sifchain/rowan

What is ROWAN?

Rowan is both Sifchain’s decentralized governance token and settlement token. Sifchain’s validators can participate in the SifDAO with voting power that is proportional to the amount of Rowan they hold. Rowan is also the settlement token for each liquidity pool in the Sifchain DEX, meaning that each pool contains Rowan as one asset and an external asset as the other. This means that traders swapping two external assets will use ROWAN as a settlement token.

How does Sifchain work?

Sifchain is an application-specific blockchain built on top of the Cosmos SDK and uses Tendermint’s consensus mechanism, which provides finality guarantees. This is an important feature for cross-chain token swaps.

To accomplish cross-chain support, Sifchain uses a concept called Peggy to create a pegged token model. These peg zones are what allow assets to be easily transferred between Sifchain and external chains. This model is described as a 2-way peg (2WP).

Validators and Delegators

Sifchain validators stake their own Rowan and the Rowan that is delegated to them by other Rowan holders. Sifchain’s consensus set consists of the top 100 validators with the highest quantity of Rowan staked. This validator set is refreshed every block. so that the changes to a validator’s total stake and its participation in the set are reflected almost immediately. There is no explicit minimum stake amount required to be a validator on Sifchain, as the amount staked by the lowest validator in the set serves as an implicit minimum.

Any Sifchain user can delegate their tokens to any number of validators on the network. Delegating to a validator entitles the user to gain block rewards by paying a commission fee to the validator. Delegating to a validator does not give that validator direct control over the delegator’s funds. However, the delegator does assume the risk of being slashed if the validator misbehaves.