Opera Mainnet v0.1 Release and the Future
Fantom is proud to announce the launch of its first OPERA mainnet, which is EVM-compatible and provides full smart contracts support available through Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”). The OPERA mainnet is operating on top of our Lachesis consensus protocol — — a leaderless asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) protocol.
This delivery is a remarkable milestone, which will bring our development of Fantom forward. There are a number of improvements and optimizations that are aimed for the next releases. Our goals are to continuously enhance the quality of consensus and our suite of applications, as well as to onboard users and organizations that wish to build scalable, secure, and decentralized applications.
Features
Opera contains the following features:
- Lachesis aBFT DAG-based consensus protocol, which is faster than synchronous blockchains such as Ethereum
- EVM and Solidity compiler support, which means you can write, deploy and run smart contracts like how it works with Ethereum, on top of a faster consensus mechanism
- A permission-less, open-source network that anyone can connect to.
- Leaderless Proof of Stake (not Delegated Proof of Stake)
- Earn rewards and secure the Fantom network by running a validator node, or by delegating FTM to a validator node
- CLI interface with Web3JS, allowing developers to easily connect their Applications to Lachesis and build Decentralised applications (“Dapps”)
- A real-time block explorer
- Mobile, desktop, and web-based wallets to be launched on 7 January 2020, with the ability to send, receive, and delegate FTM.
Acquiring Opera FTM
To acquire FTM for use on the Opera mainnet, you need to swap ERC20, BEP2, or Xar Network FTM to Opera FTM.
You can swap between tokens at the bridge (bnbridge.exchange).
Staking and Rewards
Introduction
Staking is an integral part of securing the network. Validators actively participate in consensus by staking FTM and have an incentive to secure the network by contributing their computing power to sign blocks with their staked FTM.
Stakers have an incentive to behave in the network and earn rewards by doing so. Stakers that misbehave, for example, by double-signing blocks, are labelled by the network as cheaters, and their tokens are slashed.
Nodes that are high-performing with consistent uptime earn more rewards with a higher Proof of Importance score, which measures node performance. The best performing nodes will have the highest Proof of Importance score, allowing them to earn higher rewards.
Distribution of Rewards
Validators and Delegators earn rewards after each epoch (1000 event blocks generated by the network since the previous epoch, or after 4 hours have elapsed since the previous epoch, which ever occurs first).
Rewards (consisting of both network rewards and fees) are distributed across validators and delegators, according to their Proof of Importance score, their origination score (how many transactions they originate) and, most importantly, the amount of FTM staked.
The Special Fee Contract (“SFC”) is a smart contract that maintains a list of stakers (i.e validators), delegators, and the amount of claimable rewards per epoch.
Rewards and scores are calculated at the node level and emitted to the SFC.
Rewards Schedule
Network Rewards will be as follows:
16.48 FTM per second ($0.165 / second), or
1,423,872 FTM per day ($14,238.72 / day), or
42,716,160 FTM per month ($427,161.60 / month)
Rewards are very high to reward early adopters of the network and dilute as participation increases.
Rewards are calculated per epoch as follows:
Rewards = epoch*duration (in seconds) * Network Rewards + epoch tx fees
There is a fixed commission rate of 15% that validator nodes earn from the rewards generated by delegators to the node.
To encourage users to stake FTM, and thereby increase the security of the network, rewards are locked until the minimum staking amount of the network (starting at 80%) is reached. This minimum staking amount decreases every second, on average, 1% a week).
Rewards are locked for a 6 month period from the launch of the mainnet.
Note that the above rewards schedule is subject to change, and we aim to have the structure determined by the governance of the network in the future.
Staking Guide
You can follow this guide here on setting up your own validating node or delegating to an existing validator.
Ecosystem tools
Explorer
Fantom has a real-time explorer available here. You can view transactions and blocks being generated and confirmed by the network in real-time, as well as lookup individual addresses.
Mobile application (release date: 7 Jan 2020)
Available on iOS and Android, a user can create wallets, send FTM, receive FTM, and delegate FTM to validators on the network.
Desktop and Web Wallets (release date: 7 Jan 2020)
On 7 Jan 2020, the foundation will also release its Desktop and web wallets
The Desktop wallet will be available on OSX, Windows, and Linux distributions.
The web wallet should be accessible by any modern-day browser.
Future Improvements
There are many improvements and optimisations the foundation plans to work on to make Opera even better than it currently is.
Some of these improvements include:
Lachesis
- Remove the use of txPool for submitting transactions to the network
- Pack more transactions into event blocks
- Add moderators, who will help in the governance of the network
- Implement governance functionality to control parameters of the network
- Fix the number of parents per event block
- Research and develop new Virtual Machine, and database with our partners: the University of Sydney and Yonsei University
- Integrate Lachesis with the new Fantom Virtual Machine
- Improve test coverage to include different scenarios such as cheaters and multiple forks
- Add multiple addresses for validators in ledgers
- Add monikers to stakers
- Integrate more comprehensive CI/CD Pipelines (with automatic performance testing and error detection)
- Add fast sync and snapshots to allow new Lachesis nodes to sync faster.
Ecosystem tools
- Extend Lachesis API(for example, isAtropos(blockID), getAtroposes(epochID), getParents(blockID))
- Add push notifications on receiving FTM and rewards
- For Mobile, add fingerprint/facial unlock, and passcodes for each wallet
- Display balances across multiple currencies
- Add support for multiple Opera tokens
- Add support for ERC20, BEP2, and Xar wallets
