Further Thoughts on the Ontology February 5th Upgrade

Christina Liu
OntologyNetwork
Published in
2 min readFeb 10, 2019

On February 5th, 2019,the Ontology team informed all nodes to start an urgent upgrade of the stake authorisation on the MainNet.You can read the announcement here.

The network downtime of this upgrade reflects a degree of control the Ontology Foundation has on the Ontology public chain network. Here, we, the Ontology team, are willing to share our thoughts with the community.

Ontology believes that the blockchain architecture needs to be controlled to a certain degree in the beginning in the following three aspects:

1. Control over the process of network expansion. Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have also gone through this process to reach their current scale. In the initial stage, the process development of the Ontology network needs to be developed according to plan, with a process designed and implemented by the Ontology Foundation.

2. Control over the costs and compensation of nodes. Node operations require costs and nodes receive compensation from transaction fees. During this initial stage, the dApp ecosystem is not strong enough and fees generated by dApps aree not enough to support node operation costs. Therefore, the Ontology Foundation is consciously controlling the network scale during this initial stage.

3. Control over the project. The implementation and stabilization of the Ontology VBFT consensus mechanism to create a fully autonomous infrastructure takes time and requires supports from the technical community. The iteration of the project enables Ontology to achieve its vision step by step. In the early stage of project tuning and innovation, it is necessary to control development to a certain degree to avoid bifurcation and support emergency plans. This upgrade reflects this.

The Ontology Foundation has the responsibility to ensure the security of the Ontology ecosystem in this early stage. With the expansion of the Ontology ecosystem, the Ontology Foundation will expand the scale of the Ontology network and enable more ecosystem partners to operate and develop independently.

We welcome discussions from the Ontology community and other blockchain projects. Please get in contact with us at contact@ont.io.

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