Technical Note to the Metronome Community

Thank you for being a part of the Metronome community. Metronome saw a successful Initial Supply Auction and completion of the first Daily Supply Lot, and now is being actively transferred and used.

This technical note provides some education and highlights some potential issues arising from the popularity of the Autonomous Convert Contract (ACC).

1. ACC purchase/sale price is determined by blockchain confirmation order.

Normally, a user will choose to make a conversion based on some data, including price, and then create a blockchain transaction that executes the conversion. Some time passes, normally 15–30 seconds depending on network load, and the Ethereum platform executes (confirms) the transaction.

The amount of MET or ETH received during conversion is determined by the ratio of MET/ETH balances held in the ACC, as described in the Owner’s Manual. Notably, as the balance of one side (ETH or MET) shrinks, it becomes more expensive to further reduce that supply, thus changing the ACC conversion price.

From the ACC’s point of view, transactions are processed on a strictly first-come, first-served basis in blockchain order. “Blockchain order” means that Ethereum (or Ethereum Classic, Qtum, …) miners process the not-yet-in-a-block (unconfirmed) transactions one after another. The order is roughly the order in which they were received, but this is not guaranteed, and transactions may be reordered in the face of higher transaction fees, resulting in an unexpected change in conversion pricing for the reordered transactions. Similarly, during times of high volume on the blockchain, it may take a long time for the network to process a transaction, and therefore the conversion rate may change in the interim.

We are working to add a feature to the Metronome wallet that allows a target price to be set. Developers also may utilize the Metronome blockchain API directly for set a target price.

2. Metronome Wallet refresh delays.

As a result of the Metronome Wallet’s popularity, we are having to increase our server capacity to handle the much-larger-than-expected load. The current infrastructure has been responding slowly to some requests, leading to long (30–60 second) delays in updating the transaction list, or simply some non-fatal errors. Funds remain safe; the impact is strictly limited to the Metronome Wallet display, not the core Metronome system.

Overall, the core Metronome system and Metronome Wallet appear to be operating as expected. The bumps in the road so far have been around early popularity of certain parts of the MET system.