PrimaBlock contract update
Since launching PrimaBlock in October we’ve had time to reflect on the community’s feedback. We are excited to announce that, after several weeks of hard work, we are now ready to deploy our first major product release.
For this release, we focused on the smart-contract and the back-end infrastructure. Here is a quick summary of the changes:
- A new fee structure & distribution
- Automatic distribution
- Airdrops of ether and tokens
- Chaining pools
- Reduced gas costs
- Overhaul of the back-end infrastructure
Fee structure and distribution
From now on, there will be a fixed 0.5% PrimaBlock fee applied to all pools. However, we will still give creators the option of creating a pool with their fee waived (e.g. you would not get fees but PrimaBlock would get a 0.5% fee).
As PrimaBlock grows, we need to spend more time and money scaling the technology and helping our users. The new fee structure will allow us to focus on PrimaBlock and its community, as well as hire new talent to push the platform forward.
Fees will now only be distributed to the pool creator instead of being divided evenly between the pool admins. We’re leaving it up to the pool creator on how they want to share fees within their organization.
Automatic distribution
When you create a pool, you will be able to activate the automatic distribution feature, as well as set the number of token drops you expect to receive from the ICO. Then whenever tokens are deposited to the pool our back-end will automatically distribute them to all the pool contributors. Which means that the contributors will not have to go through the claim tokens flow (visit primablock.com, click get my tokens, go to MEW, send the transaction to get tokens, etc).
Similarly, if a pool is cancelled or refunded, our back-end will automatically distribute the Ethereum back to all the pool contributors.
The gas cost for those operations is deducted from the pool balance and is detailed on the new tooltip available in both creator and contributor dashboards.
What is a token drop?
Some ICOs have a pre-sale structure where some tokens are released immediately after the TGE and the remaining ones are released some time after the TGE. For example, an ICO can give 80% of the tokens immediately to investors and 20% of the tokens 4 months later. We call each of these distribution events a “token drop.”
Airdrops of ether and tokens
In some cases, there is the need to refund part of a pool to contributors while still sending tokens, or even making a pool which is used for multiple tokens (10% token A, 90% token B). The new version of the contract is now supporting multiple tokens and ether airdrops. The user interface to take advantage of this new feature is still in development but will be coming soon.
Chaining pools
With the old contract version, to be able to chain contracts, you needed to use an intermediary wallet. The new version will allow you to directly chain one PrimaBlock pool to another.
Reduced gas costs
We have optimized the new contract to reduce the cost of deploying a new pool. We managed to reduce the gas expenditure by over 50%.
Overhaul of the back-end infrastructure
As mentioned earlier, with the wave of new users starting to use PrimaBlock, we had to step up our game and redesign our whole infrastructure to be able to scale the service. The first step was to switch from a single dedicated server running the back-end and our own Ethereum node to a cloud based auto-scalable containerized environment running on Google cloud, as well as outsourcing the Ethereum node component.
New Ethereum node provider
As some of you have certainly observed, since the kitties showed up, the PrimaBlock UI has often been out of date with the actual state of the contract. We even went through periods where pools were completely inaccessible. The cause of these issues was that our Ethereum node providers were very unstable.
To mitigate these issues we tested multiple new providers and we decided to go for QuikNode. A big shout-out to their team as they responded to our issues quickly and intelligently. QuikNode has been the most stable of all the Ethereum providers we’ve tried!
What will Primablock work on next?
Now that the infrastructure and smart contract updates are complete, we want to focus on user interface changes for our next release.
We will use PrimaBlock revenue to first add a front-end developer to our team. There is a long list of front-end changes we want to make including building out the UI for the airdrop and chaining features. We are already going through the selection process and plan to hire the new developer by the end of January. Once we have that addition to our team we’ll be able to iterate much more quickly and take PrimaBlock to the next level!
As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas for how PrimaBlock can evolve in the future.
