Stratis today announces the launch of StratisEVM — a new layer one blockchain built on Ethereum. Under the plans, Stratis will bring its expertise, products and community of developers to the Ethereum ecosystem and retire the existing Stratis blockchain.
The plan is designed to accelerate innovation by making it easier to develop blockchain solutions using more widely available tooling and the interoperability capabilities inherent to the Ethereum ecosystem.
StratisEVM is a Web-3 ready Ethereum-based proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, featuring the native $STRAT token. StratisEVM will be a layer one blockchain, with plans to also introduce a layer two to deliver high-throughput and low finality decentralised computing. These advanced capabilities are specifically designed to support gaming and DeFi applications.
Community voting on the proposal has just concluded following a two-week voting period. The Stratis community overwhelmingly backed the new plans with a near unanimous vote of 99.3% in favour.
The decision to launch StratisEVM is based on the following advantages it will bring to the developer, user and wider communities:
Integration
- Choosing an Ethereum-based framework over a bespoke platform offers immediate integration with a robust and well-established ecosystem.
- Working with the Ethereum codebase means teams building on StratisEVM benefit from continuous upgrades and innovations developed by the largest decentralised developer community.
- The core Stratis team will no longer need to commit such significant resources to building and maintaining developer toolkits designed for the Stratis blockchain. Instead they can focus on improving interoperability and performance in-line with the project’s priority areas: gaming, DeFi, NFTs and enterprise.
Interoperability
- The shift to an Ethereum-based framework opens doors to enhanced interoperability and compatibility with numerous existing decentralised applications (dApps) and protocols.
- The Ethereum blockchain hosts a multitude of dApps, ranging from decentralised exchanges to lending platforms, which StratisEVM can interact with or utilise for added functionality and value creation.
- Establishing such a wide range of interactions and partnerships on the existing platform has been challenging for Stratis and required additional development of complex and bespoke protocols.
Familiarity
- Developers are more likely to build applications on a platform that offers familiar tooling. Ethereum dominates blockchain market share and moving to the ecosystem will boost developer activity.
Under the plans, existing $STRAX token holders can exchange their tokens for the new $STRAT at a rate of 1:10. For every 1 STRAX issued on the Stratis blockchain, there will be 10 STRAT tokens issued on the StratisEVM, bringing the token supply to just over 1.53B.
The original Stratis blockchain was launched in 2016 and since that time new use cases have emerged that require micro-payments. The token supply is being increased by 1:10 to make the token more useful for these new use cases, in particular gaming.
StratisEVM will feature a masternode contract that will enable new and existing masternodes to lock their collateral and continue to receive rewards as they do on the current blockchain. During the StratisEVM launch, Stratis will honour reduced collateral requirements for the original masternode operators (pre-STRAX) who remain federation members.
Chris Trew, co-founder and CEO of Stratis, said: “Since 2016 our focus has been the delivery of a Microsoft-focused blockchain platform. However, Ethereum has grown exponentially, with record-breaking usage and capitalisation. We felt it was time to retire the Stratis blockchain so we can spend less time building tooling and more time optimizing the Ethereum infrastructure for new use cases like gaming and DeFi. It’s encouraging to see the community support for the new plans and we’ll be bringing a lot of experience, dApps and developers across to the Ethereum community.”
He continued: “We are continuing with our roadmap, including our NFT marketplace ‘Stratisphere’, our NFT ticketing application ‘Ticketsphere’ and plans to issue the first regulated GBP Stablecoin. We are particularly excited about the surge in mobile gaming and look forward to supporting upcoming projects via the new StratisEVM blockchain.”