Coinbase Custody teams up with Bison Trails to offer Polkadot staking to clients

Coinbase Custody has partnered with infrastructure provider Bison Trails to give clients the ability to start staking Polkadot’s DOT tokens once the protocol goes live. The news comes a few months after Coinbase’s custody arm launched support for DOTs, allowing investors to claim their token allocations from Polkadot’s previous funding rounds.

Why it matters:

• This Coinbase and Bison Trails partnership could extend beyond the Polkadot integration, according to CoinDesk. While staking is a critical part of Coinbase’s services, it’s not their core product, and the exchange might be better off outsourcing validator management to staking-centric companies like Bison Trails, especially for networks with more complex validator requirements. A few months ago, it looked like exchanges would make smaller staking providers obsolete. But this newfound partnership might indicate there’s a long-term role for these companies in the market.
• Polkadot is still in a pre-launch stage and has plans to roll out its mainnet in phases. The first versions of Polkadot will have limited functionality and feature a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism instead of its proposed Nominated Proof of Stake (PoS). Investors should not expect network staking (and the potential for yield) to arrive until after the project’s security audits are complete. While there is no timeline for any of these product releases, DOT holders can find solace in the networks lofty initial inflation rate (10%) and annual staking yield (~20% but depends on the number of tokens actively staking).