Dfinance Mainnet. Today on the 16th of November, we are…
Tags: Defi, Dfinance, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Financial Freedom

Today on the 16th of November, we are happy to release the mainnet version of the Dfinance blockchain! The development of the Finance protocol has been a long time coming, and today we are ready to announce some interesting news and updates.

During the last month, our incentivized testnet went ideally. It never went down and showed good performance, so we are going to keep the same genesis block for the next 2 weeks

We wanted to mention that our started mainnet does not require validators to update anything.

What’s next? We are going to launch a new network upgrade that will fix part of the non-critical bugs in the case of dnode, enable new kinds of gov proposals, and much more.

Also, domains will be switched, we are going to remove testnet mentions, as our testnet becomes the mainnet and we launch another testnet version just for developers.

What’s New?

Validator Statistic and Staked amount

During our incentivized testnet, we got 26 validators up and running. This is a good result for us, and we very much appreciate community members who set up and ran validator nodes or delegated XFI and LP tokens to existing validators.

More validator and delegator statistics can be seen in our explorer.

The network currently has 10,088,622 XFI staked, that’s around 44.8798% of total XFIs. It’s a large number and it’s continually growing.

Also 13,361 LP tokens were recently staked, that’s 2 times more than we had during launch time. That’s $174,868.12 in liquidity added to Uniswap in one time frame to the XFI / ETH pair.

That’s a pretty good result for us at the moment

Validator Security and Sentry Architecture

After some research, we resolved to increase our validator security by bringing in Sentry Architecture. This is infrastructure that allows validator nodes to hide behind sentry nodes, which helps mitigate DDoS attacks on validators, as well as other potential attacks.

We enabled this infrastructure for our nodes and recommend validators learn about sentry architecture and take this approach in the future when the network grows.

Rewards Distribution

As we are not able to move values between two chains yet (Ethereum and Dfinance/Cosmos), we are bringing a new solution to stakers. We will distribute validator and delegator rewards using the Ethereum network, and the first distribution will happen in a week.

We will use the same Ethereum addresses validators and delegators used on the Staking Portal. Once distribution is finished, we will announce.

Also, in the future, until the PegZone case has been resolved, we can repeat such distributions.

Understand that it’s not double your rewards as we will take any distribution on the Ethereum network into account.

PegZone and Staking portal

When we started developing the Dfinance network, we chose the Cosmos SDK because at that stage, it seemed the best solution to build your blockchain to us. And it’s true, Cosmos is very usable and a great system if you want to build your blockchain. It also has the IBC protocol, which allows you to build communication and value transfers between chains (which supports block finality). But the main feature we expected it to have is PegZone.

The Cosmos team started developing PegZone a few years ago, but it hasn’t hit production yet. Why? Because PegZone is an extremely complex tech that requires a lot of research, testing, auditing, and a great community. The Latest PegZone version developed in connection with the Cosmos team is Althea project PegZone, you can monitor it’s progress on their Github repository. It’s not too far from being released, so we expect to see it finally working soon.

As already mentioned, PegZone is complex tech and requires a lot of testing and a community. Community, as in a network of validators. These validators are usually necessary to move assets between two chains.

The validators that maintain PegZone must be known, be completely public and have passed the most thorough KYC, because current PegZone implementations and ideas bring a lot of risks. For example, it can be more profitable to steal funds from PegZone than to continue to secure PegZone and earn small fees, especially if validators are not honest. It’s just one of those cases. So, PegZone implementations require a lot of testing, security audits, and a great validator community.

Unfortunately, the Dfinance protocol even now is far from it. We could try to utilize the Althea version and use founders as validators, but this doesn’t bring a lot of security and trust, as PegZone will be very centralized and if some of us get hacked, it brings a lot of risks.

So currently, we resolved to keep our Staking Portal and staking contract as it is, while we’re searching for a way to solve this issue or while Cosmos blockchains will finally have PegZone working and we can just utilize it using the IBC protocol, like other chains.

Government proposals that solve validator problems.

We’ve launched two government proposals since our latest release and they both passed, which is great news for our community, and we thank everyone who participated! Now, let’s see how each proposal changed the Dfinance network step by step.

Proposal #1

The aim: To increase the slashing window for validators who missed blocks.

Issue: Slashing window for validators who missed blocks was previously around 10 minutes, which made validator infrastructure issues or regular validator updates extremely dangerous and hard.

Improvement: Now it’s been increased up to 16 hours, which has made infrastructure issues more convenient, simple, and safe.

Proposal #2

The aim: To solve the issue for community validators with small self-stakes, and to provide more people with the ability to be involved in the staking infrastructure.

Issue: Dfinance allows you to receive delegations only in amounts that are less than x10 that of the self-stake. So if you self-stake 1000 XFI, the maximum delegations you can get is 9000 XFI (1000 * 10–1000).

Improvement: We increased the ratio from x10 to x10000, so low self-stakes are not an issue anymore.

Both proposals passed smoothly, without triggering any network issues. You can look at both proposals in our API.

Our Community Heroes

We are always very happy when our community members are active! We really appreciate it and want to tell you today about two of our remarkable members:

1First of all, we would like to mention @Endijs! He developed missed blocks explorer for us and previously he wrote a great article that describes how to set up a node and become a validator on the Dfinance network. @Endijs has his own validator on the Dfinance network called “new-era”, so enjoy voting for him.

2 Another community member @greenbrx has also helped us a lot! He released blockchain explorer, where you can find:

validator activity

average block time

list of government proposals, etc. His validator is “gruberx”, and it would be great to support him with votes as well.

Thank you guys, we appreciate your input a lot!

Thanks everybody for being with us. Tomorrow we will announce our next steps, we are sure you will be pleasantly surprised. Stay tuned.

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