Happy Birthday RChain Mainnet!

RChain Celebrates One Year Anniversary of Mainnet Going Live

By Steve Henley

Mainnet Goes Live

February marks the one year anniversary of the launch of mainnet, a major technical achievement for RChain.

REV Genesis was 1582631986995 milliseconds (Wed Feb 25 2020 11:59:46 UTC) after the Unix epoch at 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970.

With the advent of mainnet, RHOC token holders received an equal number of REV tokens added to their REV wallet.

Visit https://tgrospic.github.io/rnode-client-js to check REV token balance. Join the RChain Discord server at https://discord.com/invite/NWkQnfH if you need assistance.

The RHOC token was a ERC 20 token based on the Ethereum platform. RChain’s native token is the REV token.

Visit http://revdefine.io/#/ to view the RChain platform transactions history.

Three Epochs and Counting

Among the RChain other successes over the past year are the epochs. At the start of each epoch REV token holders have the opportunity to stake tokens on the RChain Cooperative node validators. Staked tokens provide network security on the proof of stake (PoS) consensus blockchain. An epoch length is 250,000 blocks which is approximately four months. Token holders that stake REV currently receive a seigniorage reward of 7%. At the end of each epoch participants can elect to rollover their tokens to the next epoch or cash out their staked tokens and/ or their reward.

Ideation Workshop

RChain coop members presented several ideas and user stories at the Ideation Workshop to promote the development of decentralized applications (dapps) and developer tools. Ideation Workshop winners received REV token rewards.

Submitted ideas included:

• C-RTS revives the classical RTS genre once again and fuses it with a real crypto economy to make the game e-sport ready from the start.
• xRETH-DEX is a decentralized exchange.
• CubeSpawn is a simulated design environment.
• Tree of Wally (ToW) is a Wally currency mint and governance entity that regulates live Wally distribution and data rates (aka tax, gas, or resource constraint) within an app ecosystem, beginning with a content subscription platform.
• js2rho uses JavaScript developer tools to write Rholang smart contracts.
• Reactive Game generates random numbers from a blockhash. The game demonstrates the reactiveness of Rholang.
• Liquid (superfluid) Democracy + Trust Metric Prototype in RhoLang, trust from the top down and bottom up are combined to determine sentiment and make good decisions in line with both the cooperative and the members.
• Visual rholang process modeling with BPMN for facilitating Rholang smart contract development.
• Rv2020 is RChain voting with discord integration.
• RStake helps with a community operated RChain staking pool(s).
• Distributed Non-Profit Community Ledger is a start-up platform where a coop requires distributed ledger technology (DLT) to track/audit member contributions & ‘reputations’ as well as patron usage & ‘reward points’.
• Third party content verification is a feature that allows any website running on Dappy (dapp) to trigger a third party content verification by the browser, based on cryptography and the name system. The goal for such a system is to provide companies and organizations extended tools for third party quoting on the web.

Ideation Workshop winners were:

• First place — Liquid Democracy + Trust Metric Prototype in RhoLang
• Second place — Third party content verification
• Third place — Rv2020

Hack-A-Thon

The RChain Hack-A-Thon was an opportunity for participants to come together to share dapp ideas, collaborate and learn about Rho calculus (the math behind Rholang). There are plans for a future Hack-A-Thon this year. Visit GitHub learning links to learn more about the RChain platform.

RVote

RVote found its roots as RV2020 in the Idea Workshop. RVote is a blockchain based voting dapp developed by the RChain community to allow coop members to vote for board of directors (BODs) and Items of Business (IOB) during the RChain annual membership meeting (AGM) in October 2020. To learn more watch the RChain voting demonstration for RVote and MetaMask.

Annual General Meeting (AGM)

Each year RChain Cooperative holds an AGM to elect the board of directors and vote on Items of business proposals. The 2020 AGM was held virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Three candidates were elected to board and one IOB was approved by the membership. Visit the GitHub repo to learn more about the AGM 2020 election results. RChain is a representative cooperative in which the coop members vote to elect representatives to sit on the board to represent their interests. Board members vote on resolutions at monthly board meetings which determine the RChain course and direction. Learn more about how to join the RChain Cooperative as a member.

Last Finalized State (LFS)

With LFS RChain can now remove the blocks from the blockchain (for instance, a group of 250,000 blocks) which in turn lightens the blockchain. Having far fewer blocks to process for update creates greater efficiency which allows new node validators to quickly arrive at the current state. LFS allows the RChain blockchain to be GDPR compliant and provides for legacy data business opportunities. Read “Blockchain Gets Lean and Accessible” for more information.

RChain Computer Science Workshop

This well attended event saw esteemed mathematic and computer science participants from

Imperial college, University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, Brunel University, University of Lisbon, Royal Holloway London, and University of Hertfordshire. The individuals from these prestigious institutions are the key players in Multi-Party Session Types which derives from pi-calculus and choreography.

Block merge

The RChain platform network of validators scales both vertically and horizontally. The network scales vertically in that as you add more CPU processors to a validator node, the node gets faster. With the implementation of block merge the RChain network now scales horizontally in that as you add validator nodes, the network scales nearly linearly. Scalability is the ability to process a high volume of transactions.

Block merge is currently implemented on the RChain devnet.

Roadmap

There are more technical milestones to achieve. This year RChain will update the proof of stake (PoS) contract which will allow for external validators to spin up nodes. Rholang version 1.1 will allow for more expressiveness and performance. Namespaces and sharding will bring more performance by allowing concurrent processing. For more information on the RChain Cooperative visit https://rchain.coop/