Theta Mainnet 3.0 will be released today — Everything you need to know about this major protocol update and TFuel staking
The day is finally here for Theta Mainnet 3.0! Theta blockchain will perform a hardfork at blockheight 10,968,061 (approximately 12pm Wednesday June 30, 2021 PT) to enable the Mainnet 3.0 upgrade. These updates are critical to incentivizing Edge Nodes and growing their numbers to 100k and beyond, making the Edge Network more useful to video platforms and other partners increasing adoption of Theta Network overall. Strengthening the network of Edge Nodes also enables additional new work types such as decentralized storage for NFTs, processing for applications operating on edge networks, and much more.
For a full technical and economic background on Mainnet 3.0, see the whitepaper here.
Note, there is no token swap as part of Mainnet 3.0. Your THETA and TFUEL tokens are safe as-is in their existing wallet addresses. Do not fall for any scams about ‘required token swaps’.
Theta Mainnet 3.0 introduces two major protocol innovations:
- Elite Edge Nodes will enable “Uptime Mining”, the tokenization of Internet bandwidth and availability. Users will be able to stake TFuel to an Edge Node to upgrade it to become an Elite Edge Node. Elite Edge Nodes can earn additional TFuel through their staked TFuel, incentivizing a larger, more robust, and more reliable Edge Network. New 4% TFuel inflation for uptime mining for Edge Nodes will be introduced in this update.
- A new TFuel burning mechanism will add a cost for using Theta Edge Network, namely a “network fee” as a balancing force against new TFuel supply. Since Theta Network launched two years ago we recognized that there is significant value accrued to video platform partners in the form of content delivery network (CDN) cost savings, increased user engagement, and revenues resulting from shifting infrastructure costs to user rewards. With Mainnet 3.0, a minimum of 25% of each TFuel payment to the Edge Network will be burned at the protocol level, effectively becoming a cost for platforms using the network. In addition to this, 100% of all gas fees for running smart contracts and transactions are burned. In the long-run as Theta’s Edge Network becomes more widely adopted, this could meaningfully reduce the supply of TFuel.
To prepare for Mainnet 3.0, updates have been made to several key components of the Theta ecosystem. You can get the details for each update here:
For instructions on staking TFUEL to upgrade to the Elite Edge Node, see the Theta Docs page here.
While Theta blockchain will always continue evolving at the protocol level, with the core Theta blockchain features now in place, the focus of Theta development will shift toward the broader Theta ecosystem and global adoption of the network. We’re excited to share more on these upcoming initiatives with the Theta community in Q3.
