Dear Souldiers,
The current maintenance is a significant one involving, among other things, the core chain code. The changes being made during this maintenance period are expected to reduce or eliminate the need for further maintenance, such as the ones we have experienced on occasion during the three and a half months since the Phantasma mainnet was launched. Most of these maintenance periods have revolved around a need to make adjustments and improvements to the Sustainable Energy System (SES) that represents the gamification of KCAL. While SES has improved, we do foresee that perfecting SES would be likely to require further maintenance periods down the road. Some of these could potentially be significant depending on the evolution of SES and how the game is played.
Considering this, we have had some core decisions to make over the past weeks. Extended maintenance periods are naturally undesirable with a growing number of live dApps on the blockchain. However, some potential issues and edge cases are too complex, they cannot be anticipated and must therefore be experienced, in this case for example the first seasonal change. After experiencing the first SES season and observing SES in practice through burn rates, claiming strategies and community engagement, we have been able to get a better idea of the future implications of the current system. This experience has led to our decision to move on from the SES experiment.
This decision was not made lightly, as we do realize that many Souldiers love many features of SES such as the burning mechanism, the competitive element and the dynamic KCAL generation. However, we firmly believe that this is the best decision we can make, to ensure a significantly faster and much more stable chain with a vastly reduced need for maintenance periods and code optimizations. As a result of removing SES, all manually burned KCAL contributed to the bomb up to this point will be released from the contract and refunded back into their corresponding wallet — the bomb has been defused, and visually it will seem as if the bomb never existed. The ones who neglected claiming KCAL in season one will also receive the excess KCAL they were supposed to receive. This also permanently solves the challenge of having to monitor and decide whether to claim KCAL prior to seasonal changes or not. For SES we expect that this would have been a significant challenge which would have led to an ongoing decrease in the amount of KCAL generated — in turn leading to a too low and diminishing supply that would have required other adjustments to achieve sustainability. The obvious reason for this is that claiming a massive amount of KCAL right before a seasonal change would have made it much harder to beat the villain than originally intended, and this challenge would have been compounded for each season.
The KCAL generation rate, from now onwards, is 0.002 KCAL/SOUL per day, and there are currently no plans to make changes to this rate. As briefly mentioned above, this decision also comes paired with technical advantages. The code complexity of SES meant that every transaction had to go through several extra steps while being processed, which came at an efficiency cost. Our preliminary benchmarking after removing the SES element indicates that transactions are now being processed multiple times faster than before, bringing us closer to the maximum theoretical TPS limit of 5000 as well as delivering an even better user experience through the significantly faster confirmations. Removing the SES element also naturally removes any need for maintaining and adjusting SES, which will provide increased stability and less technical overhead, allowing us to focus all efforts on the upcoming dApp releases. All in all, the multiple benefits achieved through this decision will allow for quicker development and shorter time to new releases.
Block Producers
But what about the BPs? The top burners of SES would eventually be rewarded a BP spot whenever a standby spot opened. However, the SES removal means that future BP spots can no longer be granted based on the old mechanics. But fear not, the team recognizes and would like to reward the top contributors of the first season. We are looking into a way to make more room within the initial 25 BPs, to potentially open a few (shared) community BP spots for top burners from season one. As the energy bomb has been permanently defused and all burners are receiving their KCAL back, this opportunity for a BP slot will be offered in return for a KCAL contribution — which will subsequently be distributed to the remaining top burners.
How will future BPs be selected? We are planning to utilize our Onchain Governance System for the future BP selection process. SOUL Masters can submit a pitch nominating themselves as candidates, while the community can vote for their preferred candidates based on their pitch as well as their (potential) contributions to the Phantasma ecosystem. This system can be built as a dApp on Phantasma Chain. More details will follow as the final decisions regarding this new system are made.
Final words
We recognize and respect that some community members will miss SES, but we firmly believe that it will be evident that the advantages of this move far outweigh any perceived negative aspects. In short the chain logic has been simplified, making it far more robust and efficient, leading to far less technical overhead and maintenance as well as a much better user experience through quicker transactions. In addition to the improvements in the day to day user experience sending and receiving tokens, this will make high traffic scenarios with multiple dApps in frequent use much more fluid. On top of this, the changes ensure a sustainable KCAL generation to support dApp usage without soaring costs to the developer teams and dApp users utilizing the Phantasma blockchain.
*We are experiencing intermittent connectivity issues with the NEO scan APIs at the moment which is hindering our post verification testing for swaps and will need to find an alternative solution if that is not rectified anytime soon. We reached out to the NEO community for help. All changes have been implemented in the code, but we might potentially need more time to conclude the maintenance due to this connectivity issue.
More info about Phantasma Chain
Telegram Announement Channel: https://t.me/phantasma_announcements
Medium: https://medium.com/phantasticphantasma
Twitter: @phantasmachain
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/phantasma
Discord: https://discord.gg/rYfajr
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phantasmachain/
