Chorus One

Basics

• Validator for Proof-of-Stake-based blockchains.
• From an Interchain blog (21-2-2020):

"Chorus One was founded in early 2018 to operate validators for Proof-of-Stake networks. Brian Crain, co-founder and CEO, was previously the COO at All in Bits, and helped set up the Full Node blockchain co-working space in Berlin, home to the 2019 Interchain Conversations conference. Brian left All in Bits in late 2017 to set up Chorus One with co-founder Meher Roy, with whom he had already been running the popular Epicenter podcast.

Brian, Meher, and the Chorus One team have been huge contributors to the Cosmos ecosystem over the years, with a focus on protocol analysis and community growth. They provided significant early feedback on the economics of the Proof of Stake design, and have published many articles about the Cosmos protocols and community. Chorus One is currently validating on Cosmos-based networks and other Proof-of-Stake blockchains.

Chorus One has also been at the forefront of building highly available validators. Besides building one of the first high-availability validators for the Cosmos Hub, they have been building a high availability validator for Solana StrongGate with funding from the Solana team. Moreover, Chorus One has been building Anthem, a web tool with staking analytics and historical reward data that is launching soon.

Chorus One has been financed independently by its founders, but was recently engaged by the ICF to initiate research into Delegation Vouchers, a mechanism to provide liquidity for staked Atoms. As part of this effort, they’ve created the Liquid Staking Working Group, which hosts regular open meetings to gather input from the wider community on the design of this enhancement to the Cosmos Proof of Stake mechanism. The goal is to produce a design that can then be funded for implementation. We look forward to the ongoing thought and community leadership demonstrated by Chorus One, to the results of the Delegation Vouchers project, and to their evolution into a long-term sustainable Proof of Stake services company."

Projects

• Listed as a node operator at Chainlink (7-2-2023).
• Wormhole; is one of the 19 guardians (10-8-2021).
• Is a validator on Band Protocol (8-2020).

Is Staking on

• Anthem; their staking platform.
• "Assets Staked with Chorus One: $21,275,011.30" (1-3-2020)
• Supporting Cosmos, Terra, Kava, Loom and Chainlink. With Kusama, Regen, Solana, Polkadot, Celo, Oasis and Centrifuge 'upcoming' (1-3-2020)
• Skale and NEAR (2-9-2020).

Team

• Brian Fabian Crain; co-founder (who worked together with Roy on Epicenter) has been in the Cosmos ecosystem since 2017 while working at All In Bits.
• Meher Roy; co-founder
• Brendan Dillon
• Joe Bowman
• Chorus One has been financed independently by its founders.
• Has a partnership (2-4-2020) with Band; "Chorus One operates with two separate sets of validation and sentry nodes in different geographical regions that will support BandChain."
• Supports State of Stake (10-9-2020).

Funding

• Axelar; part of their $60M ecosystem fund (19-12-2022)
• Lava Network; part of the $15M seed raise (15-2-2024).
• RedStone; part of their $15m Series A round (2-7-2024).