Metaverse Pillars of Creation: MST mining
Metaverse Pillars of Creation (MPC) is the next major upgrade of Metaverse blockchain. This upgrade is divided into 2 phases: double consensus PoW/PoS in phase 1 and triple consensus PoW/PoS/dPoS in phase 2.
MPC upgrade is getting closer, and similar to the previous update SuperNova in June 2018, will bring major changes in the blockchain, one of them being MST mining.
MST (Metaverse Smart Token) is one of the tokens standards on Metaverse, like Ethereum has ERC 20 (and others) or NEO has NEP-5. However, one of the common concerns of projects being built on major blockchains is how to distribute their tokens. The most popular ways are via ICOs, often followed by airdrops. But would there be a better way to distribute the tokens among a large number of users?
Bitcoin was distributed only via mining reward, and it is probably one of the fairest way to distribute tokens. MST mining on Metaverse allows any miner, via any kind of mining (PoW, PoS and dPoS), to receive a reward of a chosen MST in addition to the ETP mined. This means that a new project built on Metaverse could easily reach the existing miners and be distributed among a very large community: the existing PoW mining community and the new PoS and dPoS mining communities.
From a miner perspective, there is no additional cost and the difficulty to find a block is the same. So any ETP miner should also choose to mine a MST since it will be a “free” MST reward for mining each block. However, a miner can only mine one MST at a time, which means he will have to choose wisely which project he wants to support or which MST will provide the highest reward per block. We can imagine that the PoW mining pools might choose different MST’s to mine, and so the miners will join the mining pool that mines the MST that they want to support and receive as a reward. The 23 delegates of dPoS may also choose to mine different MST’s in order to attract more votes.
How does it work?
The first step for the MST issuer consists in specifying that this MST can be mined, during the MST creation. It’s also at the creation that the parameters to calculate the reward per block are defined:
(1) the initial reward per block (i.e. 3 ETP for Metaverse, and 50 BTC for Bitcoin)
(2) the block reward decrease interval (i.e. every 500,000 blocks for ETP, and every 210,000 blocks, 4 years, for BTC)
(3) the decrease speed per interval (i.e. 0.95 for ETP, or 0.5, halving, for BTC)
In simple words, if we keep the example of ETP, it means that (1) the initial block of ETP had a reward of 3 ETP to the miner, (2) this reward decreases every 500,000 blocks and (3) it decreases by 5% (it is multiplied by 0.95) at the end of each period.
You can easily calculate the total supply that will be created via the following formula:
TOTAL_MINED= INTERVAL*STARTING_AMOUNT*(1/(1-ATTENUATION))
However this amount will be reached only if 100% of the miners decide to mine this MST, which has a very little chance of happening. So the real TOTAL_MINED value will probably be much lower, according to how many miners decide to mine this MST.
Of course, not all the total supply has to be created via mining. The MST creator can decide to issue X amount directly at the MST creation to himself and Y additional tokens that will be slowly created from mining.
And that’s it for the MST creation! After creation, anyone can start to mine this MST. For PoS mining, you can simply choose the MST that you want to mine in the list of MST that can be mined:
You can then see in your transaction history that each block mined is rewarded by both ETP and the selected MST.
It is also important to notice that PoS mining provides a much lower ETP reward per block than PoW mining: the ETP PoS mining reward is around 10% of the ETP PoW reward. However, the MST mining reward is the same for both types of mining. This means that PoW miners’ reward in MST might be small in value compare to the ETP reward, whereas PoS miners might be much more interested in the MST reward.
MST mining provides projects the possibility to distribute their own tokens through mining without having to build their own separate blockchains. Having a large range of MST’s that can be mined on Metaverse will also create a healthy competition between the different MST’s, since only 1 MST can be mined per block. We hope this unique feature in the crypto world will attract the attention of new projects and miners into Metaverse.
