Telos Blockchain Network — Weekly Report — December 28th, 2018
Happy Holidays
The first full week of free-range Telos happened to come during the same week that Santa visits and many hard-working tech workers go home to visit their families (or better yet, Mazatlan). I would not have chosen to launch the network just before the biggest holiday in North America and Europe, but it was a good test. The chain survived. New users discovered it, and the TLOS token even started trading with a bit of volume. It’s very tempting to do a “12 Days of Telos” piece, but I’m not a fan of cramming poorly fitting tech puns into holiday literature, so I’ll skip it.
A lot has happened this week. The Telos Foundation elected its board. This is almost certainly the first blockchain election of this type. Oh, people have voted by blockchain before, but then they usually let the smart contract count the votes and then humans make any necessary changes based on the outcome. With the Telos Foundation board, control of the TF 6 million TLOS in funds are transferred to the winners, who then have specific voting powers to access and disburse those funds. That, to my knowledge, has never happened before. It has certainly not happened in EOSIO. I’ll be writing more about what a landmark this election is soon.
The funny thing about landmark elections is, when they are done, you still have to figure out who is going to update your website. The Telos Foundation Board’s real work begins now. There is a lot to do. Most of the functions of the Telos Foundation were handled in-house by GoodBlock and other TLG members until the TF board was elected. Now that is has been, there will be a quiet transfer of those powers. When nations do this, they have parades and speeches. As a new organization, the TF is probably just going to have a Zoom call. Parades are probably a ways off.
The Telos block producers have been doing their primary job — keeping the network humming along — exceedingly well. So far, the Telos chain has been as boring as promised, with no unexpected pauses or hiccoughs.
RAM is also purring along without incident. While RAM did briefly double in price, the TF RAM Administration Director (interim), Jan Smit, executed a number of trades which cost a few, previously warned, RAM speculators quite a bit of TLOS. Fortunately, the rise in RAM prices was short-lived. At the moment, RAM is 0.108 TLOS per Kilobyte, or 8% above the Publish Guidance Price. That’s not bad at all. Telos RAM costs have not come close to the debilitating speculation that occurred on EOS, either in the magnitude of the price rise, nor the length of time it persisted. And at the moment, in real dollar terms, Telos RAM costs 1/20th what EOS RAM costs and Telos NET and CPU cost 1/100th their EOS equivalents. It’s a fire sale for eos.io app developers.
Speaking of developers, the biggest news on Telos is that EDNA, the world-changing app that puts your DNA on the blockchain under your own control, announced that it would deploy on Telos in less than three weeks and provide a “teleport” token gateway for users to transfer their EDNA tokens on the EOS chain to Telos. This is a major decentralized app choosing to deploy on Telos for all the right reasons. If it were not for the Christmas and New Years holidays going on right now, I expect we would be seeing much more of this from other apps hanging on the sidelines. I expect that January will show a lot of this activity. Which is great, because the whole purpose of Telos is to empower apps and users to come together.
I wish everyone a happy new year and want to thank you for following Telos through 2018. I am committed to making Telos THE platform for 2019. We have an amazing road ahead of us.
With the new year and the new Telos Foundation board, my weekly report will migrate to the new GoodBlock Medium page at https://medium.com/@goodblock_info. I have a number of articles planned for the next few weeks covering many areas of Telos from arbitration, to worker proposals, to plans for ongoing development by the core devs — including our roadmap for the first quarter of 2019.
— Douglas Horn
Here’s what we accomplished this week:
- Telos Foundation Board Elections Completed
- Interim Block Producer Compliance Team Disbands
- EDNA Announces It Will Deploy on Telos
- Mainnet Updates
- RAM Prices Remain Stable
- EOSex Lists TLOS
First Telos Foundation Board Elections Completed
The Telos Foundation is an independent organization that supports essential network functions and projects that would otherwise go unfunded. On December 24th, 2018, the Foundation announced the first round of nominees elected to its Executive Board: Richard Bryan, J.T. Buice, Mark Cohen, Beth Farnham, Justin Giudici, Azad Halim, Jim Hewitt, Rob James, Josep Rosich, Jesse Schulman, Marlon Williams, and Joost Voordouw.
Votes were cast over a three day period by Telos Foundation Voter Token holders, a group mostly comprised of Telos Launch Group and EOS community members. Board members are now tasked with filling the roles of Executive Director and RAM Administration Director (currently held by Interim Director Jan Smit) and staff roles.
Read the full press release: https://medium.com/@teloslogical/press-release-telos-foundation-board-elections-completed-ecfdf9b393b4
The Telos Foundation Interim Charter and TFVT Token Distribution Process: https://medium.com/@teloslogical/telos-foundation-interim-charter-and-tfvt-token-distribution-process-ca88b2ef1e1e
Interim Block Producer Compliance Team Disbands
On December 26th, the Interim Block Producer (BP) Compliance Team comprised of Mark Cohen (Telos Vancouver), Richard Bryan (TelosDAC), Azad Halim (Octagon Labs), and James Davis (GoodBlock) officially stepped down. The team’s regulatory responsibilities, such as helping new Telos block producers achieve full compliance with Telos governance rules and confirming compliance status of new BP candidates prior to kicking, have now been relegated to the Telos block producers (BPs).
BPs are in the progress of determining best practices for enforcing regulatory compliance on the mainnet. There currently is no formalized chain-of-command for vetting new BPs and garnering the ⅔+1 minimum vote of 15/21 active BPs needed to kick noncompliant BPs. Any proposed solutions will need to balance the need for transparent governance with maintaining decentralized decision-making power. In the meantime, prospective BPs can refer to the resources below for block production requirements and guidelines:
Block Producer Compliance Overview: https://github.com/Telos-Foundation/telos/wiki/Telos:-Block-Producer-Compliance-Overview
Telos Block Producer Minimum Requirements: https://github.com/Telos-Foundation/tips/blob/master/BPMinReq.md
Disclosure of Entity and Server Information — “regproducer” Human-language Contract:
EDNA Announces It Will Deploy on Telos
EDNA, a decentralized solution allowing individuals to have their genomes sequenced and then retain control of that data, including monetizing and storing genetic data without compromising user identity, has publicly announced that they will deploy on the Telos Blockchain Network. EDNA CEO Greg Simpson made the announcement along with GoodBlock founder Douglas Horn on a special installment of the Costa Rica Crypto YouTube channel. The EDNA initial coin offering took place on EOS, but the team has decided to join Telos because of more opportunities to empower its users. The GoodBlock dev team will also be reviewing the DAC monetization contract to ensure that token transfer happens smoothly.
The EDNA token staking contract is now live. Token holders will see increased rewards in three weeks leading up to unlocking the DAC monetization contract, at which point you will be able to transfer your tokens from the EOS network to the Telos network. This will allow users to access features that are unique to Telos (soon to be announced).
We are grateful to EDNA for bringing tremendous value to the Network and look forward to the development of this partnership.
Learn more about the EDNA: www.edna.life
Watch the Costa Crypto conversation with EDNA founder Greg Simpson and Douglas Horn of GoodBlock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQURQiHce1s&feature=youtu.be
RAM Prices Remain Stable
Thanks to RAM Public Guidance Price (PGP) protocols and outstanding leadership from Interim RAM Director Jan Smit (Dutch EOS), RAM prices remained stable despite initial attempts of speculative buying from a small group of token holders immediately following Network Activation.
The price of RAM first increased slightly in response to the increase in new Telos accounts that were created. Speculators immediately bought 0.8GB in the first 15 minutes of activation, driving up the price more than thirty percent, and the RAM Administration then sold the same amount to reduce the RAM price back down to 0.1 TLOS within just 10 minutes. After several other similar rounds of speculative buying, the RAM Administration requested that BPs quickly increase RAM to 32GB before releasing 1.6GB back into the market, which eventually brought the RAM price back down to 0.11 TLOS.
Jan has also begun to test and refine a new strategy of selling RAM into the market at a high frequency to prevent cycles of speculative buying following a large sale of RAM by the RAM Administration. As of December 26th, the Administration was selling approximately 20KB per minute (170 bytes per block) during most of the day. Currently, the RAM price remains stable and is trading at 0.107 TLOS per KB as of publication time.
Mainnet Updates
The Telos Mainnet has been operating smoothly without disruptions since its launch, a significant accomplishment. The Telos Core Developers including Peter Bue, Craig Branscom, and Ed Silva of GoodBlock along with J.T. Buice of Kainos BP and Jesse Schulman of CalEOS have detected and resolved small system issues. An exploitable bug was found in the `eosio.saving` and `eosio.amend` contracts and resolved with a new code patch. Following a pull request, the system passed a series of regression and unit tests and the contracts were updated. There is nothing to suggest that the potential bug was ever exploited.
EOSex Lists TLOS
On December 25th, 2018, EOSex officially began listing TLOS tokens on its hybrid exchange. This new listing provides more options for buying and selling TLOS tokens, and is also available in eleven languages. Tokens on the Telos mainnet can also apply to be listed on EOSex. Thanks to Josep Rosich (EOS Barcelona) for building the EOSex wallets and delegating TLOS for CPU and bandwidth.
Learn more: https://eosex.com/#/
Token listing application: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxsC6z7ncJiydUMnjmR8medPE3kh7SZLlCdSXfBXyrrw-xUA/viewform
Join the Telos conversation and get more info!
Telegram: https://t.me/HelloTelos
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HelloTelos
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TelosFoundation.io
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheTelosNetwork
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TelosNetwork/
Discord:https://discordapp.com/channels/466757729508261889/468500684858327040
