Creditcoin 2.0
When we initially began the Creditcoin project back in 2017, we concluded that Hyperledger Sawtooth was the best candidate to fulfill our technical requirements and serve as the foundation for our project. With initial contributions by Intel, Sawtooth was a part of Hyperledger, the umbrella project of open-source blockchains started by the Linux Foundation — the project had a good mission, direction and significant momentum behind it at the time.
On April 4th, 2019, we delivered the first version of Creditcoin based on Sawtooth. It was a proud moment for the Creditcoin foundation and us, and unfortunately, it was also the starting point of a long uphill struggle. As the number of nodes grew, the Creditcoin Network started to suffer from problems with peering and frequent/long forks.
The Creditcoin Foundation has put an incredible amount of effort into resolving these problems and at the end of the last year, we thought we’d finally done it. However, during the past couple of months, as we’ve delved deeper into these problems, we’ve been faced with the simple truth that Sawtooth is unsuitable for our project moving forwards.
This left us with a choice. Whether to push forward with a reconstructed Sawtooth designed to fit our requirements or whether to implement Creditcoin on a new architecture better designed to suit our needs.
In 2021, Substrate stood out from other blockchain architectures. Developed by Parity, Substrate comes with extensive functionality and reliability. There is a vibrant and active community that includes more than 100 active blockchain networks. These other networks serve as a proving ground for the underlying technology, which will lead to a much more stable foundation for Creditcoin to be built upon. As we worry less about the underlying technology, we will be able to focus on the core purpose of Creditcoin, creating a credit lending infrastructure that allows fintech lenders and microfinance providers greater access to capital.
After a long and careful period of deliberation, we made the difficult decision to implement Creditcoin on Substrate. Whilst taking this route will mean a lot of hard work and effort reimplementing parts of Creditcoin which already exist, we are confident that Substrate will help us deliver a more successful blockchain and ecosystem in the long run.
This means that Creditcoin 1.8 will be the last version of Creditcoin based on Sawtooth developed by the Creditcoin Foundation. The Creditcoin Foundation will no longer maintain or support Creditcoin Sawtooth from this release forward. As our project has always been open source, we welcome anyone in the Creditcoin community who wishes to continue our efforts.
Creditcoin 2.0 will hard fork from Creditcoin 1.8 at block 1,123,966. We will take a snapshot of the Creditcoin Network on the block, export account balances and public keys from Creditcoin 1.8 to a file and give the public keys the genesis balance on Creditcoin 2.0. Since the Sawtooth implementation stores balance by sighash (hash of the public key), not the public key itself, we could only identify the public keys for 21,738 out of the 32,059 wallets. We plan to migrate what balances we can automatically. Creditcoin 2.0 also has a function where users can prove ownership of a sighash to claim the balance stored for that sighash.
The Creditcoin Foundation would also like to publicly introduce Creditcoin 2.0, the first version of Creditcoin built on Substrate and benefiting from the extensive tools the Substrate ecosystem offers. Moreover, this release paves the way for Credal, and with it, the live integration of Creditcoin with our various partners which we have all been waiting for. I can promise that the foundation will redouble its efforts on improving, building and realizing the true vision for this version of Creditcoin — starting today.
Creditcoin 2.0 has maintained stability with over 500 nodes during its closed-beta testing period, ranking among the top 15 networks on Polkadot Telemetry. The network also went through heavy load testing, without experiencing any significant forks or peering issues during the period. A test participant said, “the mining experience got incomparably better.”
We thank our community for trusting us during the difficult months behind us, especially our miners who have undergone many network stability problems during our efforts to improve the various 1.0 versions of Creditcoin. Now, it is up to us to repay that trust/We will continue to do our best to repay the trust you have placed in Creditcoin. Thank you once again.
