Idena hard fork announcement: Quadratic invitation rewards, extra flip rewards and other improvements

Dear Idena community,

We plan to release a new version of the Idena node on December 16, 2022. This will be a hard fork that includes the following changes.

1. IIP-6: Quadratic invitation rewards

Change in invitation rewards distribution so that invitation rewards are calculated in proportion to the amount of the stake to the power of 0.9 and they are distributed between the inviter and the invitee.

Motivation:

• Stimulate the organic growth of the network not associated with the growth of the large pools.
• Incentivising users who invested the most in their stakes to invite friends/family/colleagues
• Providing opportunity for newcomers to earn rewards at the level of other participants immediately after the first validation
• Mitigating the self-invitation problem exploited by pools that do not stake money

Read more details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-6

2. IIP-7: Quadratic rewards for extra flips

Split the Flip rewards fund into Basic flip rewards and Extra flip rewards. Authors who create qualified extra flips will be additionally rewarded with a premium in proportion to the stake amount of a flip’s author to the power of 0.9.

Motivation

• Increasing the total number of flips by motivating users to create extra flips
• Increasing the number of flips created by independent users but not by large pools

See the detailed proposal here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-7

3. IIP-8

Change in the discrimination mechanism of recently undelegated identities by allowing them to change pools or create their own family pools without waiting for 3 epochs.

Motivation

• Easing the undelegation process
• Increasing the number of independent validators

See the detailed proposal here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-8

4. Resolving the case when no qualified flips on validation

Assigning validated status for those identities who got no qualified flips on the short/long session and their previous status was Candidate, Suspended or Zombie.

Motivation

Very rarely an identity can get no qualified flips on the short/long session. In such cases the identity status was set the same as before validation including Candidate, Suspended and Zombie. After the hard fork activation identities with Candidate, Suspended and Zombie statuses will be considered as successfully validated.

5. Requirements for increasing the flip grade in case of small qualification committee

In case of a small qualification committee the minimal requirements for considering the flip grade increase are set as following:

• with a committee of 2 and less users, 100% of users are required to approve the flip
• with a committee of 3 or 4 users, 2 approvals are required;
• with a committee of 5 users, 3 approvals are required.

Motivation

To avoid accidental flip grade increase on small committees

6. Oracle Voting improvements

• Canceling epoch prolongation during counting. If the period of secret voting has ended and the counting has started, then there is no need to prolong the voting when the epoch changed.
• Automatically recalculate the committee size of the Oracle voting when a new epoch starts. When the Oracle voting is prolonged the committee size will be changed proportionally to match the new Network size.

7. Other changes

• Amount of burnt coins will be synchronized across the network to rank on-chain ads correctly.
• The accuracy of the Oracle voting fee parameter of the RefundableOracleLock contract will be increased by 1000 times.

8. Bug fixes

• Voting deposit bug fix. Oracle deposits will not be subject to owner fee. Oracle deposits will be refunded in full regardless of the owner fee.
• Spoil invitation vulnerability fix (Credits to @Zen). Allow ActivationTxs to an address with Invite status only if it’s coming from itself.
• Invalid roots bug fix

How the hard fork will be activated

1. The new node version will support both the current blockchain protocol and the upcoming protocol changes.
2. By running the new version of the node you vote for the upcoming protocol changes. By running the previous version of the node you vote against the protocol changes. To publish your vote you need to keep your Idena node online with the activated mining status during the hard fork voting period.
3. The hard fork voting period starts on December 23th at 8 am UTC. The hard fork will be activated once the voting criteria is met. Otherwise, the hard fork update will be blocked on December 30th.
4. The hard fork update will be activated only when more than 80% of the non-discriminated validators who run their nodes support the upcoming changes
5. Newbie and delegated address votes are discriminated against and not counted. Pool owners are counted once.