Another month has passed and this is already the third I/O News Update I am writing. Over the last month the core dev team has been mostly working silently in the background, except for the 2nd of July when IOC lead developer Joel Bosh held another AMA livestream on the official YouTube channel in which he announced the zero-knowledge protocol Nighthawk. You can read all about Nighthawk in my other article here but there are a few things I did not discuss which were announced during the livestream as well. Together with the launch of Nighthawk, which is planned for the 1st of December 2019, an orphan pruning tool will be launched as well as a POS reward halving.
For those that don’t know, orphan blocks are blocks that have been verified but did not make it into the blockchain because another block was accepted just a little earlier by the network. These orphan blocks would not exist without any data so if a network has many orphans the blockchain will grow in size unnecessarily. The Orphan Pruning Tool gets rid of these orphan blocks and therefore saves hard disk space on the computers of the people that stake their IOC.
Also on the 1st of December of this year, a POS reward halving is planned to take place. This means that the rewards for staking will go down from 1.5 IOC to 0.75 IOC per block which might have a positive effect on the price of IOC in the long run but of course time will tell. A reward halving is necessary to make sure stakers will get rewards for staking their coins for many years to come which is not uncommon as other coins like Bitcoin and Litecoin do this as well.
Lastly, the I/O Reddit page has gotten an overhaul so feel free to check it out and join the subreddit!
Do you have anything to add or do you have a question? The Telegram chat is the place to go. For questions about and support for the IOC Wallet, please join the I/O Coin Wallet Support channel instead. You can also find more info on the websites of the I/O Digital Foundation, I/O Coin and Chameleon Ledger. If you are a developer and you want to help a hand, the I/O Coin GitHub is a good place to start.
