Crypto Currency

Moonstake Hosts Joint Interview with CEO of Trusted Ranking Platform Staking Rewards, Mirkos Schmiedl

SINGAPORE, Apr 23, 2021 – (ACN Newswire) – To celebrate our first anniversary this April, Moonstake held a joint Q&A with Staking Rewards, the first and most trusted resource hub for staking and yield-bearing assets data. This interview provides many valuable insights into the current state as well as the future outlook of the Proof-of-Stake…

SINGAPORE, Apr 23, 2021 – (ACN Newswire) – To celebrate our first anniversary this April, Moonstake held a joint Q&A with Staking Rewards, the first and most trusted resource hub for staking and yield-bearing assets data. This interview provides many valuable insights into the current state as well as the future outlook of the Proof-of-Stake market and information about Moonstake, a top-ranking staking provider on Staking Rewards.Here, the Senior Advisor of Moonstake, Shogo Ishida, serves as the moderator. Answering the questions are Mirko Schmiedl, the CEO and Founder of Staking Rewards, and Lawrence Lin, the CEO of Moonstake. Here’s the full transcript of the interview.Shogo: What should I watch out for in 2021 to stay on top of one of the hottest trends in staking?Mirko: 2021 will be a year with a lot of noise. Thus even more important to pick the right news sources and content to stay on top of trends. Already seeing a lot of projects without any substance popping up everywhere. I would try to listen to people with proven track-record only. And refer to news sources that are trusted and work professionally. At Stakingrewards.com we thrive to provide a pre-vetted and independent overview of the entire staking market.Shogo: What can we expect to see in the Proof-of-Stake market in 2021 and how to stay on top of all the hottest trends in staking?Mirko: One of the biggest trends in 2021 is definitely staking derivatives. With the launch of Ethereum 2,0 in December last year, we have seen many solutions being developed which offer liquid staking products that can be traded on the secondary market. This trend is emerging into the multichain nature which is another big trend for 2021. There are more and more bridges and it is now possible to move wrapped staked assets across chains. Lido Finance, Stafi Protocol, and Anchor Protocol are great examples.Shogo: What are the biggest adoption barriers for Proof-of-Stake and Staking right now and how should we solve them?Mirko: One of the biggest barriers is still the ease of use. There are not many solutions that provide a simple user interface for multiple crypto assets. Especially across chains there needs to be more easy tooling to hold, store, and stake many assets in one interface. Another adoption barrier is the unclarity for tax treatment. I see many people hold off staking as they are afraid of the legal treatment. From the Protocol Research perspective I think we have mainly achieved consensus, that Proof-of-Stake is the go-to group of algorithms which will dominate the market besides Bitcoin. We made it! Governance is a topic that still needs a lot of attention. We are still in the very early days for that. It will be a big challenge, once networks become more decentralized. As of now this is still a long path until we will face the real challenges. Most projects are still highly centralized and the decision making process is achieved fast.Shogo: Ethereum, the world’s #2 biggest blockchain, which originally a Proof-of-Work blockchain, has begun its development to switch to Proof-of-Stake network at the end of last year. How do you think this will impact the future of the staking market going forward?Mirko: The launch of Ethereum 2.0 was a massive milestone for the overall blockchain space. It marked the beginning of a whole new era. Ethereum sets trends and drives innovation. Their unique approach which fosters grass roots participation and decentralization makes the network more resilient and I hope other protocols will be inspired and can learn from them. Ethereum in my view combined the Proof-of-Stake design of Early Stage projects like Peercoin, NXT, Reddcoin, etc with the later stage projects like Tezos, Cosmos, EOS. Ethereum took the best of both worlds and is also strong in layer 2 tooling, like development of sacred shared validator keys, staking derivatives etc.Shogo: What makes a staking network unique amongst others on the market?Mirko: A good staking network needs to have long-term aligned incentives, great security module, active governance participation, ease-to-use, accessible for everyone, low minimums, shorter lock-ups times, good tooling, great wallets, rich set of high-profile validators, rich set of grass roots validators, community engagement, good API/data access, great block explorer, simple economic design that is easy to understand, solving liquidity issues, also having raised less money is mainly a good thing for projects. That’s just to name a few points I consider extremely important for a project to stand out. You can see that all of the top-ranking staking projects are being adopted and supported by the high-profile staking providers such as Moonstake. On Staking Rewards you can find interesting patterns between the quality assets and providers.Shogo: Recently, Moonstake has formed alliances with various blockchain projects like Centrality, Polkadot, Orbs. How does Moonstake decide on which Proof-of-Stake coin to support?Lawrence: If you look at Moonstake’s lineup of supported assets, you can probably see the strategy behind our decision. That is, we focus on the demand of the market for that coin, how popular it is, and how large its staking volume is. And of course, we’re always open for deeper collaboration opportunities, so we also look at how the project’s vision and roadmap goals can align with our own to widen our scope of collaboration.Shogo: Stakingrewards.com provides rankings for staking providers, DeFi platforms, exchanges, and wallets. What are some key things that the top platforms in each category have in common?Mirko: Good and successful staking providers are amongst the best research boutiques in the industry. They choose wisely which networks to validate, thus the networks they choose are likely to have good long-term incentives in place. This makes these coins highly demanded by the community and therefore worth supporting, which I believe, like what Lawrence just said, is a strategy Moonstake is currently adopting.DeFi platforms have to be innovative or fill a no-brainer market gap (e.g. Pancakeswap as “Uniswap on BSC”) in order to succeed. The successful platforms are driving innovation and development, while having great incentives for the community. Giving away more than 50% of tokens to the community via farming in order to bootstrap the network is more of a necessity these days.Successful exchanges are easy-to-use, and list good projects. Again it’s important for exchanges to have a strong research arm and be close to innovation. Staking features and campaigns are becoming more and more a differentiating factor.Shogo: Moonstake became one of the top 10 staking providers within 1 year. What was the strategy to accomplish this as a staking wallet solution for users and businesses?Lawrence: Indeed, 2020 was an incredible first year for Moonstake. We achieved over $900 Million in staked assets and earned the trust of investors and businesses worldwide with our staking wallet as well as staking-as-a-service solutions. In just one year, we’ve become one of the top 10 biggest staking providers in the world. This is thanks to our strategy of only collaborating with the most esteemed institutions, projects, and custodians on the market while also taking active part in promoting global awareness of blockchain and staking in various educational initiatives, bringing the world of cryptocurrency and decentralized technologies to a wider audience of consumers and businesses. And with the recent launch of Muse.Finance, the Moonstake ecosystem will continue to grow from 2021 onwards, especially in the frontier of DeFi, and help accelerate the connection from staking to DeFi.Moonstake has been proudly featured in the top 10 rankings of global staking providers on Staking Rewards since February this year. We were thrilled to have a joint interview with them and hope for potential collaboration opportunities in the future.About MoonstakeMoonstake was recently established to develop a staking pool protocol to satisfy increasing demands in regional and global blockchain markets. Moonstake develops a staking pool protocol and provides business services through partners and companies.Moonstake aims to be the largest staking pool network in Asia by providing an active environment for crypto asset holders. Establishing a clear partnership roadmap with Moonstake represents another significant milestone for continuing to strengthen ties with leading platforms across Asia’s burgeoning Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) ecosystem. Partnership has been announced with Emurgo, Ontology and NEO to boost staking adoption, Binarystar, Japan’s biggest blockchain hub, OIO Holdings Limited (SGX: OIO), a Singapore-listed company. Industry’s reputed advisors, such as Lisk and Lawrence Lim of RAMP DEFI support Moonstake’s innovative journey.With a full-scale operation launched in August 2020, we expanded our business and as of now, our total staking assets exceeded over USD 900 Million. https://www.moonstake.io/About Staking RewardsStaking Rewards is a platform of open-concourse, that provides data and guidance to minimize the risk when investing in the countless opportunities to earn passive income with cryptocurrencies. The team is curating knowledge and data to build a healthy staking and defi ecosystem. Staking Rewards is committed to lowering the access barrier to staking opportunities by presenting, comparing and benchmarking all the (Staking) Providers, who are dedicated to providing infrastructure, security, expertise and sometimes even custody or insurance for the staking assets. https://www.stakingrewards.com/ Copyright 2021 ACN Newswire. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.com
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Crypto Currency

A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin

Tech Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin Most simplifies the complex process of quantum computing as “it can be 0 and 1 at the same time.” That is not an explanation for

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A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin

Most simplifies the complex process of quantum computing as “it can be 0 and 1 at the same time.” That is not an explanation for why it threatens Bitcoin. This is.

By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Aoyon Ashraf
Updated Apr 6, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Published Apr 5, 2026, 8:03 p.m.
Make preferred on
(Misha Friedman/Getty Images)

What to know:

  • Google has published research suggesting a future quantum computer could theoretically derive a bitcoin private key from its public key in about nine minutes, threatening the security of Bitcoin and other cryptographic systems.
  • Unlike classical computers, which process bits as either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits that can exist in multiple states simultaneously and exploit phenomena like superposition and entanglement to explore many possibilities at once.
  • This fundamentally different form of computation could undermine the mathematical assumptions behind current encryption, raising urgent concerns about the safety of existing blockchain assets and digital security more broadly.

This week, Google published a paper describing how a quantum computer could theoretically derive a bitcoin private key in 9 minutes, with ramifications that stretch to Ethereum, other tokens, private banking, and potentially everything in the world.

Quantum computing is easy to mistake for a faster version of a regular computer. But it is not a more powerful chip or a bigger server farm. It is a fundamentally different kind of machine, different at the level of the atom itself.

A quantum computer starts with a very cold, very small loop of metal where particles begin to behave in ways they do not behave under normal conditions on Earth, ways that alter what we think of as the basic rules of physics.

Understanding what that means, physically, is the difference between reading about the quantum threat and actually grasping it.

How computers and quantum computers actually work

Regular computers store information as bits — each is either a 0 or a 1. A bit is a tiny switch. Physically, it’s a transistor on a “chip” — a microscopic gate that either lets electricity through (1) or doesn’t (0).

Every photo, every bitcoin transaction, every word you’ve ever typed is stored as patterns of these switches being on or off. There is nothing mysterious about a bit; it is a physical object in one of the two definite states.

Every calculation is just shuffling these 0s and 1s around really fast. A modern chip can do billions of these per second, but it still does them one at a time, in sequence.

Quantum computers use something known as qubits instead of bits. A qubit can be 0, 1, or — and this is the weird part — both at the same time!

This is possible as a qubit is a completely different kind of physical object. The most common version, and the one Google uses, is a tiny loop of superconducting metal cooled to about 0.015 degrees above absolute zero, colder than outer space but here on Earth.

At that temperature, electricity flows through the loop without any resistance, and the current is said to exist in a quantum state.

In the superconducting loop, current can flow clockwise (call that 0) or counterclockwise (call that 1). But at quantum scales, the current does not have to pick one direction and actually flows in both directions simultaneously.

Don’t mistake it for switching between the two really fast. The current is measurably, experimentally and verifiably in both states simultaneously.

(CoinDesk)

Mind-bending physics

With us so far? Great, because here’s where it gets genuinely strange, because the physics behind how it works isn’t immediately intuitive, and it is not supposed to be.

Everything someone interacts with in daily life obeys classical physics, which assumes that things are in one place at one time. But particles do not behave this way at the subatomic scale.

An electron does not have a definite position until you look at it. A photon does not have a definite polarization until you measure it. A current in a superconducting loop does not flow in a definite direction until you force it to pick.

The reason we don’t experience this in everyday life is decoherence. When a quantum system interacts with its environment, air molecules, heat, vibrations and light, the superposition collapses almost instantly.

A football cannot be in two places at once because it is interacting with trillions of air molecules, dust, sound, heat, gravity, etc., every nanosecond. But isolate a tiny current in a near-absolute-zero vacuum, shield it from every possible disturbance, and the quantum behavior survives long enough to compute with.

That’s why quantum computers are so hard to build. People are engineering physical environments where the laws of physics that normally prevent this stuff from happening are held at bay for just long enough to run a calculation.

Google’s machines operate in dilution refrigerators the size of huge rooms, colder than anything in the natural universe, surrounded by layers of shielding against electromagnetic noise, vibration, and thermal radiation.

And the qubits are fragile even then. They lose their quantum state constantly, which is why “error correction” dominates every conversation about scaling up.

So quantum computing is not a faster version of classical computing. It is exploiting a different set of physical laws that only apply at extremely small scales, extremely low temperatures, and extremely short timeframes.

(CoinDesk)

Now stack that up.

Two regular bits can be in one of four states (00, 01, 10, 11), but only one at a time (since current flows in only one direction). Two qubits can represent all four states at once, as the current is flowing in all directions at the same time.

Three qubits represent eight states. Ten qubits represent 1,024. Fifty qubits represent over a quadrillion. The number doubles with every qubit that is added, which is why the scaling is so exponential.

The second trick is something called entanglement. When two qubits are entangled, measuring one instantly tells an observer something about the other, no matter how far apart they are. This lets a quantum computer coordinate across all those simultaneous states in a way that regular parallel computing cannot.

And these quantum computers are set up so that wrong answers cancel each other out (like overlapping waves that flatten) and right answers reinforce each other (like waves that stack higher). By the end of the computation, the correct answer has the highest probability of being measured.

So it’s not brute-force speed. It’s a fundamentally different approach to calculation — one that lets nature explore an exponentially large space of possibilities and then collapses to the right answer through physics rather than logic.

A monumental threat to cryptography

This mind-bending physics is why it is terrifying for encryption.

The math protecting bitcoin relies on the assumption that checking every possible key would take longer than the age of the universe.

But a quantum computer doesn’t check every key. It explores all of them simultaneously and uses interference to surface the right one.

That is where it ties into Bitcoin. Going one direction, from private key to public key, takes milliseconds. Going the other direction, from public key back to private key, would take a classical computer a million years, or even longer than the age of the universe. That asymmetry is the only thing proving that a person is holding their coins.

(CoinDesk)

A quantum computer running an algorithm called Shor’s can go through that trapdoor in reverse. Google’s paper this week showed it could do so with far fewer resources than anyone previously estimated, and within a timeframe that races against bitcoin’s own block confirmations.

This is why the threat of quantum computers breaking blockchain encryption is genuinely making everyone very worried.

How that attack works step by step, what Google’s paper specifically changed, and what it means for the 6.9 million bitcoin already exposed, is the subject of the next piece in this series.

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