TATCH 👻: tclGulden recap and details 🏴‍☠️

7 min readJan 30, 2019

1. Quick summary

A few months ago we introduced ‘tclgulden’.

However, Gulden pairs on Bitshares platform did not prove to be reliable enough, forcing us to freeze this topic until we could come up with a gulden bridge/gateway of our own. The aim is to make it 60% cheaper than market benchmark at 0,10% fee per transaction.

You will find an overview of our gateways by reading this article.

Now that they have been tested and backed-up to our satisfaction, we can resume our tclgulden introduction without depending on a 3rd party.

If you have been following us for some time or if you are familiar with Gulden, PoW2, Witnessing and just want to know more about ‘tclgulden’: please jump to point 5.

Prerequisites:

You need to understand what Gulden is and how PoW2, its trust-less consensus, works. If it is not the case please refer to official sources here:

We strongly encourage anyone with blockchain interest to read the Pow2 White Paper in depth, as it has profound implications for the Gulden blockchain consensus and how it works. You will notice that it vastly improves security whilst reducing the minimal number of confirmations required for a valid transaction. When fully implemented it should allow for transaction with 0 confirmations and that is pretty cool !

2. Gulden witnessing formula

Broadly speaking, Gulden consensus works using both a Proof-of-Work and an hybrid Proof-of-Stake (called Proof-of-Witnessing; hence the name PoW2). New blocks are produced every 150 secondes. For each block a 100 NLG reward is shared between miners (80 NLG) and witnesses (20 NLG).

In order to participate as a witness you only need 3 things:

A wallet that is 24/7 connected
Some Gulden to ‘stake’: at least 5000–10000 NLG)
Select a locking period: from 1 month to 3 years)

From those 3 things, you will be attribute a ‘witness weight’ value. The closer that value is to 1% of the total witnessing weight of the network, the better your ROI (on a YoY basis).

To get a better idea, have a look at Dactual (an independant Gulden Explorer) Witnessing Calculator.

This calculator appears to be more accurate than the one provided in Gulden Wallet as it takes into account Witnesses in ‘cooldown period’. These are witnesses who recently collected a reward and as such have stopped participating as witnesses for a short period of time.

3. How to witness Gulden ?

With your own device: computer, server, VPS, Raspberry-Pi (check out https://guldenstore.eu, https://www.gulden-shop.nl, etc)
With a ‘Witnessing as a service’ like G-dash cloud (https://cloud.g-dash.nl for instance)
Or through tclgulden by simply owning some tclgulden tokens.

4. All Witnessing accounts are not created equals

Once you have play around with a Gulden Witnessing Calculator you will quickly notice a few facts:

If you are not willing to commit a large Gulden amount into witnessing and/or locked them for a large period of time; your potential reward drops significantly… As you can see from the picture below some small accounts have been running for a large period with little or no rewards:

It is even worse if you take into account inflation of the total Gulden supply. It stands now at 484 millions Gulden and it is considered to grow to about 1,680 millions Gulden over the next 60 years

About 57.000 NLG are added everyday in order to reward both miners and witnesses who are keeping the network running. That figure is close to an additional 21 millions Gulden yearly, equivalent to a 4,4% inflation rate…

In order for your witnessing account to compensate that rate, you need at least 110.000 NLG locked for a year or 30.000 NLG locked for two:

Note of Interest: Gulden natively incorporates ‘advanced features’ that mitigate those drawbacks (starting from phase 4 of PoW2 implementation). Namely you’ll be able to either split a witnessing accounts and/or merge smaller accounts into one. However, the latter will only work if and when both accounts have been created using the same block ! Small detail that many overlooked or perhaps failed to notice.

5. tclgulden: about filling a gap

Now what if, just like miners ‘pooling’ their hashrate power together, you would pool Gulden together to set witnessing accounts with ‘optimal’ witnessing weight, i.e. as close as possible to 1% of the total network witnessing weight ?

This makes Return on Investment (ROI) much more attractive:

That’s precisely the value proposition of tclgulden:

Instead of locking your own Gulden for a fixed period of time and witness yourself (on an RPI or other device) or even have your witnesskeys running on a cloudservice (like G-Dash Cloud); you can take a “share” in Tatch Capital Gulden Witnessing Pool: That is exactly what tclgulden token is all about !

It grants you a much higher ROI by allowing you to participate in a pool of witnessing accounts where the witness network weight is as close as possible to 1% of the global witnessing weight !

To participate, simply exchange your own NLG for tclgulden and is all there is to it. With these tclgulden you now participate in the Tatch Capital witnessing pool. No hassle, everything is managed for you.

When you wish to withdraw, simply exchange your tclgulden back for NLG (or any others asset available on Bitshares DEX). You are not bound by any fixed locked-in period.

6. Modalities

tclgulden is currently beeing set up in 2 phases:

Distribution phase

A large initial supply of tclgulden has been issued and are tradable against Gulden here (if you are not familiar with Bitshares Dex, have a look on this article). All witnessing accounts from the Tatch Capital pool will be locked indefinitly (once the locking period ends, they will be put back into witnessing for the longest available period).

Distribution phase will ends on March 14th 2019 (Pi day). This means that on that day all tclgulden not sold will provably be destroyed (burn) and not one more will be created henceforth.

Running phase

On that day, once the maximum supply of tclgulden will have been set, 95% of witnessing rewards from the pool will be used to set buy orders on the tclgulden/nlg pair. The remaining 5% of rewards will be part of Tatch Capital’s income stream, same cost as other ‘witnessing as a service’ suppliers.

All tclgulden bought from those buyback orders will, once again, be provable destroyed (burned); mechanically reducing total supply of tclgulden. Yet leaving the pool of witnessing accounts untouched.

This BuyBack and Burn policy applied to witnessing will therefore increase the value of tclgulden in term of NLG.

Following screenshot illustrates BBB (buyback and burn) schedule apply on imaginary 10 millions tclgulden total supply:

As you can see tclgulden/nlg buyback pricing increases by steps of 1% as quicly as total supply of tclgulden decreases of 1%.

Reasons for this is to set a ‘fair-pricing’ . This way even if you didn’t trade NLG for tclgulden during the distribution phase your ROI remains the same even if you enter afterwards.

Transaction Fees

tclgulden has a 1% trading fee that goes directly toward TatchCoin holders. It serves two purposes:

Favour TatchCoin holders, for who tclgulden is primarily intended.
Discourage equivalent of “pool jumping”; or in current case: prevent traders to get in and out around time when buyback orders are put into place.

7. TL;DR — Recap’

Pros:

Same ROI for all tclgulden holders, as close as possible to maximum ROI available on a YoY basis and regardless of any minimal amount.
No locking period, tclgulden are tradable freely
‘Hassle-free’: no need for hardware, 24/7 connectivity, complicated setups, etc
Favor Tatch Capital community members (TatchCoin holders)
Equal opportunity for all rregardless of whether you entered before or after the running phase. People who enter the distribution phase will have a small advantage in terms of time to first buyback orders setup: aka tclgulden/nlg should ‘jump’ on the 14th March 2019).

Cons:

By using tclgulden you trust Tatch Capital to manage the witnessing pool and to apply the buyback and burn policy
By buying tclgulden you actively relinquish ownership of NLG for tclgulden.
tclgulden favors Tatch Capital community members (TatchCoin holders)

Special thanks to Fornax, Paul and others for helping in the making of this article ! 😘

Don’t hesitate to join us on Telegram, upvote, clap, share and/or ask questions in comment section.

Much love,

Cédric

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