Q Mainnet Is Live!
On 23 March 2022 at 03:25:07 UTC, the Q mainnet went live.
This is a major milestone for the Q protocol. Congratulations to everyone in the Q community who has been working hard towards this moment! I hope you are as excited as we are.
As of this writing, the first 14,000 blocks have been produced, staking and delegation is live and first root node proposals are waiting to be voted for. In short, everything is running smoothly.
A few important links you should have on your radar:
Your HQ: https://hq.q.org/
- Participate in governance, check and manage stake
Block Explorer: https://explorer.q.org/
- Inspect blocks, Q addresses and transactions
Documentation: https://docs.q.org/
- Tutorials for onboarding to Q
Website: https://q.org/
- Access to the Q Whitepaper and the Q Constitution
Launch Proceedings
In the initial setup, mainnet has been launched with three validator nodes operated by Q Development AG, the issuer of the Q token. Those validators were needed to start the consensus engine. Once the consensus engine was upgraded to have a permissionless stake-based entry, the first external validators joined the network. In the following days, the validators operated by Q Development AG will be phased out.
Q’s governance is fully operational from Day One of the mainnet. This means that from now on, all changes to the Q protocol will be subject to decisions by the Q community as laid down in the Q Constitution.
In order to bootstrap the network’s governance setup, an initial set of three root nodes has been active as of the first block. These root nodes are operated by Q Development AG and members of the development team behind Q. Similarly to the initial set of validator nodes, these initial root nodes are needed at the start the network and will be phased out very soon. At the time of writing, the first root node proposals are already live for voting. We expect that over the coming days and weeks, network participants will apply for root node positions, creating a competent and diversified set of root nodes.
What’s next?
From here on, activity on Q will increase as more validators and root nodes join the network to support the protocol. We consider the current status of the Q network to be a “mainnet beta” version with a limited number of participants, most of which have already been active on previous versions of Q’s testnets. These participants will actively test the network and monitor its performance. If issues arise, they can be addressed by the team that has been involved in the development of the Q protocol.
As stated above, Q’s governance is already fully functional and proposals to upgrade the protocol can be made by network participants. With the maturing of Q, the emphasis will shift towards onboarding applications and developers, fostering the Q community and progressively decentralizing the Q network.
Stay tuned for further updates on Q!
