Proof of Stake (PoS)

Ethereum is the programmable chain whose community chose a recovery history after The DAO, then replaced proof-of-work with a live proof-of-stake engine without swapping ETH.

BNB began in 2017 as a Binance fee token, left Ethereum for Binance Chain in 2019 and became gas and stake on BSC in 2020. The 2022 Token Hub exploit and validator-coordinated halt exposed the human decisions behind its two-chain design; the 2024 Fusion and two burn mechanisms reshaped it again.

Solana grew from Anatoly Yakovenko’s idea for a verifiable clock into a fast proof-of-stake network; outages, FTX’s collapse and new validator clients then forced it to prove that speed, recovery and independence are different engineering problems.

TRON began with a 2017 content-platform sale, became an independent DPoS chain in 2018 and found its largest observable use as a rail for USDT. TRX now links resource fees, staking, SR elections, issuance and burns.

Hyperliquid grew from Jeff and iliensinc’s self-funded trading team into a Layer 1 whose exchange lives in chain state. HYPE’s 2024 user distribution aligned traders with that system, while HLP and the JELLY vote revealed who absorbs losses and when validators can rewrite a market’s ending.

Cardano began as Hoskinson and Wood’s research-led, federated chain; successive eras moved block production, programmability and finally protocol-and-treasury decisions into wider community hands.

Telegram sold future Grams before a court stopped distribution and Pavel Durov ended the project in 2020. Newton developers carried testnet2 into The Open Network, while the separate Free TON became Everscale. Telegram later returned as the network's driving force and largest validator, and in June 2026 the existing Toncoin was renamed Gram without a token migration.

Mysten Labs’ five co-founders built Sui by turning Move resources into explicit onchain objects. The chain launched in 2023, changed its consensus engine, survived repeated validator-software halts and approved the Cetus recovery proposal with 90.9% of counted stake, excluding Foundation stake—events that make its speed, fixed supply and human control easier to separate.

Avalanche began with an anonymous consensus paper, then a Cornell team turned its repeated-sampling idea into a 2020 network with three specialized chains. Cortina later retired the live DAG, while Etna separated application-chain validation from the 2,000-AVAX Primary Network bond. AVAX still secures the Primary Network, where rewards mint and fees burn supply.

NEAR began as a code-writing AI experiment, became a staged sharded blockchain, and now supplies Chain Signatures and Intents for multichain actions. Its wider agent-economy thesis remains partly a roadmap, while NEAR's concrete roles are fees, storage, staking and value transfer.

Polkadot moved from its 2020 relay-chain launch to coretime in 2024. It reports a 2.1 billion DOT cap from March 14, 2026, while official issuance figures conflict and JAM remains a proposed successor.

Cosmos Hub is one sovereign proof-of-stake chain in the wider Cosmos ecosystem. ATOM secures and governs that Hub; IBC links sovereign chains through light-client proofs, while only separately approved consumer chains borrow Hub security.

GateToken (GT) began as an exchange-distributed token, became Gate Chain's native consensus asset, and now pays gas on Gate Layer. Those roles share a symbol but differ in issuer history, holder rights, validator power, supply accounting and bridge control.

Silvio Micali’s team built Algorand around a new lottery for every block, then watched treasury, software and governance grow into separate centers of lasting power.

Beldex began as a Monero-derived privacy chain and switched to masternode proof of stake in 2021. Its native privacy and issuance rules are visible in code, while foundation rewards, application claims and EVM bridges add separate trust boundaries.

Aptos carries Move and Block-STM out of the Diem engineering lineage, but APT rights are defined by stake and governance code. Its 2026 supply-cap vote also shows why approved policy, executable payload and live protocol state must be checked separately.

HASH pays, stakes and votes on Provenance Blockchain; it does not represent the loans or securities recorded there. Governance burned 5 billion HASH in May 2026, leaving 95 billion on-chain, while published dynamic-inflation tokenomics remain distinct from the live zero-inflation parameters.

Injective embeds spot and derivative orderbooks in a Cosmos chain. Its weekly winner-take-all Burn Auction evolved into a monthly Community BuyBack in October 2025; committed INJ is burned, but validator issuance continues and holders do not automatically receive exchange revenue.

Dash began as XCoin, inherited Litecoin 0.8 code from Bitcoin's family, became Darkcoin and then Dash. Today miners order blocks, collateralized masternodes lock transactions and blocks, and only masternode votes direct a 20% treasury; ordinary DASH ownership alone grants none of those operating or voting powers.

Tezos is a self-amending proof-of-stake blockchain whose native tez (XTZ) pays fees, secures baking and carries delegate voting power. Its protocol can replace itself after a five-period baker vote; staking and delegation assign different reward, lock and slashing rights, while Etherlink runs as a separately governed EVM Smart Rollup above Tezos layer 1.

DCR powers Decred's unusual chain of consent: miners propose blocks, five tickets are called to judge them, Politeia frames budgets and policy, and on-chain votes activate code or release treasury funds. A liquid coin is not automatically a vote, equity share or treasury claim.

Akash is an on-chain market for independent CPU and GPU providers. Tenants choose bids and fund leases in ACT; AKT secures validators, governs upgrades and funds, pays gas, and supplies ACT's oracle-priced burn-mint route.

IOTA is the native asset of a Move-based, object-oriented delegated-proof-of-stake network. Rebased preserved Stardust balances through a 1:1 ledger-state transfer in May 2025, but changed decimals, fees, staking and supply policy; it did not create equity or a redemption claim on the IOTA Foundation.

TEL is moving from a 2020 two-decimal ERC-20 into an 18-decimal, multi-chain gas asset scheduled for 24 September 2026. Its real biography spans a Swiss association, permissioned telecom validators, corporate wallet and remittance services, and a Nebraska bank—none of which gives an ordinary TEL holder a claim on company or bank assets.

THORChain moves native assets between chains through bonded nodes and threshold-signed vaults. Its biography follows RUNE from settlement asset to security bond, then tests that design against the 2021 router exploits, the 2025 THORFi default and the 2026 GG20 vault capture.

Zano is a privacy-first layer-one where standard transactions hide sender, receiver, amount and asset type. Its live hybrid PoW/Zarcanum consensus, uncapped issuance and issuer-controlled Confidential Assets make privacy distinct from ownership and governance rights.

NEO is the indivisible governance asset of Neo N3, not GAS and not a Neo X gas token. Its story runs from Antshares in 2014 through a renamed 2017 network and a mandatory 2021 chain migration to a two-chain system whose votes, rewards, bridge and upgrade powers do not amount to equity in the organizations that build it.

Onyxcoin (XCN) changed units in the CHN conversion, kept the asset through a rename and expanded into Base and Onyx Layer 1. The stXCN voting route announced in 2026 is distinct from legacy Ethereum governance.

The Graph is a blockchain-data indexing protocol whose subgraphs turn chain events into queryable APIs. GRT coordinates Indexers, Curators and Delegators, while the live protocol runs principally on Arbitrum and remains upgradeable through Council-governed contracts.

MultiversX is the continuation of Elrond: ERD was redenominated 1,000:1 into EGLD in 2020, while the 2022 name change did not create another coin. Its biography separates sharded validation, fee-offset issuance, stake-based governance, validator upgrades and optional account guardians from corporate or redemption rights.

Qtum launched on 13 September 2017 with a difficult promise: keep Bitcoin’s UTXO ledger while running Ethereum-style contracts. Its Account Abstraction Layer made that combination work, but also committed the chain to maintaining two upstream traditions. Offline staking, FastLane and later Shanghai, Dencun and Pectra releases show how that original choice kept shaping QTUM.

Kusama is a sovereign Polkadot-SDK network whose native KSM moved with balances, staking and OpenGov from the Relay Chain to Kusama Asset Hub in October 2025. KSM pays fees, secures validators, buys coretime and votes; it has no maximum supply, and current runtime parameters bound annual inflation between 2.5% and 10% around a 75% ideal stake ratio.

TFUEL is Theta’s spendable native fuel, not its governance stake. A five-billion genesis balance became 7,456,043,401 by September 5, 2026 because code issues fixed 48-TFUEL and 38-TFUEL block rewards while fees and Edge payments burn portions. THETA secures Validator and Guardian consensus; TFUEL pays gas, stakes to Elite Edge Nodes and settles EdgeCloud work.

Casper Network is a proof-of-stake Layer 1 whose history turns upgradeability into a control question. CSPR pays execution costs and bonds validators; Highway gave way to Zug in 2025, while validator votes and staged node software—not token ownership alone—change protocol and issuance rules.

Mina's famous 22KB is a proof of the latest state, not a zip file containing every payment. Producers still need ledger state, archives keep history, and SNARK workers sell proof labor. That division made a small verifier possible—and made MINA an uncapped reward currency for the larger machine behind it.

Flow is the proof-of-stake chain Dapper Labs began after CryptoKitties exposed consumer-scale limits. FLOW pays fees and storage, secures four validator roles and fuels both Cadence and Flow EVM, but it does not by itself grant equity, redemption or an automatic binding vote.

Li Jun launched Ontology as a trust network in 2017. A NEO-hosted distribution led to an independent 2018 chain, ONTO and ONT ID; staking, EVM compatibility and a verified-human-data strategy later changed how ONT connects to the product.

Oasis grew from Dawn Song’s privacy-computing research into a proof-of-stake network with separate ParaTimes. Sapphire moved from testnet to mainnet in 2022, OPL connected its confidentiality to other chains in 2023, and ROFL took attested code off-chain in 2025—without making hardware, keys or external data automatically trustworthy.

Astar began as Sota Watanabe’s Plasm Network, then outgrew a Layer-2 label and became a Polkadot application chain. Its unusual builder-staking economy survived a short-lived zkEVM expansion; Astar later closed that chain, carried ASTR into Sony and Startale’s Soneium, and kept native-chain governance distinct from the new bridge contract’s admin keys.