Basechain Upgrade — What’s New in DPoS v3
Update:
- Basechain was formerly known as PlasmaChain. Read the official announcement.
You may have noticed a few changes on the staking dashboard recently. That is because we have upgraded Basechain (Loom Mainnet) to DPoS v3 — an upgrade that brought some pretty massive improvements over v2.
This article will detail some of the more important changes, and how they benefit LOOM delegators.
Below are some of the most significant improvements that you’ll see in v3 — a lot of good news for you — so please read on.
1. Automatic Compounding of Rewards
It’s finally here!
Any unclaimed rewards are automatically restaked and given the base reward (currently 5% per year). This means your staking rewards will automatically start earning even more rewards, without you needing to do anything.
Of course, you can also always claim your rewards and stake them with a longer lock-up period to get more rewards on your rewards.
2. Multiple Delegations per Validator
With DPoS v3, you are now able to delegate multiple times for different lock-up periods to the same validator.
Previously, if you delegated to the same validator twice, your lock time would restart from the time the second delegation was made 😢
But that didn’t offer the flexibility stakers wanted — the ability to stake additional tokens later without affecting previous delegations.
3. Base Reward After Lock Time
Did you go on vacation and forget to restake after your lock time expired, losing out on precious LOOM rewards?
No worries, we got you covered 😎
In v3, delegations with an expired lock time will keep earning the base reward of 5% until the tokens are withdrawn or restaked.
4. Consolidating Multiple Unlocked Delegations
Do you have multiple unlocked delegations with the same validator?
On a particular validator’s page, go to the bottom of the page and press “Consolidate”. This will merge all of your unlocked delegations to that validator into one.
5. Preparation for Slashing
As we wrote here, Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) systems such as Basechain need a mechanism to punish malicious or irresponsible validators.
But what happens when a validator doesn’t do their job? What if they don’t treat users fairly, try to censor transactions, or simply neglect their duties?
In these cases, malicious or irresponsible validators need to be punished — which is the purpose of the staked tokens. Validators lock up those tokens as a bond, and if they are dishonest or fail to perform their duties, those staked tokens are slashed as a penalty.
DPoS v3 has a few new improvements to help us prepare for when slashing is enabled, including improved statistics on missed votes/commits.
6. Capping Validator Voting Power
One of the major promises of blockchain technology is decentralization. As such, it must not be possible for a single entity can control this DPoS chain.
Basechain runs on Tendermint, and voting power is allocated to each validator based on the number of LOOM tokens staked and the lock-up periods of those tokens.
In order to ensure no validator can halt the chain if they go offline, validators will be capped at a Tendermint voting power of 28%.
And you can rest easy, as your staking rewards will not be affected by this voting power cap in any way.
7. Code and Performance Improvements
We’ve also made several code and performance improvements.
Just to mention a few of them:
We’ve enhanced code robustness in v3, added more nil pointer checks, ensured address assertions now check the chainId, and implemented much more extensive unit and end-to-end testing.
In addition, to avoid any potential miscalculations of rewards, runtime invariant checking has been incorporated . This is an additional check to make sure the rewards stakers receive are accurate.
The CLI has also been reorganized: DPoS v3 commands can now be accessed under the loom dpos3 command.
This v3 upgrade is an important step in making Basechain an interoperable multichain platform.
We’re giving validators and delegators the functionality they need to keep the network running smoothly and securely, and giving developers the decentralization and throughput they need to deploy large-scale blockchain dapps.
Loom Network is the multichain interop platform for scaling high-performance dapps — already live in production, audited, and battle-tested.
Deploy your dapp to Loom’s Basechain once and reach the widest possible user base across all major blockchains today.
New to Loom? Start here.
Want to stake your LOOM tokens and help secure Basechain? Find out how.
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