Anatoliy Shakhomirov

3Commas is proud to introduce DeCommas Gears — a new service that provides tools to explore and utilize the Solana blockchain ecosystem which over the past several months has risen in status and market cap. DeCommas Gears allows you to track cash flows, wallets, pools, and handle a huge number of transactions and addresses in just a few clicks.

Wallet explorer

DeCommas Gears allows you to track important Solana wallet information. The tool displays tokens, liquidity, yield farming, and transaction history.

Information on Gears can be updated automatically every minute or every 20 seconds as desired.

There’s also transaction history to see the latest wallet activity.

Multisender

Multisender is a tool allowing users to quickly send tokens to a large number of Solana addresses. Thanks to Multisender, you don’t need to create multiple transactions manually, and instead can generate one transaction for multiple addresses. To do so, Multisender simply requires a list of the desired addresses and transaction amounts. Because the cost of token transfers within the Solana ecosystem is low compared to other blockchains, this feature ensures higher profitability for traders.

To work with Multisender, head over to the Tools page and connect your wallet to the service. Multisender will automatically display the coins available in your wallet so you can choose which token to send. Here, in the Amount field, you should specify the total number of tokens to be sent to the specified wallet address.

Then, in the Address field you have two options: either load a .json file with the addresses themselves, or enter them manually in the Insert text field with the number of tokens to be sent out, separated by commas.

In the next step, the Multisender tool automatically checks all addresses for compatibility with the coin to be sent. This mitigates the risk of losing coins to an incompatible wallet address.

The third step will display transaction information to approve. Make sure to look this over carefully and ensure that all transaction information — including value and addresses — is correct.

Lastly, don’t forget to confirm the transaction in your wallet.

Pool explorer

Liquidity pools became one of the major innovations in decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020. In liquidity pools, funds are locked in different smart contracts and used for decentralized trading, lending, staking, or liquidity mining.

The Pool Explorer within DeCommas Gears displays available pools on the Raydium, Saber, and Orca platforms, sortable by volume and APY (yield). The tool page shows the total pool liquidity:

Sorting by platform type:

Solana pools and links for additional information:

With the Pool Explorer tool you can get an overview of the various staking pools and activity within the Solana ecosystem and find the best deals on staking yields within these pools.

Farm explorer

Solana is one of the most profitable ecosystems for farming due to low fees when interacting with its decentralized network. However, interest rates on farming pools fluctuate daily, so it’s critical for investors to track trends for all available pools in the ecosystem.

This is where Farm explorer comes in handy. It displays all available pools and information on their total liquidity.

The annual return (APY) is shown next to each pool, which can also be used to sort information.

Accounts creator

The Accounts creator tool allows you to create up to 10,000 addresses in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is enter the desired number of addresses and your browser will automatically download a .json file with the newly created wallet addresses. The file contains information about the addresses and private keys for your personal use.

In addition, the wallet data file can be used in the aforementioned Multisender tool to deposit funds to multiple wallets simultaneously within the Solana ecosystem. This is a handy tool for crypto startups or anyone running rewards promotions.

Bridges

A blockchain bridge is a connection that allows users to transfer tokens and/or arbitrary data from one blockchain to another. The two chains may have different protocols, rules, and governance models, but the bridge provides a compatible way to communicate securely between both ledgers.

DeCommas Gears has information about bridges available to users between different cryptocurrencies in the Bridges tab. To search for the right Bridge, select two cryptocurrencies or enter a name in the Search field. For example, the screenshot below showcases the various ETH/USDC bridges.

Our platform is constantly improving to reflect new trends in the Solana ecosystem. To make sure you stay up to date on the newest available tools, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter!

It has been a month since we officially launched the Flovatar project. Within this short period, we successfully deployed a fully functional non-custodial marketplace, published a mobile app on the AppStore, completed our first special airdrop to all minted Flovatars, witnessed the Sparks floor raise more than 5x, and even had a coffee brand collaboration spearheaded by some of our community members. It is fair to say a lot has happened, yet it is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what we have planned for 2022. This is where the journey truly begins.

As we start preparing for the 2022 roadmap, it seemed the right timing to share with everyone in the community the vision we have for the future of Flovatar.

Before jumping into the main section, we also wanted to redefine what Flovatar is about. In our previous communications, we referenced Flovatar as a PFP project. However, we felt it was a bit restrictive given how dynamic and rich the project is from the start. We see Flovatar as an evolving ecosystem that will ideally bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3. It is also a bold take on IP creation and shared ownership. We envision a future spanning gaming, consumer goods, entertainment, education, and metaverse.

Of course, we could promise you the moon all we want, but if we cannot get the spaceship built or the fuel needed to get there it is all just smoke and vaporware. That is why the first major topic we would like to cover is how we are going to fund all the initiatives we have planned.

Treasury

We have a long-term vision for Flovatar and that is why we are putting the money where our mouth is. 60% of the entire project revenue, including past and future drops and the ongoing 5% marketplace fee, will be allocated to the project treasury, the FlovaBank. FlovaBank is the wallet that holds the treasury of the project and one day it will be ultimately managed by the community via the DAO. The mandate is to finance initiatives that will help the Flovatar ecosystem grow or elevate the branding and prestige of the project.

The treasury will be used to cover the costs of production of new art pieces (Flobits, future series, and much more), salaries for new team members or collaborators, and more importantly, to finance community-driven projects that will help grow the project, positively enrich the ecosystem and bring value added benefits to all Flovatar owners.

Some examples of ecosystem initiatives that we would like to help bootstrapping include the creation of comic books using a selection of Flovatar characters, animated mini-series (e.g. South Park), educational content (e.g. Once Upon a Time anatomy series), 3d models that can be printed by anyone at home or brought over into multiple metaverses.

FlovaBank will be used also to fund collaborations with external projects, artists or blockchains, and anything that might ultimately benefit the Flovatar project as a whole. In the early stage, it is likely the core team will share a series of initiatives for Flovatar owners to vote in Discord, where a minimum of 5% of total owners vote is needed to validate the proposal and the majority of votes being in favor to pass. Over time, we hope the DAO can fully manage end-to-end all the initiatives.

Flobits

Flobits play a vital role in the Flovatar ecosystem. Currently, they allow owners to give their Flovatars a whole new dimension and richness. Another advantage is Flobits allow owners to update the look of a Flovatar over time based on their personal preference, seasonality, or trend without having to create another derivative project.

While all that might already exceed what most PFP projects would offer, the truth is there are many more utilities we haven’t revealed yet behind Flobits. Below is a peek into some of upcoming developments we have planned.

Gaming

Gaming is going to be one of the first strategic initiatives that we are aiming to kick off with a FlovaBank proposal. However, we have seen too many projects promising blockbuster, AAA style games that end up taking years to deliver and most likely still come below the expectation. For context, a traditional AAA game takes approximately $100+ million to produce. That is why for Flovatar we would like to take a different approach of delighting early on and then progressively deliver richer experiences.

The first few games released are going to be the very simple, leisure type, purely for fun purpose only and likely won’t have any utility embedded. In parallel, we are also planning to commission a few games in the mid-term that will incorporate Flobits as part of the game-play. The inspiration for these games is going to be retro arcade style: games that are simple to play yet hard to master.

Upgrading Mechanism

A few concerns were raised from the community regarding the Flobits supply. While it is our intention to empower a healthy economy in the long run with scarcity in mind, we wanted to also share a bit of our philosophy.

The majority of Flobits should be easily accessible and relatively affordable to most Flovatar owners at the beginning of each collection drop. That is because fun and creativity are foundational components for Flovatar and Flobits play a big role in enabling all of that. At the same time, we are aware that the curation process might not be perfect and not every Flobit released will have similar popularity. So while we want to keep the supply relatively broad during each drop, especially with common Flobits, we want to also provide a way for the community to select over time which ones are worth keeping.

That is why we are planning to introduce an upgradeability feature for all Flobits. The way it works is allowing same tier Flobits to be merged together (burned) in order to produce a higher rarity tier Flobit. The resulting new Flobit would come from new designs, so they won’t impact the existing higher tier Flobits. It is still work in progress so details are subject to change, but just as an example, one might need to merge 10 common Flobits + $DUST in order to generate a new rare Flobit. Similarly, to generate a new epic Flobit, one would need to merge 10 rare Flobits + $DUST and so on. This mechanism will provide the community a curation mechanism and an opportunity to obtain higher tier Flobits that doesn’t involve trying to liquidate on the marketplace the undesired ones.

$DUST

We want to preface by repeating that the project is only one month old. This means there is a lot that still needs to be planned out properly and important components like the $DUST token cannot be rushed. We are aware the community is eager to learn more about the token model, so we will try to share some high level thinking. However, please bear in mind this is far from the final draft and many details might change along the way. One thing is certain, most of the value will be accrued to Flovatars.

At high level, each Flovatar will qualify for $DUST distribution on a recurring interval basis. It is likely we will design for the distribution to last between 5 and 10 years. In addition to a flat amount, there will be some additional multiplier factors determining the total amount each Flovatar will receive periodically. One of these factors that we have previously confirmed is the rarity score. It is not certain, but likely there will be few other factors that might be applied as extra bonus that are yet to be discussed. The ultimate goal is to design the incentive in a way that ultimately benefits the ecosystem and economic stability in the long run.

We want to also briefly mention the various utilities we have planned so far. The good news is that the Flovatar ecosystem is an ever growing one, which means as new experiences are built on top of new, there is high likelihood new token utility will be introduced too. In no particular order, below are some of token utility for $DUST:

Naming the Flovatar

Creating a bio for the Flovatar

Flobits upgrade mechanism

Flovatar 3D upgrade mechanism

Special swag purchases

Participate in the Ultimate 1/1 Flobit auction

Metaverse/gaming unlocks

DAO voting participation

DAO

Flovatars are the real founders of the Flovatar World and for that reason they will always have guaranteed rights to vote in any DAO proposal. All minted Flovatars will have equal voting power, regardless of the rarity tier; after all, we are all equals when it comes to rights and decision making.

Additionally, $DUST owners will gain additional voting rights based on the amount of $DUST held. The rationale is that the token will allow the project to expand participation to a broader audience, allowing new members to participate in the decision making. It is likely we will consider a qualifying holding period in order to avoid short term manipulation.

We have successfully integrated the Emerald Bot in our Discord server to allow Flovatar owners the ability to verify their status and access exclusive sections and channels. This will allow a more representative voting in Discord, until the proper DAO smart contract will be ready.

We don’t want the DAO discussion to be taken lightly and we really want to think through how we will handle the transition from the current state to a fully autonomous setup. It won’t be easy and there will be a lot of trials and errors along the way, but we will definitely work very hard to implement it in the best way possible.

Marketing and Commercial Rights

Marketing is going to be a key focus for us in the coming months as the project grows. We will kick off an official job position as Marketing Director to help us launch various marketing initiatives and grow the project awareness across a much larger audience.

As mentioned earlier, we will use the treasury from the FlovaBank to seek potential collaborations with other projects, artists and influencers, integrate with key metaverse platforms and possibly bridge the Ethereum side too. All these initiatives will provide us many promotional opportunities to reach a broader audience.

Another key area of focus is going to support and amplify upcoming community projects to show how thriving our ecosystem is. We are also planning to build tools like a meme generator that could help us generate social buzz and show a glimpse of our community creativity.

Finally, another area that we will actively be looking towards, is the potential collaboration with other brands to eventually create branded Flobits collection drop. The opportunities are limitless and we welcome any community suggestion or collaboration.

Conclusions

As you can imagine 2022 will be a year packed with updates, challenges, and many other surprises we haven’t mentioned in this article. Our approach is to show by action and often prefer to under-promise and over-deliver. That is why sometimes we find it a bit challenging to decide what we feel confident sharing in advance.

At the same time we thought it was important to keep the community informed and share the vision we have for Flovatar in the long run. There are so many initiatives we want to launch with you all and we can’t wait to see what our growing community will also come up with by their own initiative. If what we have seen so far is of any evidence, there is so much creativity waiting to be unlocked.

The GIP-13 proposal passed and it is now time to celebrate the birth of vCOW, the token for the CoW Ecosystem, a critical component to empower traders so that together we can all light up the dark forest.

“The wait is over CoWs!! By the power vested in me by the CoWmunity, I now declare this moment as the birth of the vCOW token” Master CoW

Tl;dr

Master CoW’s dream has always been to give back to the community that contributed so much to this project. By launching the governance token vCOW we are handing over true ownership to the community (>50k addresses).

vCOW is a governance token and therefore will be non-transferable in the beginning. This means you WILL NOT be able to sell it immediately after claiming. However, it is up to CowDAO members (YOU) to vote on whether making the token transferable complies with applicable laws.

Claiming takes place on either Mainnet and/or Gnosis Chain. Where you can claim is NOT related to your activity but ONLY to the amount of vCOW Tokens you are eligible for under the airdrop criteria. (Besides for Smart Contract wallets as the wallet address is not necessarily the same one across chains). Users eligible for 10,000 vCOW Tokens or less will claim on Gnosis Chain. They are also sent 0.1xDAI each to cover their gas costs. Everyone else can claim on Mainnet.

Airdrop: airdrops are dropped to users who have earned a CoW-POAP, traded on either Ethereum &/or Gnosis Chain, and to GNO holders.

In addition to receiving the airdrop, some users also have the option to invest and buy additional vCOW tokens. These Investment Options were dropped and offered to traders and to GNO holders. GNO holder options let you buy vCOW with GNO. Trader options let you buy vCOW with ETH on Mainnet and with xDAI on GnosisChain.

If you exercise an Investment Option, the amount you invest WILL BE VESTED linearly over 4 years. This means that you WILL NOT get the amount immediately after investment.

When exercising your investment option, you are presented with the opportunity to choose a % amount to invest. Note that claiming the investment options is ONLY POSSIBLE ONE TIME and thus, if you don’t fully claim it, you will not be able to reclaim the % you leave uninvested.

You will be able to claim the airdrop and investment options all within one bundled transaction.

Want more vCOW? GnosisDAO is vesting 5% vCOW to users locking their GNO until February 15 here: lock.gnosis.io

Happy CoW, Happy life

How do the tokens fit into the CoW vision?

The CoW Protocol mission is to make markets both more efficient and fair by building the ultimate batch auction settlement layer. As we are offering users best prices, we are aiming to become the foundational liquidity hub for trading digital assets.

Master CoW’s dream has always been to give back to the community that made this project special, this is why the vCOW token is conceptualized as a governance token. CoW Protocol now becomes a cowmunity owned project via the CowDAO. The token & CowDAO aim to ensure that the protocol isn’t captured by rent seekers, and that it stays neutral to the core players of the system, the traders.

What is the purpose of the vCOW token?

CowDAO believes in creating a global trading ecosystem of the people, by the people, for the people, that shall not perish under any threats. The crypto dream has never been about creating an instrument that can easily be put in a box, but about creating global assets that can govern and manage these new decentralized global networks.

This is why the vCOW token is conceived and launched as a governance token, and it’s non-transferable at first. That’s right, when you claim the airdrop, you will receive a token that cannot be transferred out of your wallet.

This is not an error, but an intended practice, as airdropping a governance token at first is essential for the ecosystem to build the right forces to form around it. Once the token is in your wallet, the vCOW token will entitle its holders with voting rights in the CowDAO. It is up to CowDAO members to vote on whether the token should be made transferable or not.

The main purpose of CowDAO is to govern and curate essential infrastructure components of the CoW Protocol ecosystem, including:

System Parameters — CowDAO will be in charge of all system parameters such as the objective function for solution scoring and solver slashing conditions.

Treasury holdings and Protocol revenue — Allocation of treasury holdings, distribution of Protocol revenue and investing into ecosystem projects.

Staking — CoW Protocol solvers will be incentivized to compete for providing best solutions by capturing value for participation. This could come in the form of trading fees, solution token rewards or both. Solvers could be required to stake COW in order to participate in solution submission.

If you are interested in learning more about the governance process, make sure to sign up to the CowDAO forum and participate in this exciting new cow-venture.

Token drop

CoWmunity of free traders that want to get the best on-chain prices at the cheapest execution costs, while being protected from the dangers of the dark forest, today is your day. As a gesture of cow-preciation to our users, GNO holders, supporters and many more members of our awesome CoWmunity, the vCOW token is now live for you to claim.

Click here to be redirected to claim your vCOW. To add vCOW to your wallet, here are the corresponding contract addresses below:

Ethereum: 0xd057b63f5e69cf1b929b356b579cba08d7688048

Gnosis Chain: 0xc20C9C13E853fc64d054b73fF21d3636B2d97eaB

The threshold for claiming on Ethereum or Gnosis Chain has been established at: 10,000 vCOW tokens. Thus,

If you are eligible for > 10,000 tokens, you will be eligible to claim on Ethereum Network. **Make sure you read this step by step guide before you proceed to claim.

If you are eligible for ≤ 10,000 tokens, you will be eligible to claim on Gnosis Chain Network. In order to make it easier for you to claim in Gnosis Chain, and benefiting from the substantially lower fees of the network, eligible users under this category will receive 0.1xDAI. **Make sure you read this step by step guide before you proceed to claim.

Note that for Smart Contract wallets such as the Gnosis Safe, given that the wallet address is not necessarily the same one across chains,you will only be able to claim in the network where you were awarded the tokens, regardless of the amount you were airdropped.

As laid out in the GIP-13, the 1 Billion COW initial token supply has been distributed among the CoW team, the CowDAO treasury, the GnosisDAO, the CoWmunity investment options, the CoWmunity, the CoW advisory and the CoW team investment partners.

Whilst airdrop holders directly have full control over their full claim, investors & GnosisDAO & the core team are receiving their vCOW tokens under a 4 years linear vesting schedule. Here’s a high level view of how the token distribution schedule looks like:

Note that the linear vesting over 4 years unlocks the corresponding amounts for every Ethereum block, until it reaches the final date. This means that once the initial claim has been made, the 4 year vested amount will start to unlock consequently and proportionally for each Ethereum block. For more information on what vesting means, please refer to the following link.

What type of users got the drop?

Are you wondering about the criteria for the CoWdrop qualification? The official criteria was laid out in this tweet thread, but here is the recap:

COWMUNITY AIRDROP

Our CoWmunity has been dropped 10% of the tokens, plus another 10% in the form of investment options.

The following community members are eligible for the airdrop:

CoW POAPs

Users who have been awarded a POAP, but not all are equally valuable. Some that are most special are the ones for our CowStars and User Test Participants. Note that we say “awarded” and not “owns”, since we know that there have been secondary markets for these POAPS. We only took awardees into consideration.

Power Traders

A Power trader is someone who has traded on either Ethereum mainnet (before block 13974427) or Gnosis Chain (block 20024195) with a minimum of 3 trades, with at least 14 days between the 1st and the last trade, and for a minimum of 1K total volume. Note that stable to stable coin trades only by factor 0.1

Traders

A trader is someone who has traded on either Ethereum mainnet (before block 13974427) or Gnosis Chain (block 20024195) at least once for a total of 1K USD or who has done at least 5 trades. Note that stable to stable coin trades only by factor 0.1

GNO Holders

A GNO holder is someone who held at least 0.1 GNO on either Ethereum mainnet (before block 13974427) or Gnosis Chain (block 20024195). They were eligible for holding GNO on Mainnet and/or GnosisChain, and for running GBC validators. In addition, all the following LP token holders were accounted for: Balancer v2 (mainnet), Uniswap v3 (mainnet), Honeyswap (gnosischain), Symetric (gnosischain), Sushiswap (gnosischain), Elk (gnosischain), Swapr (Gnosischain)

INVESTMENT OPTIONS

The following community members are eligible for investment options, GNO Token holders (proportionally to the GNO they were holding at snapshot) and CowSwap’s Power Traders (as classified in linked tweet) will be given the opportunity to buy additional vCOW.

Power Traders

A Power trader is someone who has traded on either Ethereum mainnet (before block 13974427) or Gnosis Chain (block 20024195) with a minimum of 3 trades, with at least 14 days between the 1st and the last trade, and for a minimum of 1K total volume. Note that stable to stable coin trades only by factor 0.1

GNO Holders

A GNO holder is someone who held at least 0.1 GNO on either Ethereum mainnet (before block 13974427) or Gnosis Chain (block 20024195). They were eligible for holding GNO on Mainnet and/or GnosisChain, and for running GBC validators. In addition, all the following LP token holders were accounted for: Balancer v2 (mainnet), Uniswap v3 (mainnet), Honeyswap (gnosischain), Symetric (gnosischain), Sushiswap (gnosischain), Elk (gnosischain), Swapr (Gnosischain)

For those of you wondering about the referrals done through the affiliate program, we have not forgotten about you. It is expected that soon a proposal will be submitted to CowDAO, proposing a reward for our strongest advocates!

CONCLUSION

At CoW Protocol, it’s core to our mission to reduce inefficiencies where possible. We don’t want you to spend your ETH on tx costs, and certianly not for airdrop claims either. Airdrops often burn millions of USD in ETH. To avoid this, we decided to make smaller airdrop sizes available on GnosisChain where gas costs are marginal, and allocate users additional xDAI to cover their gas costs. If your investment options & airdrop size are larger than the established threshold, you will claim on mainnet, since the amount is large enough for it to be reasonable. That said, in order to also reduce the amount of fees you will spend, we have enabled the possibility of combining the different types of claims all at once. Meaning that if you are eligible for airdrop & investment options, you can claim them all at once.

About CowDAO

CowDAO is an open organization of developers, traders, market makers and many more community members aligned with its vision. CowDAO is focused on fair and decentralized trading systems — in particular, building, maintaining and advancing the Cow Protocol. Cow Protocol technology powers a network of traders and solvers, enabling trustless and efficient peer-to-peer trading. Leveraging batch auctions as a key concept uniquely positions Cow Protocol as native trading infrastructure for discrete-time settlement layers like Ethereum and enables fair and accessible trading to its users.

I CAN SEE PARADISE THROUGH THE CoWS’ LIGHT — Master CoW

We are over the moooo with excitement about the launch of vCOW and its potential to empower our CoWmunity of traders to co-create the future of the best Settlement Layer for Decentralized Trading. We want your participation as we build out CoW Protocol’s infrastructure, develop technology and unite to protect users from the dangers of the dark forest.

The was taken across all categories equally: block 13974427 for Ethereum & block 20024195 for Gnosis Chain

Hey everyone!

It’s been one heck of a ride so far, and ETH governance is just getting started.

Below you’ll find a short re-cap of what happened so far, and the roadmap going forward.

The Good Stuff

EGL Genesis had exceeded our expectations, and ~11,000 ETH had been staked by Genesis participants to bootstrap EGL. These 11,000 ETH were matched with 750M EGLs and deployed to Balancer, creating a $100M ETH-EGL market (as of today).

If you don’t recall, this entire liquidity pool belongs to the Genesis participants (gradually released over a course of a year) and it is crucial because it creates a venue where mining pools can sell their EGLs. This is a good thing! Mining pools are not “dumping on EGL”, the EGL protocol incentives pools to set the gas limit by awarding them EGLs, which they do because these EGLs have value and they can be sold.

EGL Voting had a real effect on the gas limit, which is W-I-L-D!!!

If you don’t understand how wild it is, you must be living under a rock and missed the storm this tweet raised.

Pools are listening to EGL. Most hashpower had already tried following EGL, and we’re in close contact with them regarding continue doing so (see details below).

The Challenges

The number #1 challenge EGL had is with communication.

Following EGL’s success, many core devs had raised their concerns whether EGL can be abused to increase the gas limit to unsafe levels. We took the time to analyze these concerns and address them here.

A second challenge we’ve seen is that post-1559 gas fees had increased to 100–150 gwei, compared to 10–30 gwei pre-London. Mining pools are still glad to follow the EGL vote to collect EGLs, but they need to be compensated with a lot more EGLs just to break even, and even more to be worth their while. We address it below.

A third challenge was the design of the EGL-sweeping transactions, which always sweep EGLs to the coinbase address, which allows a transaction created by one pool to pay for EGLs swept by another pool, and complicate the pool operation as it requires sending EGL from the address they use for pool-miners accounting.

The Roadmap

Here’s what’s coming to EGL in the short and medium term

Short Term

We are working hard an aim to soon release a technical proposal to improve EGL’s mechanism. Specifically we aim to:

Avoid sweeping EGLs every blocks, and instead use an on-chain “sampling” of the hashpower of each pool and how closely it follows the EGL vote.

The sampling will test 1% of the blocks, reducing the cost for pools by x100, and significantly reduce the amount of EGLs they need to be awarded to be incentivized

Allow pools to only sweep EGLs if they are the ones to receive them, and specify once the address they wish to receive the EGLs they receive

Medium Term

Keeping an open communication channel with core devs is extremely important. different core devs have different opinions what the gas limit should be, but as a group they remain the beast beacon (no pun intended) for the community to navigate its path.

In our recent post, we explored multiple solutions to the concerns raised by core devs. Among them we consider giving “Signals” — core devs who use EGL to share their view on the gas limit with the community — a “Killswitch” to turn EGL off if majority of Signals feel it is being abused.

We intend to explore these solutions and see which solutions will be best for EGL and the ETH ecosystem as a whole.

We‘ll publish more details on our progress in the coming weeks.

Keeping soaring higher!

Docs, docs, docs…

Updating our documentation has been a central task over the past few days, so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I feel it’s worth saying a few words about the reasoning behind these changes.

I tend to take a methodical approach to projects, so prior to starting this task I took some time to do some research. I came across this documentation framework and found it really interesting — the division into four quadrants is very close to my natural approach towards docs as a consumer and something that was missing in our materials up until now.

My first priority was to improve the pages that explained the most basic concepts of Subsquid (the ‘explanation’ quadrant). For developers who are new to blockchain technology there are just so many new notions to absorb!

Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to explain every little detail about blockchain in this documentation, but we can at least try to provide the minimum necessary for those who are just starting to build on Subsquid.

I have also tried to retrace my own steps, scattering external links like breadcrumbs throughout our pages. Developers can follow these links to become better acquainted with any new or unfamiliar topics.

Getting up to speed, one line of code at a time

I ended last week by telling myself:

“If I am to be advocating for Subsquid developers, my first priority should be to know the ins and outs of the product itself!”

The task of restructuring, updating, and improving our documentation really helps in this sense, first because I need to read it, and second because while writing, all sorts of questions start to pop up.

Let’s take the example of our multi-layered approach. OK, so our architecture is divided into Archives and Squids. The former collects raw blockchain data and makes it exploitable, while the latter leverages this data and performs custom transformation on it. That’s easy enough to understand.

But while trying to explain it in more detail, I found that my initial level of understanding simply was not enough.

The inner workings of our Archive became clearer when I looked into how the IndexBuilder , BlockProducer, IndexerStatusService, and PooledExecutor classes interacted with each other:

IndexBuilder orchestrates blockchain data ingestion by fetching information from the BlockProducer

It then instantiates PooledExecutor so that multiple workers extract raw data, wrap it in TypeScript classes representing ORM entities (namely the Block itself, Extrinsics, Events), and saves it in the database.

It emits events, so that the IndexerStatusService is updated on the synchronisation status.

In short, it provides continuous ingestion of blockchain data, conveniently storing it in a more exploitable way.

As for the ‘Squid’ part of the ETL pipeline, it was quite clear from the start that the Processor is the key, so I went to take a look at the SubstrateProcessor class. In short, this class sets up ingestion metrics, groups blocks in batches, then starts a loop that ingests those batches.

The nice thing about it however is that it sets up methods for the developer to customise data processing by adding functions as Event Handlers, Extrinsic Handlers, and pre- or post-Block hooks.

I have used Django in the past and I instantly connected Block hooks to the concept of middleware in web servers (NestJS has a great explanation for its middleware — what a coincidence, I am taking inspiration from them for our docs!).

On the other hand, for the Handlers the pattern is akin to a Publish-Subscribe, where when calling

addEventHandler(eventName: QualifiedName, fn: EventHandler)

the developer has to specify the eventName as an argument. While processing a block, if that event is encountered, the Handler is triggered by calling the function fn specified as the second argument.

Once again, quite a clever use of tried and true software design patterns. It really does result in a polished implementation that is quite intuitive.

My first Dev interview!

As part of our Business Development initiative we are establishing various partnerships that often entail the development of software integrations. One of my roles during this process is to hold special meetings (called ‘developer interviews’) that help to make sure we gather all necessary information about how our technology is being implemented. This way I can communicate these things to our community later on.

Simply put, a dev interview is a meeting where the developer advocate (me!) sits down with developers to go over the integration that they are responsible for. During these meetings we discuss the work that needs to be done and highlight any noteworthy customisations or trade-offs that need to be made.

I had my very first of these meetings this morning, and you’ll be able to read an announcement about this upcoming integration in just a few days!

Join our Community!

To find out more about Subsquid, join us on our Discord server and chat to one of our helpful Subsquid team members or other users. For those who want some more background information on Subsquid and what it’s all about, our website and Medium page are the perfect places to start.

My hope for the dev interview process is that it will lead to interesting case studies that we can include in our documentation as neatly detailed ‘How-tos’ (referred to as Recipes in our docs). This is something I am very much looking forward to. Most importantly, dev interviews give me an excuse to get my hands dirty and do some coding .

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? That’s because it’s a very elegant implementation, in my opinion. Kudos to Eldar, our Senior Core Dev!

That is why, at some point, I took to old habits: I went to explore our codebase. And that’s where I finally started connecting the dots (Polkadot pun intended).

So, after settling in and getting to know my colleagues and establishing the first tasks I’d be getting into (spoiler: it’s documentation! ), it was finally time to sink my teeth into the tech.

One can think of these quadrants as the lens through which our new documentation should be viewed. Each part of the updated materials will fall into one of these categories and will be easy to find, depending on the needs of the reader.

Potential implications of a dynamic between Bitcoin mining and nuclear energy

Photo by Lukáš Lehotský on Unsplash

A brief introduction to nuclear energy

The nuclear energy generation process starts with nuclear reactors splitting uranium atoms, stored in a solid form of fuel. This process — called fission — releases newtons and an immense amount of heat.

Firstly, neutrons collide with other uranium atoms, causing them to split and starting a chain reaction that generates ever-more heat.

On the other hand, the heat released by the chain reaction of uranium atoms splitting is used to convert water into steam, which spins a turbine that generates electricity.

The nuclear energy production process is clean, as it uses uranium instead of fossil fuels nor does it involve any direct carbon emissions into the environment.

Additionally, nuclear plants never sleep. They are built to withstand extreme weather and run non-stop, constantly supporting the grid and shutting down only for scheduled maintenance.

Photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash

So why isn’t nuclear energy more popular? This technology often receives backlash from the media and general public. The causes behind this negative portrayal are often related to isolated accidents involving nuclear power plants.

Why nuclear energy is ideal for Bitcoin mining

Contrary to popular belief, nuclear energy is safe, clean, and extremely reliable. Additionally, it’s among the most cost-effective and economic energy sources we have.

The characteristics of nuclear energy are very attractive to Bitcoin miners for many reasons. Let’s dive deeper into some of them.

Clean and carbon-free electricity

Just like nuclear energy, Bitcoin mining has also faced criticism because of the environmental impact of using fossil fuel energy, which is carbon-intensive.

Although some stages in the nuclear energy production process imply carbon emissions — building the nuclear plant or extracting and refining the uranium, for example — , the generation process per se is carbon-free.

Cumulative CO2 emissions avoided by global nuclear power in selected countries, 1971–2018 (Source: IEA, Paris)

This puts nuclear energy among the cleanest and most environmentally friendly energy sources. As such, Bitcoin miners are turning to nuclear energy, putting an end to the pollution and environmental impact debate on Bitcoin.

Reliability and uptime

Perhaps the most important disadvantage of renewable energy is its inconsistency.

Depending on weather conditions, geographical location, and time of the year, renewable energy generation can range widely. Additionally, as output varies, so does price and uptime.

These circumstances make it very hard to accurately predict and calculate mining profitability, thus causing great uncertainty for miners.

Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

Nuclear facilities, on the other hand, have the highest capacity factor of any other energy sources.

Capacity factor refers to the ratio between the energy produced in a period of time compared to the energy that could’ve been produced during the same period at maximum performance and optimum conditions.

Furthermore, nuclear power plants tend to require less maintenance and are designed to operate uninterrupted for extended periods before refueling.

These capabilities allow nuclear plants to function practically 24/7, which makes them the most reliable power source there is.

Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash

Cost-effectiveness

The energy generation process is long and complex, and it involves many stages. The diversity of all these aspects often makes it difficult to compare different sources of energy, as their processes may vary significantly.

Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is a metric that calculates the present value of the total cost of building and operating a power plant over an assumed lifetime.

This method allows the comparison of different sources — wind, solar, natural gas, nuclear — of unequal lifespans, project sizes, different capital costs, and capacities, among other factors.

That said, the International Energy Agency stated in a report (2020) that nuclear is the low-carbon technology with the lowest cost. Only hydroelectric plants are comparable in terms of cost and generation.

Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of different energy-generation technologies (Source: IEA)

More importantly, because of technological advancements and learning curve progression, the report estimates that nuclear energy is the most economical and cost-effective technology in the long term.

Electricity produced from nuclear long-term operation (LTO) by lifetime extension is highly competitive and remains not only the least cost option for low-carbon generation — when compared to building new power plants — but for all power generation across the board.

— International Energy Agency (2020)

Low electricity prices are the main priority of Bitcoin miners, as it is the most significant factor in mining profitability. As a result, the long-term viability and decreasing costs of nuclear energy most attractive for Bitcoin miners.

How to calculate your Bitcoin mining electricity costs

Everything you need to consider before you start mining

medium.com

A unique opportunity for a Bitcoin mining and nuclear energy dynamic

Nuclear energy facilities can also enjoy several benefits from a partnership with Bitcoin miners.

Renewable energy sources — like solar and wind — are gradually gaining ground due to their popularity and declining costs. Natural gas prices are also trending down, which makes it another competitor to nuclear energy.

The decrease of U.S. nuclear power generating capacity is a result of historically low natural gas prices, limited growth in electricity demand, and increasing competition from renewable energy.

— Suparna Ray, U.S. Energy Information Administration

Nuclear reactors are among the most powerful energy generators. A typical nuclear plant produces 1 gigawatt of energy — that’s the same as 3.125 million solar panels.

However, the advancement of these technologies and the trend for domestic energy production have led to a decrease in demand for nuclear energy, as it’s being replaced by other sources.

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

As a result, nuclear reactors are shutting down worldwide. This is where Bitcoin comes in.

Bitcoin mining requires significant amounts of energy. One single ASIC miner consumes over 3kW/h. That said, large Bitcoin mining operations of tens of thousands ASIC miners can provide the much needed demand for nuclear energy to keep reactors in business.

Photo by Visual Stories || Micheile on Unsplash

Another option for nuclear energy producers is to mine on their own. They can deploy ASIC miners on-site and run their mining operations themselves, using their own low-cost energy to provide security to the Bitcoin network while turning a profit.

While Bitcoin miners obtain cheap, clean, and reliable energy, nuclear facilities gain a large sector of the market and a constant, loyal customer for their electricity.

Bitcoin mining is changing everything we know about energy. First it was renewable technologies. Now, nuclear facilities are starting to realize Bitcoin’s potential benefits for the energy industry. Hopefully, more energy producers will follow.

Bitcoin can fix global power grids, here’s how

Bitcoin and mining could be the key to building a sustainable, fully renewable power grid.

medium.com

Did you like this article?

We publish an overview after every Bitcoin difficulty adjustment. Make sure to follow us on Medium so you don’t miss it. You can also subscribe to our blog and visit Lumerin.io for more information. We’ll be glad to have you!

Up to 10%: Liquidity Provision

Up to 30%: Initial Bonus Mining

More than 60%: Continuous Rewards for minting & Allocation based on the governance decision can be used to enhance the protocol (e.g. grants for related projects)

After a successful public sale on Blocto and OccamRazer, we are quickly approaching the listing date — there is just one week left.

It means that token distribution is almost here and we want to share some details about STARLY token staking — the key aspect of the Starly ecosystem, designed to benefit token holders.

What is the purpose of it? Staking is a process of locking your STARLY tokens in the smart contract to support the operations of a blockchain network in order to receive rewards. Passive income — yes, please!

How to add STARLY tokens to your wallet

Very soon you will receive detailed information about the token claiming from Starly or the respective launchpads. To stake your tokens, they need to be on Flow blockchain.

If you have participated in Blocto IDO — your tokens are already on Flow.

If your STARLYs are on Binance Smart Chain you can use Blocto teleport to bridge tokens from BSC to Flow and vice versa. To do so, go to https://swap.blocto.app/#/teleport and connect your wallets.

Select STARLY token, in the next step select BSC blockchain in the “From” field and STARLY token on Flow blockchain in the “To” field.

Your STARLYs are now on Flow and you’re good to go!

How to Stake STARLY tokens

Log in and go to the “Staking” tab on our site (if it’s not there, it will shortly appear next to the “Starly Token” tab). Enter the amount of tokens you want to stake.

It is possible to divide tokens you want to stake into several parts, that way being able to unstake them separately. After staking tokens you will see the amount, unlock date, and annual interest.

Staked tokens are locked for 30 days. After that period you can claim your tokens and the staking reward any time. The longer you keep your tokens staked the more additional tokens you will generate for yourself.

Stake tokens to earn a 15% annual percentage rate. To celebrate the token launch, a very special 20% APY (annual percentage yield) will be applied to all the tokens you start staking before March 15th.

The interest amount is guaranteed — the APY rate does not fluctuate.

What’s next — Staking Tiers

This is just the beginning. We are currently working to implement amazing features to reward STARLY token stakers.

There will be three staking tiers: Silver, Gold, and Platinum memberships, each having an extensive set of benefits — including, but not limited to exclusive drops, voting rights, and much more. We will post detailed information about token amounts for each tier and further details later on — it is a work in progress.

We will continuously evolve the STARLY token as a centerpiece of the Starly ecosystem to benefit creators, collectors and token holders. Stake STARLY tokens to fully enjoy the ride!

What’s coming for Orion Money in 2022?

It’s been a really busy year for the Orion Money team and community!

Since our start in April 2021, the Orion Money team has been tirelessly at work building the new golden standard for a cross-chain stablecoin bank. In only eight months, our team:

Built and launched our first product — Orion Saver — on Ethereum and Polygon which now provides thousands of users with 15% fixed APY on any stablecoins, the highest savings rate in all of DeFi on ERC-20 stablecoins! Since launch, Orion Saver has reached $130m+ of TVL (Total Value Locked) and we’re just getting started!

Minted our governance token $ORION with IDOs on the two most popular Ethereum launchpads — Polkastarter and DAOMaker — which has resulted in a community of 5,000+ $ORION token holders. $ORION token is already on six exchanges (Gate.io, Uniswap, Pancakeswap, Quickswap, Terraswap, and Astroport) and we’re in conversations with other exchanges to add $ORION trading too.

Launched $ORION Staking and Liquidity mining on four chains — Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, and Polygon — with users staking over $30m in $ORION and another crypto.

Signed partnerships and kicked off integrations with many great DeFi projects, among which BlockBank, xDefi wallet, Dezy, GOGOCoin, with many many more to come in the next months.

Engaged a loyal social community of over 150,000 members, across Twitter, Telegram, Medium, and Discord, which have been incredibly supportive for reaching all the great milestones mentioned above!.

And if you think that Orion Money’s current Total Addressable Market (TAM) is big already — $160B+ in Ethereum stablecoins — you should also know that it is also forecasted to grow to trillions of dollars (yes, with a T) in the next few years! And we want this all as TVL in Orion Money and Anchor Protocol!

In this post, we are very excited to share Orion Money’s plans for 2022 with you. These exciting developments not only will bring a full utility to the $ORION token and an all-new, more intuitive Orion Money dApp, but also much more value-added for Orion Money users and supporters.

As always we’re very grateful for your support of the Orion Money project. We would not be able to deliver what we have done already without your support. Orion Money community is at the center of everything we do!

Read on!

Product Roadmap Update

Our plans, in general, fit into three main themes:

Create more value for Orion Money users, by making our dApp more powerful, and increasing the utility of ORION token,

Bring Orion Money to as many users as possible, by building new social engagement features and campaigns, such as an upcoming Ambassador and Referral programs,

Collaborate with other projects, especially the ones from the Terra ecosystem, double down on our cross-chain interoperability, and bring the value of Terra projects across other blockchains, bringing Orion Money to even more users.

Let’s now review the main products and features coming in 2022!

Orion Money Roadmap with live and upcoming products/features

Q1 2022

Orion Money v2

We’re redesigning our Orion Money dApp from scratch to make it more beautiful, more powerful, and easier to use. It will be mobile-first and future-proofed.

Also, considering that Orion Money is already available across four chains — Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Terra, our new dApp will be natively cross-chain with token bridges available right within the user interface.

Designs for Orion Money v2 Dashboard screen

Extra APY and utility for $ORION token

One of our main goals for next year is to ensure that true long-term holders of $ORION governance tokens are rewarded with the highest yield possible.

As described in our Litepaper, we originally envisioned this implemented via APY Levels feature, but as the crypto landscape dynamically changes, we quickly learned about the major operational challenges of this approach. If we implemented utility with APY levels, we would have to:

Constantly update $ORION stakers’ APY levels in real-time with every $ORION price change. This would require a significant amount of development resources constantly monitoring and updating APY levels instead of developing new features and products.

Each month APY updates could add up to millions of dollars spent in gas fees for the protocol and our users, especially as the majority of Orion Money deposits are on Ethereum, where the gas fees are highest.

This implementation would also be even more complex for cross-chain as Orion Money already launched on four blockchains and we plan to launch on many more.

Additionally, given the high level of involvement of the core team required for maintaining and switching APY levels, it would be hard to transition the Orion Money project to the full-DAO model that we envision to ensure long-term sustainability and decentralization of the project.

Taking all of these points into account, we came up with a more decentralized and value-adding approach where:

- Orion Money users will get a Base rate of 15% APY on all stablecoin deposits by default,

- Will need to stake $ORION tokens in Boost APY pools to increase their total portfolio’s APY from 15% to a maximum of 100%+.

More details are below.

1. Base APY

Users who deposit stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, DAI, BUSD, wUST into Orion Money will receive an initial 15% APY on their stablecoins. Also once we develop the Orion Yield feature (see below for more), we plan to increase the Base APY to match Anchor Protocol’s Earn rate (currently 19.48%).

Users who make a stablecoin deposit will receive as a receipt oUSD derivative token — an interest-bearing ERC-20 token (Orion Money USD, powered by UST).

oUSD will have many use cases:

- oUSD will serve as a receipt for the deposit. Users will be able to send oUSD between wallets and use oUSD to withdraw their stablecoins interest or deposit from any wallet. This will also help to integrate Orion Money into many more projects and crypto wallets as they usually require token receipts for deposits.

- Users will be able to send oUSD to another chain to withdraw their interest or deposit there.

2. Boost APY

The opportunities are endless for oUSD, but we envision as one of the main use cases, staking your oUSD with ORION in 50–50 proportions to increase the yield for your total Orion Money deposit via Boost APY pools.

IMPORTANT: Users typically hold and deposit into Orion Money more stablecoins than they have $ORION tokens. As Boost APY pools will have 50–50 proportions with $ORION-oUSD, most of the users will need to purchase $ORION to achieve their desired APY rate for the portfolio. We expect that this will create an organic buy pressure for $ORION token once the Boost APY pools are live.

Users will be able to earn higher APY by staking their oUSD derivative token with ORION tokens or supported stablecoins into Boost APY pools. By staking into Boost APY pools, users can increase their Orion Money total portfolio APY from the 15% base to 25%, 50%, or even to 100%+, depending on how many oUSD and ORION tokens they staked. All Boost APY pools will have incentives paid in $ORION tokens, with ORION-oUST pool having the highest rewards.

Users will be able to stake as little or as much of oUSD and $ORION into Boost APY pools as they decide. For example, if you are aiming at 25% APY for your total deposit, you would need to only stake 10–20% of your oUSD and the corresponding value of ORION tokens. However, if you would like to achieve a higher APY for your total Orion Money portfolio and have a higher risk tolerance, you can stake all of your oUSD and corresponding ORIONs in the same pool to achieve 100%+ APY for your full Orion Money portfolio.

It is up to each Orion Money user to decide their desired risk-reward balance and choose how much they are willing to stake in the Boost APY Pools. Please mind that Boost APY Pools will be DeFi (AMM)pools and will have a risk of an impermanent loss. Also as usual with DeFi pools — the yields will be the highest right after the launch.

We will provide a detailed explanation and a video guide on how to use Boost APY pools as soon as they are finalized and in advance of the launch.

Designs for Orion Money v2 Saver (Portfolio) screens with Boost APY

To summarize — this new approach will provide:

A much more scalable and efficient way of providing utility to our users who own and stake $ORION tokens, proportionally to their deposits (oUSD),

Users will be able to choose what total portfolio APY they will get based on their Boost APY pools staking amount,

Orion Money TVL will be more sustainable as depositors will be receiving at least two yield types for their deposit/stake.

Shortly after launching Boost APYs, there will be more unique products and features added into the Orion Money v2.

Vesting

We learned from $ORION IDO unlocks that monthly vesting is quite inefficient as it brings large amounts of project tokens to market at the same time. Hence, for the protocol’s and token’s stability in the future, we will be introducing daily linear vesting for all future token distributions — starting from Community Farming (early January), Seed, and so on (detailed info about ORION token distribution is in the Litepaper).

Users will be able to choose between several options for their vested tokens — Auto-Stake (ORION tokens will be automatically staked in governance as they vest), Claim & Stake (similar to airdrops on Terra — users claim vested tokens and stake them at any time), and only Claim (withdraw to a wallet). We will post more details once the daily vesting is implemented.

Swaps and in-app bridges

In the v2 dApp, you’ll be able to swap $ORION token with other crypto or other stablecoins directly within the dApp UI and bridge it to any blockchain where $ORION is supported.

This way, it’ll be much easier to manage your $ORIONs across different networks, and without leaving Orion Money dApp.

Q2 2022

xORION staking and governance

Based on your staked $ORION tokens, you will also receive xORION derivative tokens that earn staking rewards and allow voting on governance proposals.

We’re working out details of governance to make sure the long-term Orion Money users and token holders will make the most out of the Orion Money governance process — and while building this, we’re getting inspired by the recent successful implementation of token governance by Yearn Finance.

As ORION staking is live already on four blockchains (and will expand to many more), we need to come up with a good cross-chain proposal snapshot solution to ensure that Orion Money governance is including every ORION staker, no matter where they are. We will start experimenting with xORION voting and proposals in Q2 with a view of Orion Money becoming a full DAO in Q3.

Ambassador and Referral Programs

We are planning to launch our very own Orion Money Ambassador and Referral programs shortly after our dApp v2 launches with the Boost APYs feature. We have already picked up a great deal of interest from many communities, platforms, and influencers from around the crypto world for this and are extremely excited about building and bringing you the programs very soon.

While we’re still ironing out the details of the program, we want to give you a sneak peek. The incentives for our programs could look like this:

You invite a friend or follower to make a deposit in the Orion Money using your referral link

They make a deposit and start receiving their 15% APY.

You will receive a regular referral fee based on the yield they earn — calculated and paid as 10% of their Base Orion Money yield in stablecoins or 15% in ORION tokens

Rewards from referrals will be regularly deposited into your Orion Money account and will also earn 15% APY as stablecoin deposits or ORION staking rewards until you decide to withdraw them.

We will post more about the Ambassador and Referral programs as we are preparing them for launch in Q2.

Orion Yield

Our dedicated Yield product will integrate directly with other groundbreaking protocols from the TeFi ecosystem — such as Nexus, Mars, Mirror, and many others — to enable users to build high-yield, net-neutral strategies that further compound Orion Money Base APY.

With these products, Orion Money users will be able to match Anchor Protocol’s Earn rate, while also having separate stablecoin vaults with even higher but more variable yields.

Orion Insurance

Currently, Orion Money has already partnered up with selected smart contract insurance providers to bring you four insurance policies, protecting you from smart contracts bugs, UST de-peg, or a mix of both.

Next year, we’ll be looking at bringing you even more choice and protection options, including the native Terra insurance policy from Risk Harbor.

Q3 2022

Orion Pay and crypto debit cards

While these products are still planned for the later part of 2022, we have already started to speak with people that we might collaborate with to build them. We all know that crypto moves fast, is unpredictable, and things might shift around, but there is also a chance we might even be able to deliver them sooner than Q3.

As well as building the products and features described above, our engineering team is already working to solve key tasks that will enable the release of Orion Money v2. Rest assured though — we’ll put together detailed help center articles, and video tutorials to walk you through them right after their launch.

We’re incredibly excited about all these developments and we look forward to creating even more value for Orion Money users and our community in the New Year!

But until then, make sure you take time to switch off, relax, and enjoy some quality time with your loved ones — because 2022 will be even busier and more interesting than this year. We’re off to a great start, so fasten your seatbelt!

About Orion Money

Orion Money’s vision is to become a cross-chain stablecoin bank providing seamless and frictionless stablecoin saving, lending, and spending. Within the Orion Money stablecoin bank, we have three main products planned — Orion Saver, Orion Yield and Insurance, and Orion Pay. Orion Money uniquely brings high yields from Terra to users on Ethereum protocol in easy-to-use dApps.

Happy New Year from the Orion Money team!

We are thrilled to announce that after months of development, the Ethereum Testnet is live! We are aware you have been patient as we work towards our goal of bringing utility-derived yield to the masses and for that, we cannot thank you enough. Now we are ready to show you what we have got and we want to know what you think about our beta testing! We know you have questions and we will be happy to answer them here. If you still require more information, you can read the Docs or please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, Telegram, and our Discord channels and we will get back to you as soon as we can,.

What is Fluidity?

Fluidity Testnet Beta v1.

Guide to using the Fluidity Testnet Beta

Step 1) Connecting to the Ethreum Ropsten Test Network

Step 2) Obtaining Ropsten Test ETH

Step 3) Obtaining Fluid USDT (ƒUSDT)!

Step 4) Adding USDT Token address into MetaMask

Step 5) (OPTIONAL — If you want more Fluid Assets to play with!

Else skip to step 6 to start using Fluidity!)

Step 6) You’re ready to get Fluid!

BONUS

Step 7) UNISWAP! Swapping your Fluid Assets

What is Fluidity?

Fluidity takes tokens and wraps them at a 1-to-1 ratio while storing the original asset in a lending protocol. The accruing interest is stored in a reward pool with any on-chain purchase being eligible for a reward.

With Fluid Assets, yield is gained through utility. More transactions equal more yield, over time.

Existing decentralised finance incentivises leaving interest-bearing products ”idle” — sitting in an account accruing interest. Through wrapping a variety of assets with Fluid functionalities, we effectively grant utility to what would otherwise be stagnant tokens. This has the added benefit of composability and a change in how we interact with blockchain payments as a whole.

Fluidity Testnet Beta v1

When using the Fluidity web app (https:/ropsten.beta.fluidity.money) for the first time you need to make sure you are using the Ethereum Ropsten test network and have the following:

A MetaMask wallet to interface with the Beta.

Have funded your wallet with sufficient Ropsten Testnet ETH.

Have funded your wallet with sufficient Ropsten Testnet ƒUSDT.

Other users or wallet addresses to send your fluid assets to and receive from.

(Looking for other fluiders to transact with? Why not check out our Discord!)

Within this beta, you will be able to interact with a myriad of utilities that you should expect to see in the final version of the Fluidity protocol, however, there are certain features that are not in the current version of the beta, including things such as interactions that have dependencies on the FLUID governance token as well as the correspondent heightened reward probability that a user has by holding said token.

You will be able to:

Swap base assets for fluid assets and vice-versa (between USDT to ƒUSDT).

Follow the Reward Pool as it increases, and Prize Board winners in the dashboard as the rewards get distributed to the various Fluiders participating in the beta.

Have an overview of your account balance.

Send and Receive fluid assets.

Visualize your send and transaction history.

Get (testnet) rewarded for sending and receiving Fluid Assets!

We recommend that you follow the guide below to have the best experience and be able to provide the best possible feedback so that we are able to continually improve your interaction with the Fluidity protocol and its applications!

Guide to using the Fluidity Testnet Beta:

Selecting the Right Network

Firstly, you will have to connect to the Ethereum Ropsten testnet network, so in case you are unable to select that network from the MetaMask drop down, please follow the instructions laid out below to participate.

Step 1) Connecting to the Ethreum Ropsten Test Network

Open your MetaMask wallet and click on the network button on the top and then scroll down until ‘Ropsten Test Network’ is visible. If you are able to select the Ropsten Test Network options, please do so and go to Step 2, else please follow the remaining of Step 1 below.

If you have the Ropsten Test Network selected! Follow on to Step 2.

Step 1a)

Click on the circle icon on the top right corner, the My Accounts menu will appear.

Click on the Settings button.

Click on Advanced, in order to go to advanced settings.

Step 1b)

Scroll to the bottom of the Advanced Settings menu, and activate the

Show test networks option by clicking on the toggle (Blue toggle means Active)

You should now be able to click on the network button on the top and then scroll down until ‘Ropsten Test Network’ is visible.

Select Ropsten and proceed to Step 2.

Step 2) Obtaining Ropsten Test ETH

Great! Now you are on the Ropsten Testnet! The next step is to obtain test ETH to use on the Ropsten Test Network.

You can obtain test ETH from either of the following Ropsten ETH Faucets:

Test Ether Faucet

Metamask Faucet faucet.metamask.io

Ropsten Ethereum (rETH) Faucet

Ethereum Faucet - Ropsten

faucet.dimensions.network

Step 3) Obtaining Fluid USDT (ƒUSDT)!

There are several ways to obtain Fluid Assets:

You are also able to mint your own (follow Step 6)

Swapping Fluid assets in Uniswap on Ropsten (follow Step 7)

However…

The easiest way to obtain Fluid Assets and start participating in the Testnet beta is by using the Fluidity Faucet! (faucet.fluidity.money)

Simply put your Ropsten Ethereum address and click on Request Funds.

You will be redirected to Twitter and prompted to share a special post created by our team!

Once you have posted your tweet, you will be informed of the successful transaction and receive your 10 ƒUSDT on your MetaMask!

Step 4) Adding USDT and ƒUSDT Token address into MetaMask

Under the assets tab scroll down to the bottom until you see “Import Tokens”

Under “Token Contract Address” enter the USDT address: 0x110a13fc3efe6a245b50102d2d79b3e76125ae83

You can also add the ƒUSDT token address:

0x26fc224b37952bd12c792425f242e0b0a55453a6

(The remaining details of the token should be automatically added)

Click “Add Custom Token”.

Once the following screen appears, click “Import Token”

You should now be able to see your USDT token wallet balance on MetaMask!

Step 5)

(OPTIONAL — If you want more Fluid Assets to play with!

Else skip to step 6 to start using Fluidity!)

Great! Now let’s get you some test USDT to play with! While still under Rospten Testnet head over to Compound Finance.

Click on “Tether” in the Supply Market (left) section of the website

A pop-up should appear.

Click on the Withdraw tab.

At the bottom, you will notice a Faucet button.

Simply click on it to open up your MetaMask with the transaction information.

Follow the MetaMask transaction prompts and confirm the transaction.

You will soon receive your Ropsten USDT Tokens!

Step 6) You’re ready to get Fluid!

You are all set! To wrap your USDT simply use our DAPP like you would a Decentralized Exchange. Enter the amount of USDT you want to convert to ƒUSDT and click “Fluidify your money”. You are now free to send your ƒUSDT to other beta testers. Try to send it as many times as you can and watch out for a reward! Note: If you are looking for wallets to send to check out our Discord and check out the “wallet-addresses” section under “TESTNET” to see other participants.

Following your experience, please fill out the survey in the link below to give us as much feedback as possible!

Fluidity Wispform

Let us know how your experience with the Fluidity Testnet Beta went!

fluidity.wispform.com

Thank you for taking part in our Testnet! We are all very excited for the future of the Fluidity Ecosystem, so please stay tuned for the coming updates!

Step 7) UNISWAP! Swapping your Fluid Assets

You can swap Fluid Assets on Uniswap on Ropsten!

Make sure your MetaMask is on Ropsten.

Go to the following Uniswap website.

Press Import Currency (ƒUSDT).

In the Secondary Swap Currency search for USDT.

Import USDT ( 0x110a13fc3efe6a245b50102d2d79b3e76125ae83 )

You can now swap between ƒUSDT and USDT. Make sure to approve the tokens before you swap.

Watch as you earn yield when you trade on Uniswap. Pro Move: If you create your own Fluid trading pairs ( ƒUSDT-ETH?), let us know.

Thank you once again for participating, make sure to drop by the Discord to share your feedback and discuss with others about Fluidity. Make sure to send Fluid Assets to other members in the Discord.

About Fluidity

Fluidity is building assets and stablecoins that reward users when they use them. Imagine trading on an exchange or paying back a friend and winning a life-changing amount.

Stay Fluid!

BONUS

Fluid Ecosystem here I come!

One reason why we have been a bit quieter on this front was our December push to 100 Talent Tokens launched. We exceeded that goal and by now, Talent Protocol counts over 170 Talent Tokens and continues growing daily. We are also showcasing the latest talent published on the platform in our Discover Weekly series. You can find the first two editions here and here.

Furthermore, we are working on an interview series with talent to highlight some of the diverse profiles on Talent Protocol. The first drafts are ready, so expect an update soon!

We have a few aces up our sleeve to become number one as soon as possible, but make sure to share Talent Protocol with others and sign up to the waitlist, as the Protocol becomes more public.

Talent Protocol gets a facelift

A new vision for our Community

Team Changes

With the changes in the community approach, there are also changes in our Core Team: our CTO Andreas and Community & Content Lead Ivan are stepping down from their positions for personal reasons. Both have been instrumental in getting Talent Protocol to where it is today and will remain a part of the community in other roles. Thank you Andreas and Ivan!

But there are new people joining the team: Isabella will be our new Community Lead and we are working on onboarding one of the talent profiles as new Full-Stack Developer. Fingers crossed and excited to onboard Isabella in the coming weeks!

Our soon-to-join team member

Community Calls

In case you missed our last community call, where we presented the vision and our marketing and product plans for the first half of 2022, you can find the recording below. You can also download the presentation used in the call here.

We are also happy to announce our next Community Call on February 26 at 6 PM GMT. We will:

Partnerships

We already have a full pipeline, but please do not hesitate to forward potential partners (or potential talent) you think would be a good fit.

That is all folks, don’t forget to sign up for our Community Call, and we will see you there. Let’s do this

For Season 2, we will also start working with partners that can introduce high-potential talent to Talent Protocol. Ambitious, adventurous people with a good level of English are the perfect fit for this early stage of Talent Protocol, and partner organizations that can recommend such talent will be rewarded .

Answer your questions regarding all of the above

Have a fireside chat with a few talent profiles

Deliver about product, community, and tokenomics

Address our progress in executing Season 2 plans

With the community growing quickly, we felt the need to overhaul our community structure and how you can contribute to Talent Protocol. With the upcoming Season 2, Talent Protocol will be featuring NFT badges, more opportunities to contribute, and member levels . Our CMO Filipe did an outstanding job connecting all the loose ends, and you can check out the full vision here.

On the product end, Talent Protocol has made strides by removing a few critical bugs, smoothing the onboarding process, and introducing a dark mode. We recorded a short Loom to give you a sneak peek, but you will receive a longer and more detailed explanation by our CPO Francisco before the next Community Call. Keep reading

Talent Protocol is still in Private Beta, but we have been gradually opening up the platform to people on the waitlist. With all the Talent Tokens on the platform, supporters already have their pick whom they want to support, and it has shown in the Total Value Locked in the platform, or TVL . Talent Protocol recently surpassed the 200K mark and is the second-fastest-growing protocol on Celo!

TVL: 200K+Tokens live: 170+No, we haven’t forgotten about you, it has just been an insanely busy few weeks, so our latest Talent Tally is extra-packed! Let’s dive right in gm everyone,

This week has been nothing short of amazing. We launched our Sekuritance Portal and announced some interesting partnerships. We’re very grateful that all the hard work is paying off.

Let’s take a look at our top updates this week.

$SKRT tokens Airdopped

This week, we announced that the $SKRT tokens for our AdopterClub members were been airdropped on the Polygon network!

$SKRT Portal Launch

We’re ecstatic to have launched our Sekuritance Platform, opening up the portal’s ecosystem for users to perform identity management, regulatory compliance, KYC, KYB, AML and Onchain Analysis checks using crypto as a payment method. Get to know more about it here.

We Partnered up with Axion Network

We are glad to announce our partnership with Axion. This partnership will support the Axion Launch initiative through the Sekuritance platform by integrating features from the Sekur.Suite via its KYC and AML verification engine for its user-base. Learn more about it here.

GainPool Partnership

This week, we also partnered up with GainPool. They will be making use of our RegTech solutions, such as in-depth on-chain analysis and advanced KYC & AML checks as a way of complying with local and international requirements when launching projects. Find all the information here.

SKRT Moon Launch NFT

To inaugurate the launch of our new RegTech functionality on the SKRT platform we are putting out our next NFT giving the owner unique access. You can find it on OpenSea.io.

Legion Network Partnership

We’ve partnered up with Legion Network, the first super Blockchain ecosystem that combines the best services of the industry into one Super App. Legion is doing an IDO w/ Sekuritance as their Compliance Partner on Feb 17, 2022, 14:00 UTC! Contributing currencies will be in the form of USDT ERC-20, USDC ERC-20 and BUSD. The IDO will be occurring on the new Sekuritance Portal. Get to know more about it here.

NFTs and the Dangers of Financial Risks

For our first blog post, we looked at how NFT platforms tend to show a reluctance to address problems that a lack of regulation can present. It is down to other technology platforms to pick up the slack. Developing tighter protocols and more comprehensive AML and KYC requirements can help protect people from these risks. Read more about it here.

Understanding CBDCs and the Need for Regulation

Central Bank Digital Currencies are digital tokens, similar to cryptocurrency, that are issued by a country’s central bank and is tied to the fiat currency of that country.

Many countries are developing CBDCs, and some have even implemented them into their financial systems. Because so many countries are researching ways to transition to digital currencies. As with any shift into a new paradigm, there are inherent risks that need to be considered. One of the bigger sticking points is the centralisation of CBDCs, which could amplify cyber vulnerabilities already connected to fiat currencies and increase the pints of failure and vectors to attack. Get to know more about this in our latest blog post.

About Sekuritance

The Sekuritance RegTech platform provides a single platform for every eGRC need, including end-to-end AML/CTF, CECL, FCPA, vendor management, beneficiary onboarding, investor check, card processing MFA checks, blockchain wallet checks, cyber-risk assessments, and other RegTech or Business Process Management requirements.

Crypto Twitter has always be the powerhouse of crypto and Web3. Running Learn2Earn campaigns on Twitter has the potential to reach and educate millions of people. From now on, KnoxEdge DAO will run weekly Learn2Earn competitions on Twitter on top of KnoxMarket.

Below is the format of KnoxEdge weekly Learn2Earn competitions:

Place: Twitter

Duration: Weekly (Learn2Earn topic starts on Monday and ends on Sunday)

How to participate: Type a thread related to the Learn2Earn topic

Rewards: $50 each to top 10 participants with the highest likes + RT

Example:

Please use this exact format for your first tweet of the thread:

Topic: "XXX?"

Wallet: xxx.nom

Example of how your Learn2Earn Twitter thread should look like

Why are we doing this?

Since our new rebase tokenomics rolled out in December 2021, KNX token price has stabilized near its DAO treasury book value peg. If you don’t know how it works, here is a short summary of how KNX rebasing works:

When KNX price < book value, negative rebase happens. When KNX price > book value, positive rebase happens

However, in the past 2 months, KNX market price didn’t manage to rise above book value mainly because of stagnant user growth. KNX market price rising above book value will be a sign of growth. The solution to this bottleneck is straight forward: attract new users.

Therefore, to encourage more users to Learn2Earn, running Learn2Earn competitions on Crypto Twitter is a no-brainer.

New Learn2Earn Rewards

Ser, where does the $500/week come from?

The $500 comes from our 60,000 USDC in KnoxFund. There is a $60,000 buy wall on Uniswap (Polygon) to buy back KNX for Learn2Earn rewards: https://info.uniswap.org/#/polygon/tokens/0xd86b7e7e330631cb2973a3cf4395de4889ea8c9a.

Wow Ser, does this mean that there will be constant buyback pressure on KNX?

Since the buy wall on Uniswap is a “limit order”, it will absorb any KNX market sell with 0 slippage.

Wow Ser, how long can this last?

We have 60,000 USDC allocated to this. 60,000 USDC/500 USDC = 120 weeks.

How will Twitter Learn2Earn campaign generate revenue?

In the future, we will require participants to hold a certain number of KNX tokens in their .nom wallet to qualify.

Ser, how about Knoxer NFTs and weekly CELO airdrops?

It is coming in mid February. Top Learn2Earn users will receive Knoxer NFTs. Knoxer holders will receive weekly CELO airdrops. The CELO rewards come from KnoxFund: KnoxFund liquidated SOS into ETH to swap into CELO. We hope to partner with Celo Foundation #DeFiForthePeople initiative when we run out of CELO to distribute.

SOS to ETH: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xdc210a459d7d714ba384498c41371d240abe0b1972bd84122afb8dd4d5fb5716

ETH to CELO: https://explorer.celo.org/tx/0x980e97a3eb9f18e021c310430a1419d13ee13a13ec75ec1da1648c0a7d31c329/token-transfers

My thread

Please like + RT this tweet so I can win $50 Learn2Earn rewards

GM Celorians, I'm participating in this week's @KnoxEdgeDAO #Learn2EarnwithKnox competition!

Introduction to CELL Protocol

CELL is a privacy computing platform built on Non-Interactive Poof of Liveness (NIPoL) and Proof of Stake consensus mechanism (PoS), which can also build a decentralized heterogeneous cross-chain channel.

Why CELL?

The CELL network is a decentralized, highly secure, and strongly private open network. The main decentralized cross-chain platform enables anyone to freely participate in building decentralized cross-chain channels using idle devices through a fair proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and a non-interactive proof-of-survival mechanism, supporting stable, efficient as well as low-cost connections to assets in heterogeneous chains.

Design Goal

The goal is to design a cross-chain system that supports heterogeneous chains and has better compatibility than existing homogeneous cross- chains. The most famous homogeneous cross-chain is Polkadot, which targets asset and message cross-chaining, so the system is very complex and not easy to engineer. Asset cross-chaining is called teleportation on Polkadot, meaning that assets are destroyed at one end and mint at the other. The asset cross-chaining covered in CELL is different from Polkadot and is called mapping, meaning that the assets are locked at one end and minted at the other, as if a copy is replicated on another chain.

What is distributed private key management?

CELL uses a distributed private key management model. The asset mapping we mentioned earlier is essentially locking the assets, who manages the private key of the locked account? This is something we need to focus on, because whoever holds that account is in control of the cross- chain assets. There are many solutions to this problem, such as the use of multiple signatures, threshold signatures, and at the heart of this lies the trust mechanism of trusted committees (trusted third parties). If the choice of committees is too centralised, then there is a low cost of joint mischief and not enough decentralisation.

Then ensuring that the committee is chosen randomly, secure and fault- tolerant is key to the whole system. We refer to the collective that manages the cross-chain accounts as the holding committee. When the base of the committee is large enough, the holding selection is random enough, and the rights of the holding members are securely transferable, it can be considered to achieve a system that satisfies decentrality and is a highly available and secure cross-chain system.

The security of the committee involves computational security and storage security, computational security is guaranteed by the MPC algorithm, that is, during the computation, no node will get the complete private key, and storage security is guaranteed by the sealing of the TEE. Intel SGX provides two policies for encryption keys: MRENCLAVE (enclave identification) and MRSIGNER (signature identification). The Intel SGX provides two policies for encryption keys: MRENCLAVE and MRSIGNER.

The MPC protocol allows a set of parties to interact with each other in several rounds of communication to compute a function f and learn the output y = f(x1, x2, …, xn), where xi is the input to party i0. In this way, even if up to t parties are malicious (for some conspiracy tolerance t); they cannot learn the inputs of the other parties, i.e., they are kept secret.

CELL is roughly divided into two subsystems, the chain and the committee. The chain is responsible for producing blocks that can yield random numbers and all data is open and transparent, a distributed ledger. The committee is made up of devices with trusted hardware that provide distributed private key management services.

A key idea in designing the system, TEE, MPC, and blockchain have complementary properties. First, the blockchain is multi-copy and guarantees availability and persistence of state, whereas TEE does not guarantee availability (because hosts can terminate TEE on their own), nor does it provide reliable access to the network or persistent storage. Second, blockchains have very limited computational power because of consensus constraints that require all nodes to agree on state, whereas TEE incurs little overhead compared to native computation and provides trusted computation through remote authentication (off-chain computation). Further, blockchain is an open and transparent ledger and does not have the privacy of collaborative computation, while MPC protocol does not disclose any party’s input during computation and guarantees the privacy of node input, so it seems logical to use these three to construct a distributed private key management system.

However, integrating TEE with MPC and blockchain is a challenge. When the three are merging, subtle mistakes can occur. Several challenges are listed below.

The issue of the environment in which the commissioner node is running. Not limited to proving that the non-trusted environment, the committee logic is running in sgx and the code has not been tampered with.

Randomness in the selection of member nodes maximizes the cost of nodes to do evil.

Storage validity of the member node, proving that the individual’s private key fragment file is saved or removed as required.

Availability of the commissioner node, proving that the service to be linked is in SGX and preventing witch attacks.

Scalability of commissioner nodes, considering TEE code upgrades.

In the next parts we will touch on important topics, so stay with us and subscribe to our social networks so as not to miss anything!

In December we announced our liquidity migration event on 6 protocols and a timeline for conducting the migration.

By announcing the migration date, we indirectly announced the mainnet launch of the Enso platform. Driven by ambition and excitement for the public launch of the Enso platform, we failed to incorporate sufficient timeline buffers for unforeseen bugs prior to deployment.

With the Enso platform, we aspire to provide a social trading application for DeFi natives. To build a platform for the decade to come and to cover social trading for all DeFi and L1 coins involves certain security risks if deployed without proper security measures in place.

In favour of a security-first approach, we are announcing the extension of the liquidity migration event, and to reschedule the Enso mainnet launch. Our multi-step approach for a safer deployment is as follows:

Make contracts public

Publish audit from Chainsecurity

Bug bounty #1

Bug bounty #2

Testnet of Enso

Deploy Enso mainnet for public use

Migrate funds from Vampire Attack to Enso mainnet

Security is one of the key pillars for the success of the Enso platform, and vital for building trust within the community. We have demonstrated ongoing transparency with the community through various blog articles and provided explanations for decisions that were made. The decision to extend the liquidity migration event and subsequently postpone the launch of the Enso platform was not made lightly, however, it’s in the projects and ultimately users best interest, to take a security-first launch approach.

By rescheduling the time of the launch, rewards for participants in the liquidity migration event will be extended as well. NFTs will remain mintable and users who stick around for the whole journey aren’t going unnoticed.

We hope that the community understands the rationale behind targeting a later date for the migration based upon a security-first launch. No stone should be left unturned that could potentially result in any vulnerabilities being uncovered prior to deployment on mainnet. Audits, as well as internal testing, provide a greater certainty that vulnerabilities have been uncovered, however, even if all risk mitigation measures are being considered, never result in a 100% closure ratio. A great example of opening the contracts prior to mainnet deployment is Andre Cronje’s Solidly project where users are able to understand how the protocol works and report any potential bugs prior to deployment. We are taking the same approach here.

We have extended the staking timeline inside of LiquidityMigrationV2 to April 19th, 2022 — National Garlic Day. By extending the staking timeline, migration can occur no earlier than Tuesday, 19 April 2022 at 14:00 CET, allowing staking to occur up until this time. We plan on releasing Enso V1 prior to this date to enable the community to use it in beta version, understand the application, and provide feedback based upon the current version prior to the migration occurring.

This approach is a collaborative effort and we want to launch Enso together with all of you as a community.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER

This article is neither an offer of nor marketing material for financial instruments or financial services. Enso Finance is not regulated under any financial market laws in any jurisdiction. It is only the developer and provider of the ENSO platform and protocol. Due to its decentralized nature, the ENSO platform and protocol is neither controlled nor operated by Enso Finance. Enso Finance is neither providing financial services nor offering financial instruments. Any liability is excluded to the extent permitted by applicable law.

To celebrate the upcoming launch of the Public Testnet and the successful conclusion of the Seed Round led by Animoca Brands and Spartan Group, Chain of Alliance is giving away a total of 5000 USDT among 200 lucky winners!

Winners will be selected automatically through a lottery. In order to participate, users must complete the following steps (all information, screenshots, and proof are submitted in the Google Form referenced in the last step):

Follow us on Twitter and provide us with your Twitter username and a screenshot as proof that you have followed our account

Like and Retweet our Twitter Announcement.

Provide us with a screenshot as proof that you have liked and retweeted the announcement.

Comment on the original CoA announcement tweet with #CoA and tag 3 friends.

Join our Discord and make sure to gain your role as an Esquire by clicking on the cross-sword in the pledge-of-allegiance channel. Provide your Discord username.

Create your unique Discord invite link and use it to recruit 3 friends to join the Discord server. Make sure that your friends have also pledged their allegiance. Provide your unique invite link.

Provide an Ethereum/Binance Smart Chain address

Fill out the Google Form with the above information: https://forms.gle/81nUiUMpdsHVX7Wt5

Users who have completed all of the above steps will be eligible for the lottery which will be held from 02–01–2022 5 PM UTC to 02–10–2022 5 PM UTC. The prize distribution is outlined in the following table.

This giveaway is an important first step in spreading the word about Chain of Alliance and building a solid group of players for the testnet version which will be released in the near future. Thank you for being an early member of our community, and good luck with the giveaway!

1 Introduction

Fusotao is a set of network protocols which are composed of either a rule of data consistency or some certain constraints of data modification including not only a transfer constraint but also a matching verification rule. The matching verification sub-protocol, a.k.a Proof of Matching, is the main difference from other blockchains.

2 Matching System

Before start introducing Fusotao Protocol, let’s take a look at the matching system and consider why a matcher’s outputs should be verified. Matching system is a trading platform that allows users to price orders. The core component of a matching system is a data structure named orderbook which stores all orders that are according to the price and time, and a placed order must follow the sequence to trade if the price meets, while the owner of an order would be ignored. Usually, in order to trade on a matching system, users may hand over their account ownership so that the matcher can mutate the accounts, in another word, trading on matchers should reply on human trust.

Any data modifications should obey the rules below:

Rule 1 Mutable data should not be shared, and shared data should be immutable.

Rule 2 There should be only one associated mutator once data shared.

Compared to the transfer transaction, the matcher, as a mutator, must modify the orderbook’s state for each order rather than just update the states of sender and receiver. Therefore, a matching system is a strict serial system which can be represented by the following procedure:

Consider an order placed. Let x be a price, y be an amount, (xi , yi) be the ith maker by the order of price and time.

where：

Blockchain is another typical serial system whose key rule is determining the order of all accepted incoming transactions. E.g. the Bitcoin network uses PoW algorithm and the Longest Chain Rule to ensure the global unique sequence of transactions. It seems natural to build a matching system on-chain just like a plain transfer function did. However, unfortunately, due to the limitation of block capacity and high latency, it is not straightforward to do it so.

Ideally, to implement a matching system on-chain, an order must occupy 73 bytes at least:

where:

Imagine there are tens of thousands of orders in a single orderbook, it is not acceptable to store all orders in the blockchain state machine, but only keeping some essential data to validate the matching results is possible. In the next section, we will introduce how to validate the matching results without holding the entire orderbook.

3 Global States

Sparse Merkle Tree is a full binary hash tree with fixed-depth which can be used for checking if there is a node that belongs to a certain tree. A node of Sparse Merkle Tree can be represented by the following expressions:

where：

The capacity of a Sparse Merkle Tree depends on the hash function of the tree, e.g. a Sparse Merkle Tree using Sha256 has 2256 leaf nodes with height=256(root excluded). Given a data v, we can simply verify whether it belongs to a certain tree by calculating hei g ht −1 times hash function:

It is quite simple for validators, but it is not good for provers. Storing all 2257 (intermediate nodes included) nodes is unpractical for any storage system. Considering the distribution of a real Sparse Merkle Tree, most of the leaf nodes are empty, so are the intermediate nodes, that’s why we call it sparse. In an empty plain Sparse Merkle Tree, a node at height h has a certain value:

To avoid pre-calculate hash for each height, we can redefine the hash function like below:

For data updates, once a leaf node is inserted, the nodes along the path would be updated until root. Since we have the first optimization, we can infer that there will be a mount of redundant nodes along the path which can be omitted. E.g. when inserting a single node n with key=0xff..ff, value=v into an empty Sparse Merkle Tree, the parent node of n whose key is 0x7f..ff would be value=v either, so are the rest of the nodes along the path. Thus, we can define the structure of nodes to store the entire tree into an available storage:

Back to the matching procedure, since we’ve done an optimized Sparse Merkle Tree so can encode the orderbook into it and only store the root hash on-chain and leave the entire tree to matchers. Once a matcher executes the ith event off-chain and proves it by submitting some digests at i − 1th, a validator can simply verify the results like above.

Fusotao defines 2 types of key as the leaf keys of Sparse Merkle Tree:

where：

There are no leaf nodes for encoding orders, instead, the sum of the orderbook’s size is enough for validators except the condition that the matcher doesn’t pick the best makers. In the further future, we may add the best price to each orderbook node to get rid of this. A matcher has a specific global state at the ith event which can be verified by the leaf values:

where：

4 Proof of Matching

Given a user-signed event Ei and some Merkle paths P(i−1,j) at i −1, a validator can verify it using a matching procedure with well-known root hash Si−1 stored on-chain:

A matcher must maintain a Sparse Merkle Tree and update it every time after the event is applied. Let (x, y) be an ask-limit order’s price and amount of symbol (b/q) as the ith event, (xj , y j) be the jth maker exists at i − 1, then the proof generated by matcher would be (Fee not included):

Once verified, the accounts can be mutated and updated the root hash stored on-chain to Si .

5 Substrate Implementation & Cross-Chain

As an abstract protocol, PoM can either be built on existing blockchains as a series of contracts or run as an independent network. Considering the gas fee and latency, we decide to implement Fusotao protocol over Substrate as a permissionless network that permits submitting proofs with zero-cost and low-latency. In this scenario, Fusotao network acts as a decentralized infrastructure rather than a specific DEX. Thus, users may not handle over their account’s ownership to a matcher but just authorize the mutation rights. Substrate is a complete blockchain framework with a set of built-in tools including Level DB storage, libp2p communication, etc. Especially, the cryptography of Substrate is fully retained in Fusotao runtime which makes it much reliable. Therefore, the Sr25519 (Schnorrkel/Ristretto x25519) keys for user signature and Ed25519 keys for node signature used in other Substrate-based networks can be recognized in Fusotao network by changing the first type byte of ss58check address to constant 42. The acceptable Fusotao ss58check address format is shown below:

The Fusotao runtime provides a set of core APIs about PoM:

As an isolated network, it is necessary to bring existing assets to Fusotao. Inspired by NEAR Rainbow Bridge, Fusotao provides a trustless component bridging to NEAR mainnet called Avatar Messenger. Avatar Messenger consists of a contract deployed on NEAR network as a light client of Fusotao, a built-in pallet integrated in Fusotao runtime, and a relayer holding key pairs of Fusotao and NEAR. Fortunately, NEAR and Substrate both support Ed25519 signed block, bridging to NEAR is much easier than bridging to Ethereum. Because a finalized block will always be within the canonical chain, which means both clients do not need worry about the chain fork, and the relayer doesn’t have to submit all blocks.