Cosmos has a bright future. With appchains, IBC, and interchain security, it’s only a matter of time before the Cosmos is home to hundreds of sovereign blockchains. And we want Stride to provide liquid staking for all of them.

We want Stride to be the best liquid staking provider in the Cosmos. In order to achieve that goal, we’ve designed Stride from the ground up with minimalism and neutrality in mind. In the crowded liquid staking field, these two qualities set Stride apart.

Minimalism

First, minimalism. Stride is an embodiment of the appchain vision: do one thing and do it well. Stride will always have one single product: liquid staking. The Stride team is solely focused on liquid staking, with no other distractions. Further, the chain is optimized just for liquid staking, with the fewest modules possible. And what’s more, the tokenomics of $ST have one purpose: facilitate social coordination to promote the greatest usage of Stride liquid staking.

Stride will be a minimalist chain, with one solitary purpose.

The advantages of this are numerous. Most crucially, it reduces the chances of something going wrong. The Stride chain will have the fewest moving parts possible, meaning the attack surface will be small. Recently, we have seen the Terra, Osmosis, and Juno chains halted for various reasons. Each of these chains has many moving parts. When each chain was halted, it was because of one small issue in one part of the chain, which resulted in the whole chain having to be stopped. While there are many benefits to pursuing a minimalist approach, the chief benefit is security.

Neutrality

In tandem with minimalism, Stride also has the quality of credible neutrality. We believe that in order to be the best liquid staking provider in the Cosmos, Stride must be completely neutral, just like the Cosmos Hub. By neutral, we mean Stride doesn’t favor one chain over another. Stride will have no conflict of interest in offering liquid staking to any of the hundreds of new chains coming to the Cosmos.

Let us explain. Some liquid staking providers are planning to build DeFi ecosystems on their chains. If, for example, there were a liquid staking appchain with a DEX built on it, holders of OSMO, KUJI, and CRE would probably be hesitant to use that chain’s liquid staking. In the same way, a liquid staking appchain with a DEX on it would be hesitant to incentivize Osmosis pools, as it would rather incentivize pools on its own DEX.

So if a liquid staking provider has a DeFi ecosystem built around it on the same chain, that provider would obviously be biased toward that particular ecosystem. This conflict of interest would limit the adoption of such a liquid staking provider.

As opposed to other liquid staking providers, Stride is taking an approach of complete neutrality. Stride doesn’t want to compete with other chains, it wants to collaborate with other chains to help them be successful. Stride wants to help other chains build their DeFi, not build its own DeFi. Incidentally, this is the same policy followed by the Cosmos Hub. The Hub doesn’t want its own applications, it wants to help other chains secure their applications.

Stride Modeled after Cosmos Hub

In fact, in terms of design principles, Stride was inspired by the Cosmos Hub. The Hub has a minimalist design to limit the chance of things going wrong, and a policy of neutrality to make cooperation with all other chains possible. Just like Stride.

We want Stride to be the best liquid staking provider in the Cosmos. To this end, we have used a minimalist design and adopted a policy of credible neutrality. With these qualities, Stride hopes to provide liquid staking for the next hundred Cosmos chains.