As our Blockchain Launch Roadmap advances, it’s time to share some information about the masternode conditions we provide.
TE-FOOD’s masternode economics is different from other projects. Most projects reward masternodes with their own volatile tokens, without any revenue backing in sight. This is like printing money, which resembles to pyramid schemes.
TE-FOOD will only pay out a part of its transactional revenue paid by customers. We will pay it in a stable token, called Calories (CAL) with no price volatility, which represents the exact value the customers owe to the service providers. We are aware that this model has its risks and limitations, but this is the only model we know which is feasible for a B2B environment, and compliant to the regulations.
Certainly, this model can not offer such high revenues like those which pay with tokens printed out of thin air. But paying with a volatile token, and continuously dilute the supply with it has obvious long term disadvantages compared to our model.
To make it more compelling, we established the opportunity of lowering the licence need of running masternodes as the reputation of the masternode grows. The masternode service revenue, and the Reputation Discount combined is a fair offering.
Estimated transaction numbers
There are two parameters which makes it difficult to estimate how many transactions the new system will serve:
- For some events, transactions will be bundled, while in other event types, they will be submitted separately,
- At first we migrate the pilot projects, and continuously roll out to the operational system.
Therefore, as a raw estimate, which depends on a lot of technical factors, we expect a daily number on the FoodChain to reach 70 000–100 000 transactions until January, 2019, and 200 000–250 000 transactions until June, 2019.
Compared to the traffic on other blockchains, these are extremely large numbers, which means TE-FOOD’s FoodChain can be one of the top 10 blockchains in terms of daily transaction number.
Reaching this requires careful execution, which can bring unexpected delays.
Required node tiers
As the transaction number grows to a point where the capacity of Operating Masternodes peaks, we will involve new nodes from the Sleeping Masternodes. The estimated node numbers for the coming months will be:
November, 2018
- Steel: 3
- Platinum: 3
- Titanium: 3
December, 2018
- Steel: 15
- Platinum: 10
- Titanium: 5
Beginning of 2019
- Steel: 30
- Platinum: 20
- Titanium: 10
According to our preliminary transaction growth calculations, for the first year of operation we plan to implement no more than 100 masternodes.
Selection mechanism
Selection mechanism will be done according to a ranking system, which will be based on the following criterias:
- Reputation condition (the smaller gets priority)
- Contracted period condition (the larger gets priority)
- Days of eligibility (the larger gets priority)
- Date of registration (the earlier gets priority)
Node onboarding
The tasks will be the following (this process applies to later operation as well, not only to the initial selection):
- Node operators registrate and do KYC on our upcoming Masternode Management Portal. Node registration will be open for upcoming Sleeping Masternodes as well.
- TE-FOOD verifies the KYC data.
- Contracting (through the Masternode Management Portal) with verified node operators.
- Node operators are required to provide the TFD licence tokens. We will detail in a separate post how staking will work.
- When selected masternodes can be implemented, TE-FOOD notifies the masternode operators that their account is activated, they can set up their server.
- Activated masternode operators download and install the TE-FOOD framework according to the installation guide.
- Nodes are ready to start operation.
Technical requirements of Masternodes
The following configurations are planned to be required for the specific tiers:
- Steel: Storage 40 GB SSD, 2 GB memory, 1 CPU
- Platinum: 60 GB SSD, 4 GB memory, 2 CPU
- Titanium: 100 GB SSD, 8 GB memory, 4 CPU
Please note that the final configuration parameters will be disclosed before the masternode onboarding. Depending on the first results, the configuration requirements may be different than the ones displayed here.
Transaction revenue
(TE-FOOD plans to pay a 1 CAL fee for masternode operators per transaction.
1 CAL will be pegged to the value of 0.00043 USD.)
Update: This part is modified later as written in this article.
Distributing the transactions amongst the masternode tiers will be done according to their configuration.
Temporary modifications to the masternode structure
Steel tier
Steel nodes are targeted masternodes to operate the interface towards different blockchains (FoodChain, or a third-party like Vechain, IBM FooD Trust, Waltonchain, etc.).
Although there are potential customers which are interested in using TE-FOOD’s identification materials and client applications, while storing their data on a third party blockchain, we still don’t serve any of these customers. As we are close to the launch of FoodChain, we had to decide if we will temporarily omit Steel masternodes from the structure, or enable them to participate in the validation and storage of transactions.
We opted for the second choice. This means Steel masternodes will be smaller capacity servers, but with the same purpose than Platinum masternodes.
In the future, when our customer base will contain several companies which decide to use a third-party blockchain, we will introduce Steel masternodes with their original purpose.
Iridium tier
Iridium tier is special, as it’s not a masternode, but a possibility for TFD licence token holders to rent out their tokens for supply chain companies.
Similarly to Steel nodes described before, at the start of FoodChain, we don’t have customers which are not already covered by TFD token licences. As the tokenization of TE-FOOD started in February, 2018, currently all the licences of our Vietnam operation are covered, we can only implement this service for the upcoming customers.
We have some upcoming projects, therefore the first batch of Iridium nodes are planned to start service still in the end of 2018.
Disclaimer
All conditions in this post are planned ones, which will be specified in details in the masternode service contract. Conditions may be changed if they don’t work properly in practice. Just like we do in other parts of the business: if it doesn’t work well despite our best intentions during planning, we iterate.
TE-FOOD is the world’s largest publicly accessible, farm-to-table fresh food traceability solution. Started in 2016, it serves 6000+ business customers, and handles 400,000 business transactions each day.
Website: www.te-food.com
Telegram group: https://t.me/tefood
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TE_FOOD
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TE_FOOD/
