TL;DR:
- Starting Oct 1st 2020 fresh new POAPs are born on the xDai network blockchain.
- A bridge for collectors to move the POAPs to the Ethereum mainnet is going to be released soon.
- One dollar is enough for 5000 POAP mints. This means cost is no longer a barrier to have POAP in your events.
- All dapps in the POAP ecosystem (POAP.vote, POAP.chat, POAP.fun, POAP.gallery, POAP.delivery, POAP wallets) will work seamlessly.
Scaling POAP
We present POAP as an experiment in the field of applied cryptography.
It was clear since the beginning the core value proposition of POAP couldn’t be achieved if the minting of every token had a cost of over five cents of a dollar. Although it was not sustainable in the long term, we decided to subsidize the mining fees and other costs to test and validate the core concepts.
Several highly satisfying experiments were conducted and now we are ready to make the next big step forward. Starting in November we will be on boarding issuers of POAP and exploring new use cases. Anyone who runs blockchain-related events should get in touch with us (see bottom of this article).
How is the scaling happening?
A rigorous process was conducted before opting for the xDai network, based on the following principles:
Critical needs:
- Very low operating costs
- No vendor lock-in
- Easy to understand tech
- EVM compatible
- Production ready
Lesser concerns
- Immutability
- Censorship resistance
- Data availability
- Composability
Nice to haves:
- Integration with infrastructure providers like The Graph and others.
- Wallet compatibility
- NFT-friendly ecosystem
We analyzed every submission to the The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off and the conditions of xdai in the context of our needs were unparalleled. No other scaling solution came nowhere near to fit our needs the way we wanted them to be fit.
The final architecture that was established is based on minting fresh POAPs on xdai and offering the collectors transferring them to mainnet if they please. The transfer to mainnet could be executed on the same tx the POAP is born or at any point in the future.
The actual deployment on xdai is happening in phases:
- Deploying the proxy contract on xdai at the same address of mainnet. This took quite an effort but facilitates administrative tasks. DONE.
- Stopping the minting of new POAPs on mainnet so token-id’s don’t keep incrementing. Transfers remain functional. DONE.
- Enabling minting of new POAPs on the xdai smart contract starting from the last ID of mainnet. DONE.
- Preparing all the API endpoints and dapps to fetch POAP collections from both networks. WORK IN PROGRESS.
- Minting on xdai the +5000 POAPs that we are withholding since the gas prices surged. WORK IN PROGRESS
- Upgrading the mainnet contract to have to ability to mint new POAPs with an arbitrary token-ID. SPECCED.
- Creating the trust-minimized connector to migrate POAPs from L2 to L1. SPECCED.
- Adding the functionality to allow seamless minting in L2 and transfer to L1 on the redemption process. SPECCED
Final words
We are very grateful for all the work Igor Barinov (POA) has done to make this possible. Ethereum+xdai are arguably the best networks for POAP to keep conducting its experimentation however it’s important to be alert and aware that change is the only constant.
