Nervos Mainnet: Birth of a Blockchain
The release of the Nervos Mainnet “Lina” occurred at 9:11 PM UTC on Nov 15.
This launch — the birth of the Nervos mainnet — comes after months of activity, including changes and improvements on our testnet, and a series of mining competitions intended to help identify potential vulnerabilities.
Hashrates for the mainnet will typically be low during the first few weeks of a blockchain’s life. With Lina, in particular, we decided to err on the side of caution for the sake of optimizing security. The difficulty of the first epoch was intentionally set high to make it as hard as possible for large amounts of hashrate to attack the Lina mainnet. We had to make an estimation, and decided that it was better to overestimate than underestimate.
During the actual launch, the mainnet’s uncle rate was very low and we did not experience any forks. This was especially beneficial for service providers in our ecosystem such as wallets and exchanges.
Our goal is to achieve security and convenience at the same time, but when they conflict, we will always prioritize security over convenience.
As of Nov 19 we have moved into epoch 5 (the mainnet’s sixth epoch), with mining difficulty reduced from 8318TH (in epoch 0) to 4065TH (in epoch1) to 2160TH (in epoch 2) to 630TH in the current epoch— so block intervals and epoch lengths are becoming shorter. As the block interval decreases the rewards per second will increase We anticipate that the block time will remain at a reasonable level. You can track epoch progress here https://explorer.nervos.org/.
Lina will be small at first, and must be nurtured
We want to reiterate that Lina mainnet is only a few days old. Like a child, a Proof-of-Work blockchain is small in the first few months of its life. While its long-term potential is unlimited, during this early period, the mainnet is likely to experience some growing pains as it comes into its own. For these reasons, we ask users who need to make transactions to please choose an adequate confirmation number.
At the start, Lina will also have very few usable integration and development tools. Early adopters of CKB technology should have a good understanding of NC-MAX, Cell Model and CKB-VM at the outset; otherwise, mistakes or bugs may be created unintentionally. While the SDKs provided by Nervos Foundation are convenient tools for RPC and for building, signing, and sending transactions, they are still under development and should not be considered production ready.
The Neuron wallet currently only provides basic functionality (covered by security audit) such as key management, CKBytes transfer and Nervos DAO deposit/withdraw. More features and UI improvements are planned.
A New Testnet
Nervos’s Rylai testnet ended when Lina was born. A new testnet, Aggron, is now live. Aggron is for testing purposes only; tokens on Aggron have no value, and Aggron will be reset occasionally. Also, Aggron difficulty will be much lower than that of Mainnet Lina. We encourage developers to explore the Aggron testing environment to become familiar with building on CKB.
A PoW blockchain is very different from a PoS structure—launching a PoW blockchain is much more difficult. So far everything is working as expected, and the Mainnet Lina launch has been a success.
Thank you to our community for your support during this pivotal time. Please check this blog, as well as our social channels, for additional updates.
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