After careful consideration the EtherChest Core Team has decided to delay our public launch. This is however nothing to worry about we just want to ensure that everything is 100 percent before launching. Staking on Ethereum 2.0 is not the easiest endeavor and even though we have double and triple checked everything including participating in all three testnets we feel that it is of the highest importance to ensure there is no loss of user funds. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake or as some of you may have seen last night, run in to a connection issue with the ETH blockchain or ourselves in the middle of a minority fork. Such mistakes would jeopardize user funds as well as our own and we do not take that lightly.
We are going to take extra measures and setup additional infrastructure to ensure our service can operate at near 0 downtime! We are not alone in this decision, I have read that RocketPool is also delaying their launch so there is no need to worry, this is not an isolated event. In fact, we urge you to not rush in to staking because of FOMO. There will be plenty of opportunity to earn a significant return by staking on the Ethereum Blockchain regardless of launch date and any service that does rush in to this may not have your best interests at heart and may be subject to unexpected downtime and loss of funds.
With that being said, we will launch our company validator next month, as scheduled, after beacon chain finality has been reached.. I will participate in the live viewing of the launch and once it is safe I will deposit our company funds into the deposit contract. As I mentioned, we have participated in the various testnets however nothing compares to the real thing. We would much rather sacrifice our own funds rather than putting yours in jeopardy. This decision also enables us to gather even more information in a real world production environment and will guarantee that we are 100 percent ready to take on such an important task like managing a staking service. There are many unknowns as we enter phase 0, ones that even the Ethereum Core Team cannot predict. It would be terrible if something happened and our users suffered a loss because of something unknown.
During this delay we will continue to grow our community, fine tune the interface and develop the Ethereum dApp which will be ready when all system are go for public launch. We thank you for your patience and value you, our users, above all! I have said many times in the past, without community there is nothing. Let's continue to grow and spread the word about EtherChest. I know many of you were and are very excited to participate in staking and have been very patient. We are sorry that we are delaying at the last minute however, there is nothing more important than protecting our users funds. I hope you can understand this decision and we thank you for your continued patience as we build an amazing product for you!