Announcing the burning of 21,000,000 WAN by the Wanchain Foundation 🔥🔥🔥🔥

The excess WAN have been burned to preserve the total number of WAN

Noah Maizels

Published in

Wanchain

3 min readNov 7, 2019

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At 11:02:30 on November 5, 2019, Beijing time, the Wanchain Foundation burned 21 million WAN tokens. These tokens were transferred to the address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (commonly known as the“zero address”).

View the transaction on the explorer:

https://www.wanscan.org/tx/0x6bc3b697e48b95793aae27b8e9aa84f98eebe5beb024b4a051b5845ef547d865

Why destroy 21 million WAN?

We know that the total amount of tokens issued by the WAN is 210,000,000, and 210,000,000 have been generated in the creation block. In the token allocation plan, we will use 10% of the total amount of the issue for the reward of PoS equity mining.

In September 2019, Galaxy Proof of Stake Consensus went live on the Wanchain mainnet, and each day (each epoch) a certain amount of WAN tokens are generated as reward for validator nodes. According to the rules of Galaxy Consensus, Wanchain’s mainnet will issue 2.5 million WAN as consensus reward in the first year, and the rewards will be reduced by 12% year by year. Eventually, all the 21 million WAN will be issued (more precisely, infinitely close to 21 million WAN).

Those 21 million WAN were originally reserved by the Wanchain Foundation to be used as an incentives. They were reserved before the new consensus mechanism was implemented. Since in it’s implementation on the mainnet, Galaxy Consensus issues new WAN instead of using the reserved WAN, those WAN must be burned in order to preserve the accurate total number of WAN.

If we don’t destroy 21 million WAN in the creation block, then the entire Wanchain mainnet will generate 21 million new WAN tokens out of thin air, which is contrary to the total amount of WAN tokens as stated in the white paper of 210,000,000. Therefore, the burning of the WAN by the Wanchain foundation is done to ensure the same total amount of WAN.

Why is it possible to burn 21 million WAN by sending them to the “zero address”?

We know that users generate public-private key pairs on the Wanchain main network through the elliptic curve algorithm (ECDSA) (similar to Ethereum’s public-private key algorithm). A key opens a lock, and only when the user holds a private key of 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (“zero address”) can the 21 million WAN at that address be transferred.
So, how likely is the user to get the private key for the address? A total of 2160 (2 to the 160th power) different addresses can be generated for the entire Wanchain network. No one has the private keys of this address, and it is near impossible to generate it (1 in ²¹⁶⁰ chance in generating the correct private key per attempt.) This means the chance of generating it is near enough to zero that you could convert the entire solar system to a supercomputer and try until the end of the universe and never succeed.¹

About Wanchain

Wanchain is the infrastructure connecting the decentralized financial world. Wanchain’s live cross-blockchain solution is EVM-based, includes optional private transactions, and provides a decentralized, permissionless, and secure approach for interoperability. Wanchain has employees globally with teams in Beijing (China), Austin (USA), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and Madrid (Spain).