March to Mainnet: Progress Update II

Hard Fork Rehearsal is Commencing

Bluzelle

Published in

The Blueprint by Bluzelle

4 min readNov 23, 2020

Dear BLZ Soldiers,

As of today, the Bluzelle soft-mainnet has successfully surpassed 1,500,000 in block height. With the team’s hard work and effort, we are proud to inform that the new test network is now ready for public testing. This is a rehearsal for network hard fork to the production mainnet.

We have chosen the best mainnet upgrade strategy that only requires the efforts of validators to accomplish the update. Our strategy greatly reduces all the fuzz to withdraw and redeposit tokens for delegators, while keeping the staking record accurate during transition.

It is a good time for us to celebrate this small milestone together with our community and also provide an update of what we have achieved in the past month and our progress to mainnet.

Development Update

The Bluzelle team is playing an important role in the Tendermint/COSMOS ecosystem. We believe that contributing to the ecosystem by identifying bugs and issues will definitely help to improve the security of the Bluzelle network. Apart from the major bugs we uncovered during the Swarm of Duty campaign back in July, we have continued to identify and fix more in the past months. Those include:

Consensus failure after hard fork (read more)
Failure to fork a network with a small number of validators (read more)
Incorrect behaviour in query txs when limit is set over 100 (read more)
Unicode appeared in the response to transaction queries (read more)
Incorrect help text in Cosmos SDK (read more)
Bugs that caused Bluzelle Bridge to stop working in some cases

We also implemented many more new features to improve the usability, user experience and security of the Bluzelle network, including:

Added support for network hard fork
Added support for SSL on all sentries
Added support for SSL on BigDipper and Census. This means every aspect of the Bluzelle network and interface will be HTTPS encrypted.
Update in jailing criteria. This include allowing a larger number of missed blocks which can give validators more breathing room before getting jailed
New advanced gas algorithm that makes it economically possible to have “permanent” leases for data storage. It also implements a fair pricing for DB storage that is commensurate with existing cloud databases
Added tax module for network fee. This will serve as one of the revenue streams for the foundation in the long term.
Advanced new client support for the BluzelleDB which will allow searching for keys with prefixes, and filtering key-value pairs by data owner.
Support for transaction batching. This allows hundreds and thousands of requests to be sent in a single atomic transaction. This increases Bluzelle’s TPS (transactions per second) by many orders of magnitude. Critical to compete with incumbent non-blockchain competitor networks.
New BluzelleStudio, the visual data explorer for developers. This will be released for public use in the coming weeks.
Created more security measures for the Bluzelle Bridge to make it more resilient to failures arising from networks it interacts with.

Despite our ambitious timeline, we have navigated through the obstacles and made a great leap forward. However, we foresee the following items to be completed before mainnet can be launched:

Run a new public testnet in parallel that includes all the new features and bug fixes mentioned above. Public validators will be invited to join our testing. We anticipate this to run for at least two-three weeks to ensure it runs smoothly and without any failure
Final testing of hard fork support. Soft mainnet validators will be invited for a series of “rehearsals”
Final testing of Bluzelle Bridge (especially for conversion to BLZ, which will be initially run manually daily, while conversion to BNT will be automatic)

Update about Naming of BLZ tokens

As we all know, Bluzelle has a dual-token system. One is an Ethereum-based token and the other is our native token based on Cosmos. We have decided to standardize the naming of both tokens as follows.

Original: BLZ (Ethereum-based) <> BNT (Native)

Current: ERC20 BLZ (Ethereum-based) <> BLZ (Native)

In summary, the name of “BNT” will be eliminated and both tokens will now be called BLZ, with the ERC20 token being identified as such. This will help to avoid confusion between the Bluzelle network and others, allowing us to better spread our brand in the crypto community.

Commencement of Hard Fork Rehearsal

This would be the most exciting part! The real hard fork will be a highly coordinated event, where all the mainnet validators are required to perform the action together within a short window. Otherwise you will risk being jailed and slashed.

We are now ready to invite all our soft mainnet validators to join our rehearsal! You will need to join our new public testnet and run through the hard fork process several times within the instructed time frame.

If you are a current validator on our soft mainnet, please fill out this form as soon as possible. We will invite you to our exclusive discord group to provide you with the instructions and next steps.

If you are not a current validator but are interested to join our public testing, please also fill out this form and the team will reach out to you shortly.

About Bluzelle

Bluzelle aims to be the go-to data layer for Web 3.0 by providing a decentralized data network that is tamper-proof and has greater privacy, scalability and availability than traditional solutions. Powered by Cosmos, Bluzelle handles 10,000 TPS and is a delegated proof of stake. Bluzelle’s DeFi solutions are being developed to enhance Defi with historical price feeds, provide data analytics, 360-degree views, and more. As DeFi grows, Bluzelle’s infrastructure services play a big role.