RUSH Network 1.2 — Upgrading RUSH coin Smart Contract

Greetings Voyagers,

We’re pretty sure that after reading the title of this article you may be slightly surprised, even maybe annoyed. However, before grabbing your pitchforks, let us explain what is going on!

As this is an important topic for our RUSH holders, we’ll do our best to be as precise in our explanation as possible, so instead of doing the usual method of writing a full on article first and ending with a summary, we want to write the most important points first.

1. There will be no change to the total RUSH supply.
2. This will be a 1:1 swap of RUSH that is initiated by the player — we are not airdropping.
3. The swap is handled in-game. When players send their existing RUSH to the game, it will be perfectly valid/usable. However, if they withdraw RUSH, they will get the updated token.
4. We are not adding any more RUSH to the total circulation.

Due to the way that this is handled, we could have done it quietly, however we do not feel that secretive actions are in the spirit of blockchain or Hash Rush, so we’re giving a full disclosure of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it.

Brief History

If you are a blockchain enthusiast, you will know that the Ethereum blockchain is extremely popular and is constantly evolving. This evolution is necessary for the security of the blockchain, the smart contracts that live on it, and for its general lifespan.

However, this vital evolution of the Ethereum blockchain also presets some challenges to the many projects that have Smart Contracts running on it. This is something that we have come across quite a few times.

Looking back at our first RC to RUSH token swap, though there were some people that were not too happy with that decision (we did not communicate things properly and there were misunderstandings) the decision was made for the simple reason of security. What happened was after the RC contract was deployed, over time the functionality of the Ethereum expanded and vulnerabilities were detected and patched, leading us to the point that we had to upgrade (RC to RUSH) to stay safe and make use of the new features.

Though we had hoped that the solutions that we implemented in the RUSH contract would suffice for the entire game, we find ourselves in a similar situation now.

To the Present

As we announced in our previous article, we have partnered with 4ire Labs and they have been developing the blockchain part of the game. Furthermore, as mentioned in that article, the developers from 4ire Labs were able to take our design and point out new possibilities that we had not previously considered — the RUSH Gas Station that provides free RUSH transactions everywhere, improvements to our RUSH Liquidity Pool, better scalability, and so on, all ideas that can only come from people that are hugely experienced in their craft!

Naturally, these ideas were quickly incorporated into the Hash Rush Wallet servers (after all, we want to offer you the very best), but we realized that the RUSH Smart Contract was not equipped to handle such a large project. Ultimately, where it lacked was in the scalability and upgradability departments, so we had to make a choice between:

1. We keep the old contract and scrap the idea of a RUSH Gas Station
2. Or we create a new contract that can support it

As we’re sure that you can guess, we went with option 2.

Preventing History from repeating itself

With the course set, we then began asking the important question of, how can we prevent this from happening again. After all, though we can always make the token swap/contract change to be as seamless and easy as possible, such an action is dramatic and not one that we wish to do every year. The solution comes in the form of Proxy Smart Contracts.

Though traditionally, one thinks of Smart Contracts as permanent, what you may not know about is the existence of Proxy Smart Contracts. We will refer you to this article on Hackernoon if you want to learn more about these contracts.

The short version is that these contracts are upgradeable and so by using them, you avoid the issue of constantly having to change your contract (and so your token) when an issue with the contract arises, or, like in or case, when you need to have something more in the contract to provide a valuable feature.

We should note that in our case the total supply is NOT upgradeable, so once again our blockchain community need not worry about interference in that area.

How this will work

With the basic explanation of why we are doing this swap out of the way, we must now look to the question of how.

Once again, thanks to the amazing people at 4ire Labs, we have an in-game solution that is really exciting as it means that in order for us to do this, the blockchain part of the game will need to come live — something that many of you have been waiting for.

How it will work

• Once the blockchain part of the game has been activated players will be able to send their old RUSH to the game.
• The game systems will then credit their accounts like we explained here.
• However,when the player goes to withdraw RUSH, they will automatically get the new RUSH.

The biggest advantage of this method is that it gives our players more protection against scammers as no matter what version of RUSH they have, they are both valid. However, as the game system will only return the new RUSH, what essentially happens is that the old RUSH is gradually removed from the ecosystem (so no double spending the old RUSH).

What does this mean for the Hash Rush blockchain services?

It means that the blockchain activation is just round the corner. We currently estimate that we will activate the first major in-game blockchain features in the week of the 14 to 20 of September.

We will then let the system settle down, and let players swap their RUSH, somewhere in October to November, we will go live with the RUSH Liquidity pool, opening up a whole new world of opportunities for those that wish to take part!