of writing, they have roughly 3% of BTC hash rate. Additionally, they are running validators and nodes across a broad array of the top blockchain projects out there.

The founding members of the Bixin team are true bitcoin veterans, and have been influential voices in helping drive the global blockchain community forward.

MW Partners

MW Partners is a Singapore-based investment firm that focuses exclusively on early stage blockchain-enabled projects — and one of the absolute best in the game.

While being widely recognized as one of the top funds in the blockchain world, they are by no means strangers to rolling up their sleeves and diving into the technical weeds.

MW has been running technical workshops, creating developer resources, and actively participating in their portfolio networks through staking and running full nodes.

The core team brings a deeply multi-disciplinary set of expertise and experience, spanning consultancy, banking, trading, and software development.

MW Partners is currently collecting delegation interest from the public. For more information, visit https://stakewith.us.

Next Steps: Bringing on More Validators

We will continue to onboard new validators through Q1 of next year — first onto the Basechain testnet, and then onto mainnet.

The idea is to steadily increase the number of external validators on the network while ensuring stability at each step of the way, until Basechain is governed and operated entirely by the community itself.

With this inaugural batch of validators, we’re setting an incredibly high standard. 😎

If you think you have what it takes to run a validator and are keen, check out the requirements and let us know here.

(And if you’re feeling antsy, you can start with spinning up your own non-validating node right now)

Loom Network is the multichain interop platform for scaling high-performance dapps — already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.

Deploy your dapp to Loom’s Basechain once and reach the widest possible user base across all major blockchains today.

New to Loom? Start here.

Want to stake your LOOM tokens and help secure Basechain? Find out how.

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