Success! First In-Band Upgrade Showcasing Modular Upgradeability

A major milestone in blockchain history was recently achieved through the first in-band upgrade of Koinos! This groundbreaking moment demonstrates the power of a flexible, adaptive, and forward-thinking approach to blockchain technology, which assumes the inevitability of bugs and emphasizes the importance of being able to swiftly and seamlessly address them.

Modular Upgradeability

Drawing upon our years of experience in resolving complex blockchain issues as the core development team behind the Steem blockchain, we understand that there is no such thing as “bug-free” code. That’s why we designed Koinos with a focus on upgradeability and implemented a fundamentally new blockchain design we call “modular upgradeability.” With modular upgradeability, all of the business logic of Koinos main net is implemented as individual smart contracts each of which can be independently upgraded by decentralized governance in-band (without a hard fork).

Bugs Happen

Recently, a bug was identified by a community member which resided within consensus. On most blockchains this would be a very challenging and disruptive thing to fix, but as we just proved this is not the case with Koinos. While no one ever wants such bugs to be found, they are simply a reality of complex software development and denying their existence is certainly no way to build a blockchain with staying power.

The question is not “will there be bugs?” it’s “what will you do when bugs happen?”

Thanks to the modular upgradeability of Koinos, a fix was able to be rapidly uploaded to the chain as a smart contract which was then voted on by block producers through the decentralized governance contract. Once the governance process completed, the blockchain simply stopped recognizing the original smart contract (containing the bug) and switched to recognizing the new smart contract containing the fix.

Making Blockchain Upgrades Boring

As was demonstrated through this fix, modular upgradeability turns what would typically be a time consuming, technically challenging, and political process of hard forking the blockchain, into a practically boring affair with no disruption to service.

It’s a lot easier to focus on sexy scaling solutions and performance optimizations as opposed to admitting fallibility and planning for bugs, but as experienced blockchain developers we know that you cannot have one without the other.

Our mission is to accelerate decentralization, and that can’t happen if a single bug can throw a massive wrench in the progress of a blockchain. By making bug fixes frictionless and drama-free, we are not only able to efficiently resolve any issue, this frees up time and resources to pursue those scaling solutions and performance optimizations that can also leverage modular upgradeability! This design allows a blockchain to rapidly adapt to any situation and be better positioned to accelerate decentralization.

To learn more about the recent fix, go to discord.koinos.io, and to learn more about Koinos, go to koinos.io.