Dear Terra Community,
As promised, Terra’s mainnet columbus has launched on 4/23 (incidentally, the company’s 1 year anniversary) and has successfully produced its first 380k blocks — it shouldn’t be long until we catch up to Bitcoin’s 570k. Columbus launch was a big milestone, but just the starting point in what will be Terra’s most exciting year yet. We wanted to take this opportunity to recap some details from the mainnet launch and update you on other exciting upcoming events.
Mainnet Status
Columbus launch was awesome. Obviously the mainnet launch was a big (and emotional) event for all of us, and before we go any further wanted to share a video of the team counting down to the launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN_ksMSNXe0. Special thanks to our own Ken & Logan from the design team for orchestrating the event and video.
The chain is stable and fast. As for the network stats, current average block time is around 6.21 seconds. Given there is an intended 5 second blocktime delay, the network is currently achieving consensus in 1.21 seconds on average. There have not been any missed blocks, consensus faults or known errors. Though we will be pushing an update to the mainnet with minor client-side updates, we are confident that Columbus in its current form will be able to facilitate payment traffic to the tune of millions of users. Also, a security audit performed over the last 3 months by Certik and published (with lots of flattery added). (https://www.cryptoninjas.net/2019/05/14/certik-high-impressed-after-security-audit-of-stablecoin-protocol-terra/).
There are many tools being developed by our developer community. Besides our own block explorer and wallet, many developers in the community have already come forward to develop ecosystem tools for Columbus.
- Stake id by Staking Fund: https://terra.stake.id/#/
- Figment Hubble block explorer: https://hubble.figment.network/terra/chains/columbus-1
- Big Dipper by Forbole: https://terra.bigdipper.live/
- An iOS wallet in testflight by Syncnode
All in all, we are starting to see an unexpected level of developer engagement and are humbled by this incredible vote of confidence by our community.
The network is getting meaningful organic traction from node operators. With zero marketing & invites to validators, Columbus launched with ~30 validators from all across the world and now has ~49 validators and counting. The main attraction point to validators has been lower business uncertainty, as Terra staking rewards are a function of Terra payments adoption (and also paid out in stablecoin!) instead of a fixed rate inflation reward in a volatile base asset. Many others are working with us to set up nodes and get involved with staking in some way.
Many of you showed public support during the launch, for which we are thankful. Let’s keep these coming!
- Binance investment thesis https://www.binance.com/en/blog/327277090177957888/Binance-Labs-Invests-in-Terra-A-Better-Payment-Network-for-the-Masses
- Arrington XRP blog post http://arringtonxrpcapital.com/2019/04/24/why-we-are-joining-terra-mainnet-as-a-genesis-validator/
- GBIC investor thesis https://medium.com/gbic/stablecoin-with-real-use-cases-matters-178511290997?sk=480915686399fd3761fdad6c4d4428a3
- Paul Veradittakit (Pantera Capital) investor thesis http://www.veradiverdict.com/issues/veradiverdict-korea-s-first-stablecoin-issue-35-174744
- David Lee blog post http://daslee.me/terra
- Launch joint video with Cosmos founder Jae Kwon and yours truly https://youtu.be/kVcFOl2R5fU
- OkEx investor support post https://medium.com/ok-blockchain-capital/why-we-believe-in-terras-next-gen-payment-solution-370012df9bde
- Hashed: why support terra https://medium.com/hashed-official/our-investment-in-terra-re-building-money-from-the-ground-up-fa8693a022e4
- [Korean] Terra explainer video by Nonce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpfWIHeOS8M&t=2s
- [Korean] Daniel Shin explainer about Terra http://bit.ly/thereal_terra
- Cherubic ventures investment thesis https://bit.ly/2VAEumt
- LuneX investor thesis https://decrypt.asia/entrepreneurs/episode44/
- TMON integration thesis https://bit.ly/2W14kEs
Exchange listings & wallets
Luna has listed on Coinone, a major Korean exchange, and early price discovery has gone well with Luna currently trading at about $2.7–3 range over the last two weeks. We have undergone integration work with several other exchanges, and news regarding these listings should be announced over our public community channels as soon as they become available.
We have a ledger wallet available for download (custom build needed) on https://github.com/terra-project/ledger-terra. We expect this to be up on Ledger Live shortly. Integration work has also started with several other wallets and custody providers.
Upcoming launch schedules
So what’s next? There are some exciting developments coming:
Terra payments will launch in June. First to bat will be TMON, a leading e-commerce platform in Korea. This new service will be a end-to-end payment gateway integrated with 13 of 15 commercial banks in Korea, meaning that users are able to link their bank accounts to checkout instead of having to manage their own private keys or wallet addresses. Our backend payment rail facilitates the purchase and settlement of Terra. After TMON, we will be quickly pushing through integrations with the rest of the Terra alliance, summarized here: state of the alliance post.
Terra Research will become more transparent and understandable within the next few days. Our research team has been hard at work releasing a human readable stability analysis. Though it’s not long, it encompasses many week’s work that went on in our research github repo: https://github.com/terra-project/research. Now that Terra is public, research will also be doing more of its work in the open, and the first step to this will be to open a open discussion forum on our website.
Asks
Consider Luna staking as part of your portfolio strategy. Several major investors, such as Hashed, Polychain, 1kx, 100&100, Binance Labs, DDC, Hof, GDAC, Translink and others have either started running validator nodes or started engaging with other validators to stake through delegation. We expect this move to be very profitable for these institutions. But just as important, staking and running nodes sends the right messages to our community that early investors are committed to Terra’s vision and are with us through the long haul. The core team would be more than happy to walk investors through the economics and mechanics of staking Luna to facilitate this.
Continue community development & PR efforts. For those of you with access to media and community channels, please help raise awareness for Terra by either presenting the project yourselves, or by introducing the core team to those opportunities. Special shoutout to Michael Arrington, who spent his panel time raving about Terra on the main stage of Deconomy.
Help us with hiring. What makes Terra great are its great people. Our HR panel, terra.breezy.hr has the current list of open positions. If you know any candidates that would be a great fit for these positions, and are hungry for solving problems at the scale of our ambitions, please introduce us.
With ❤,
Terra Team
