An update on the Road to Mainnet
We have seen a lot of requests lately asking for an update on the mainnet roadmap. This article will shed a little light on where we are and our expectations at this point.
We, as the team behind the LUKSO Blockchain, are building a new kind of network. Even though we are building on top of proven technologies like Prysm and Geth, a lot of the technology behind the network is new and has not been done before.
One of the challenges with building new things is in estimating how long things will take to create. This makes it hard to predict concrete timelines, as certain things can take longer than previously anticipated.
We had expected our mainnet to launch towards the end of this year (Q4 2021), as we communicated in past updates. While we have made a lot of progress, based on our current development, the launch of the mainnet needs to be pushed back to the first half of next year — 2022.
Whats the current status?
We have built an internal Testnet running the final network architecture, with almost all features complete internally.
A few weeks ago, we started the L15 ephemeral testnet, allowing the test network to run in a more realistic/challenging environment instead of a clean Kubernetes cluster.
We called it ephemeral, as we expected the network to be stopped and re-launched multiple times (as we do), which was the purpose of running the network. We are currently adding more tests and features to L15 and will likely re-start within a week to test the latest changes in the wild.
L15 has helped us tremendously in understanding certain edge cases. The orchestrator consensus is now improved, and we will test its stability in the next L15 iteration.
What comes next?
There are a few things that need to happen before network launch:
- First, we need to be comfortable with the current stability of the network
- Second, we will need to do some code clean up and API finalisation
- Third, we need to run an audit on the architecture before launching for mainnet, ideally more than one
- And finally, we need to prepare for the mainnet launch (LYXe to LYX migration, etc)
We are hard at work to make the network ready, but in parallel we are also building the important tools and standards that will make LUKSO a one of a kind Blockchain ecosystem, that will make the creative economy possible in the first place. All of those things have to come together, ideally at the same time. And when they do, things will change a lot in the Blockchain space — to the better.
Expected timeline
Launching a Mainnet is no small task, and once it is started, it is in the hands of the community to accept future updates and improvements, making breaking changes (eg. a hard fork) are far more time-consuming and cumbersome. Therefore, we will only launch the network once we are comfortable that it is ready.
It’s always hard to predict when it will be ready — . Remember the infamous “two weeksᵀᴹ “, when we started Ethereum… yeah we got that here too 😅
Looking at the current development, it looks like that the mainnet could be launching sometime in the first half of next year, but this will depend on the stability of the current implementations and the results of the audits, as well as other unknown factors that might come during development. Ideally, we add more implementations of our protocol to the mix, to increase further stability to the network. If you have what it takes and have/want to work on consensus protocols let us know, we are always happy to get good talent.
Thank you all for your support and interest in what we are building at LUKSO. If you are interested in more details on our current progress, please join our #validator channel, follow our GitHub, and contribute! LUKSO is an open-source project built by many. If you have what it takes, contribute!
🖖 See you soon in the world of 🆙
