Must Read Before Gemini Upgrade

Compute Rewards (CR) raise from 1% to 70%

Doyle guo
Phala Network
Published in
8 min readMar 30, 2022

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On March 15th, Marvin Tong, a member of the Phala Network Congress, issued a proposal Phala Tokenomic Launchon the forum. The proposal aims to update Phala Tokenomics. It has now entered the referendum stage and will end at block height #1461600. Judging from the current voting results, there is a relatively high probability that the vote can be passed. How will the upcoming launch of Gemini Tokenomics impact the Phala community and overall ecology? I will share my research and analysis here.

And if you want to learn more about the updated worker deployment scripts and increase in the staking amount, here is the article about it. ( Link: Gemini Tokenomics Upgrade Technical Guidance).

Background

Khala, as the pre-mainnet of Phala Network on Kusama, was launched in September 2021 to test the stability of the network technology and Tokenomics. After nearly half a year of testing, Khala network has reached its fourth halving period and has achieved a maximum of 20,000+ computing nodes that are online at the same time.

In the current Tokenomics, 1% of the total amount of PHA is used for mining rewards for miners on Khala Network. With the launch of the Gemini Tokenomics, this number will increase to 70%. Furthermore, rewards will be awarded equally to miners on Phala and Khala networks.

Important Adjustment of This Upgrade

The following important adjustments will be made to the current Phala Tokenomics:

1. More rewards will be released

A total of 1 billion PHA tokens have been issued. The distribution of token usage and the updated compute reward output is as follows. This upgrade will increase the reward to workers from 1% to 70%, and the rewards allocated to workers will all be activated.

Figure 1: Comparison of computing rewards releasing before and after the upgrade

We are currently in the fourth halving period of Khala Network, with a standard output of 25.3k PHA per 7200 blocks. Once Gemini launches, the total daily compute rewards (CR) will increase to 720k PHA, which is 28.4 times the current value!

2. Additional Delegation Allowed Without “Stop”

Another primary focus of this Tokenomic upgrade is to remove the additional limit on the amount of delegation.

In the past, we may have had such troubles: the initial delegation amount was set too small, resulting in a lower value of V than expected, which affects the rate of increase of V value. You can only increase the amount of delegation through stop .But you need to wait seven days for cooling down, and the incremental V exchanged for past online performance will also be cleared. These issues will be improved with this upgrade.

In the future, Phala Tokenomics will support additional delegation without a cooling-down period, and the V value will be recalculated when workers put in more delegation. As a result, there is no longer a seven-day waiting period for the additional delegation. However, the incremental V will still be reset to zero and recalculated after the additional delegation.

3. Maximum Compute rewards of a Single Worker Become Unlimited

There is a constraint limit in the current Phala Tokenomics to avoid excessive rewards for the remaining workers when the number of workers is too small. For each payment, miners get the minimum value between the number allocated by the budget and at the time of this payment.

Because of this limitation, when the number of active workers is small, workers cannot obtain relatively high income, which is not conducive to the incentives of Phala network to workers when ecological development is hindered. Therefore, in this update, this maximum limit of rewards has been removed. In the case of insufficient participation in the early stage, workers who enter the market first can get excess returns.

The V value will be reduced by the same amount as the payout reward in each payout event. Affected by the above limitations, the increment of the V value for each payment event in the past will not be negative. After this update, a constraint will be added. If the payment reward exceeds the increment of the V value, the increment of the V value will be deducted to 0 at most, and the reduction of the v value will not occur.

4. The Slash Mechanism Will Not Be Activated

The Slash mechanism that has not been launched in the Phala Tokenomic will not be activated in this upgrade. But it is foreseeable that this mechanism will be activated in the future as the reward increases.

5. Worker deployment Script Upgrade

With the upgrade of this Tokenomic, worker deployment script for solo miners made by contributors from the community will launch. And the team also upgraded PRB to include the function of additional delegation.

If you are a senior Phala worker and don’t need additional delegation, you don’t need to prepare for regular operations. However, if you want to learn more about the updated worker deployment script or PRB, Here is the article on new worker deployment script operation and PRB (Link: Gemini Tokenomics Upgrade Technical Guidance).

If you are new to Phala Network, or you want to use your PHA to delegate and make a profit, please pay attention to Phala’s Wiki, which has a detailed explanation. (Phala Network Wiki

Will market circulation be affected by the substantial increase in compute rewards?

Not necessarily.

Let’s take a look at how Phala’s compute rewards are calculated.

Referring to the Phala Tokenomics, we know that the following formulas are essential:

Formula 1 — Payout Event:

Formula 2 — Share of a worker

Formula 3 — V value of a worker

Formula 4 — Calculation of ΔVt

When we calculate how rewards are distributed to workers and study the correlation between worker metrics and performance, our logic is to learn the formulas from 1 to 4.
But when we want to use these formulas to calculate, the order when we use them is 3–4–2–1.

➡️ For example, Bob recently opened an active worker with an Intel quad-core processor, and he spent about $500 on the hardware. He delegated 10 thousand PHA for it. Its performance test result is 378, and the confidence level is lv.5 (ConfidenceScore is 0.7).

  • Therefore, its V=(1+0.7⋅(1.5−1))⋅(10000+0.3⋅378/0.667)=13729 (Formula 3)
  • If every performance test is standard without special compensation
    (γ(Vt)h(Vt)), its ΔVt=(1.0002−1)⋅Vt+0.016=0.0002Vt+0.016 (Formula 4)

I made a chart, and if everything is normal, it will take 143 days for the V value to increase to the maximum.

  • Its initial share=√[13729×13729+(2⋅378⋅0.7)×(2⋅378⋅0.7)]= 13739.2 (Formula 2)

By calculating the gray shaded area in the figure, the sum of its Share within 143 days is approximately equal to 68.809% of the worker’s Share, which is always the maximum value of V. Therefore, the rewards of Bob’s worker in the past 143 days is approximately equal to 68.809% of the worker with the maximum V value.

How will Bob’s rewards change before and after the Tokenomic update?

The number of PHA delegated in Khala stake pool is 33,986,754(#1433847). This amount of PHA can be delegated to 1699.33 workers with the maximum amount of PHA (about 20 thousand PHA per worker);
The sum of the total Share on Khala is 60,815,075.05, which is converted into a maximum Share (about 30005) to 2026.83 workers.

After nearly half a year of stable network operation, the currently running workers have an average increase of 19.27% compared to the initial Share through stable online.

For Bob’s worker, we can do some simple calculations to predict the change in rewards based on the current value obtained without considering the growth of the online V value from the community active workers:

The calculation of the form above refers to formula 1

The cost Bob pays is a one-time investment of $500 in equipment as a worker and a daily management cost of less than $15/month, and his 10,000 PHA as a delegator. Even for the current holding price of $0.27 /PHA, such an annualized rate of return is still profitable.

Supply and Demand Changes in Tokenomics

The following views are limited to the deduction of Tokenomics supply and demand and do not represent any investment advice.

Under the attraction of such APY, what might happen to the market?
Will token holders enter the market for delegates, and will compute providers add workers?

At present, the circulation of PHA in the market is 272 million pieces, and the daily trading volume is about 8 million when it is active. Therefore, although 720k PHA will be mined every day once Gemini Tokenomics is launched, there may be a potential increase in staking in the market.

In the same way as the calculation above, we can give another set of numbers:

  • In the first halving period, when the entire network delegation amount was 200 million, the number of full-delegated workers was about 10,000 (each worker has 20,000 PHA), which is five times the current number. However, considering the 20% increase in V value, there are still about 8,000 workers, which requires nearly 120 million PHA to be additionally delegated into the stake pool.
  • At this time, the monthly reward of each full-delegated worker can still reach 1728 PHA (if the worker is running normally).
  • In our first halving period, only 129 million PHA can be mined total.

Based on the above supply and demand speculation, we believe that although more PHA will be released through the Gemini upgrade, at the same time, more (compared to the current) demand for PHA will be leveraged. And the relationship between supply and demand will return to balance under the adjustment of the market.

Gemini Tokenomics Will Promote the Construction of Phala Decentralized Cloud Computing Platform

Since the cloud computing automation supply and demand are balanced, the development of the supply protocol (rewards protocol) is mostly completed. In the next step, the development team will focus on developing applications using Web3 cloud computing technology.

Update calendar for Gemini Tokenomics

The Kusama Network block time is unstable, and the time cannot be accurately estimated.
You can click
https://polkadot.js.org/apps to query the specific time of the real-time block height.

References
- Phala Network wiki about Tokenomics:https://wiki.phala.network/en-us/learn/tokenomics/tokenomics
- Proposal of Gemini Tokenomic Launch:
https://khala.subsquare.io/democracy/referendum/27

About Phala

Phala Network tackles the issue of trust in the computation cloud.

By organizing a decentralized network of computation nodes around the world, it offers high-performance services without relying on any cloud vendor. Phala workers run the programs in Secure Enclaves, a privacy technology already embedded into modern processors, enabling versatile and confidential execution. Together, this creates the infrastructure for a powerful, secure, and scalable trustless computing cloud.

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