IOV Name Service made in Cosmos.

We are so excited to share with you something very big for us today:

We are migrating to the Cosmos SDK!🚀

In any technological enterprise, there are sometimes considerably important choices to be made to ensure a successful future. The decision made by the IOV team to migrate to the Cosmos SDK has been well thought out and we think it is necessary to give you the reasons.

Yes! This is big step for us in order to achieve several milestones:

• We want to make sure we use an SDK that every wallet providers knows how to connect to
• We want to be able to prepare future IBC integration and Cosmos SDK is the right way to use IBC. IBC will play an important role when it comes to oracles and secondary markets.
• We are passionate about name and portability and we want to focus only on the Name Service and rely on the Cosmos SDK for future upgrades.

Currently, IOV Name Service is using a Weave SDK and we are proud of the work we did on Weave SDK. We started the Weave SDK before the Cosmos SDK and at the time Cosmos SDK was not live yet. We are happy to see that we have been a technological pioneer: Weave is, for example, using protobuf and Cosmos SDK is planning to migrate from Amino to protobuf. However, for now, things have changed, Cosmos SDK and the proof-of-stake module are rock solid and we want to stay focused on one thing: our Name Service.

We also have full trust in the Tendermint and Cosmos teams. We wanted to thank the Tendermint and Cosmos community and teams for the great work they are doing. And special thanks to Gautier from Tendermint who gave us great advice about this amazing opportunity for IOV to do this migration.

Phase 1) the migration process will start this Monday May 25th

The first phase is to collect all new star1 prefixed addresses from our IOV token holders in order to be able to build a new genesis file in mid to late June. This process will be fairly simple because the mnemonic (12 words or 24 words) you created on the IOV Name Service will stay the same after the migration.

Phase 2) After we collect addresses from our IOV Token holders, we will actually perform the migration on the IOV Name Service to migrate to the Cosmos SDK. We are planning the actual migration next month in June 2020.

When phase 2 starts, IOV will add its own validator to the existing validator set on the legacy chain. It will have 2/3+ of the voting power so that it alone can halt the chain once all the iov1 to star1 address associations are made. The precise time and block of the halt will be decided in the future. Once the chain is halted then its state can be dumped and the new genesis file created. Existing validators will be given time to repurpose their hardware, submit their gentxs, and validate the new genesis file. The genesis file will be publicly available so that token holders can validate their holdings, too. The new chain will launch when all is well, hopefully within hours of the halt of the legacy chain.

If something goes wrong with the migration then IOV will restart its validator and the legacy chain will restart. A post mortem on the failed migration will be performed, errors corrected, and then the migration procedure will be repeated.

Validators

The new chain will use proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-value and the validator set will be expanded from 10 to 16. IOV is grateful for the support of its existing validators. IOV will continue to provide existing validators with their guaranteed reward so long as they remain in the validator set. IOV will delegate to existing validators in order to keep them in the validator set for as long as possible up to October, 2021. The delegations will take commission into account.

What happens if you haven’t submitted your address on time ?

There is a contingency procedure for IOV token holders that don’t create their star1 address before the new chain is launched. The procedure is non-trivial and details of it are beyond the scope of this document. We are hopeful that all IOV token holders create their star1 address in a timely manner and the contingency procedure will not be invoked; however, rest assured that IOV token holders will not lose their tokens because of the migration.

What is the impact of the proof-of-stake on our economic model?

The fundamental mechanics of redistribution of reward proportionate to stake stays the same: the redistribution of the name service fees goes to the stakers using the proof-of-stake of the Cosmos SDK. Double signing and jailing for validators uses the unaltered and proven Cosmos SDK module.

What’s next

Phase 1) of the migration is starting soon! If you are an IOV Token holder orpremium starnames owners please make sure you follow our medium account and join our telegram account. We will write a detailed article about what the Name Service participants need to do in phase 1) before the migration.

We are also doing a livestream AMA thursday May 28th, 2PM Paris Time. See you there 🙌