Major Milestone Met: Launching Pion Network, Removing Malicious Actors & Planning a Relaunch

October’s Highlights and Recap

Published in

Muon

4 min readNov 3, 2023

The launch of the long-anticipated Pion network/$PION on October 18th represented the culmination of many months of planning and development by Muon teams. Let’s delve into Muon’s achievements this month.

Ecosystem Updates

Pion Network Launched

Pion network, Muon ecosystem’s canary and first mainnet, launched on October 18th. Four days before its launch, eligible users for the node-drop started claiming their bonPION node-drops. This interval gave the team the chance to study the process and help users with any potential difficulty.

Since Pion’s launch, 1,500+ people have created NFTs, successfully joined the network and started getting rewards in PION. To give operators a chance to iron out any potential problems on their servers, minimum uptime is not considered for the first month; that is, all node operators get the rewards regardless of their uptime. After the period, all conditions and requirements will be observed.

Pion Node Tiers

Based on their bonPION amount and verification level, node operators are categorized into four tiers. The higher your tier, the higher influence you can have in the network. See our Medium article for more info.

For the time being, only tiers 1 & 2 are active. All operators who were eligible for the node-drop are automatically given tier 1. To upgrade to tier 2, see our guide.

Pre-Launch House Cleaning

In a previous article, we explained in detail how the whole ecosystem can benefit from uniqueness verification. So since the start of the uniqueness verification process on ALICE, our dedicated UV team has been studying the data including verifiers’ behavior. Through complicated techniques, they discovered a number of operators who tried to gain larger rewards by running multiple nodes. These malicious actors were blacklisted and not able to join PION.

However, to make sure no one was mistakenly regarded as malicious, we gave the blacklisted operators a chance to appeal and present relevant evidence to our UV team. In the appeal process, we found that only one of the behaviors originally considered suspicious was in fact not malicious. As a result, a total number of 60 wallet addresses (out of around 1,600) were whitelisted.

Omitting the malicious actors not only made the network safer but increased the amount of rewards for honest operators substantially.

For more details, refer to the Pre-Launch House Cleaning article. We are also going to publish a fully-technical article on how these were discovered.

$PION’s Migration

Soon after the launch of PION token, we received multiple reports from the community that one of the launch partners might be manipulating the market to the detriment of the Pion holders, and, consequently, the whole ecosystem. Our team investigated the case thoroughly and communicated it with multiple chain analysts. The result? There is a high probability that the suspicions were valid.

To protect the community and our utility token, our only viable strategy was to pause the token and migrate it. That is why PION token contracts — and not the Pion network- were paused on October 25th, and a migration process was initiated. During this period, one can set up a node, and earn rewards, but claiming rewards and increasing bonPION will be reactivated after migration.

Very Important: To be included in the snapshot and be able to claim their $PION, all MEXC users must withdraw their $PION from MEXC, and submit this form by November 10th. Note that if someone has not done these by 16:00 UTC on Nov 10th, they will not be able to claim their $PION on the relaunch day.

Partner Updates

Rewarding Fear Community with $PION!

Our friends at Fear, the popular horror entertainment platform, pioneered the use of Pion network as their DON (Decentralized Oracle Network). More importantly, they are generously giving all the rewards earned from running their Pion node to their community members. See the details. They are also extending their Halloween campaign. (Learn more).

The launch of Pion network marks a new era for Muon ecosystem, its community, and blockchain users. There is a lot more to come. Stay tuned.

Muon Network

Muon is a chain-independant and stateless DON (Decentralized Oracle Network) that enables dApps to make their off-chain components decentralized. By incorporating Muon, the manner in which decentralized applications store, process, and access data will be fundamentally transformed, redefining the landscape of decentralized systems.

Run a Pion node.