XELIS Mainnet Launch

N. R. Crowningshield
XELIS Project
Published in
7 min readApr 19, 2024

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Genesis April 20, 2024

XELIS

The cryptosphere is set to experience a significant change on April 20, 2024, as XELIS, an innovative Layer 1 platform, launches its mainnet. The network has been meticulously crafted from scratch, using Rustlang as its primary programming language. Renowned for its safety, concurrency, and performance, Rust will enable XELIS to harness these attributes and introduce groundbreaking features that could significantly enhance the network’s functionality. This genesis aims to improve blockchain standards by integrating blockDAG architecture for simultaneous block propagation and implementing Homomorphic Encryption to improve privacy by encrypting balances and transferred amounts.

XELIS distinguishes itself with several unique features designed to optimize user experience and expand functionality within its network. Its egalitarian mining approach allows CPU and GPU users to participate efficiently, ensuring a decentralized and inclusive mining environment. The platform will also support Confidential Assets, allowing any asset deployed on XELIS to maintain confidentiality and full functionality, rather than simply serving as a number within a smart contract. The network also benefits from an advanced event system that ensures all activities, whether in the daemon or wallet, are easily detectable and notify users promptly.

XELIS improves user convenience with features like Instant Sync, which rapidly updates wallet balances and transaction history, and Integrated Addresses, which includes additional data in wallet addresses for enriched transactional information. XELIS is also gearing upto support Smart Contracts, enabling users to create and deploy decentralized applications effortlessly. Through these innovations, XELIS will provide one of the most user-friendly and versatile platforms, making it an attractive option for daily use and developer engagement in the broader crypto landscape.

  • Coin Name: XELIS (XEL)
  • Average Block Time: 15 seconds
  • Maximum Block Size: 1.25 MB
  • Block Reward: up to ~ 1.46 XEL
  • Maximum Supply: 18.4 million
  • Minimum Transaction Fees: 0.00001 XEL per kB
  • Atomic Units: 8
  • Block Dev Fee: 15%

Introduction to the XELIS BlockDAG

XELIS adheres to the principles of safety and decentralization while achieving today’s need for high performance. In the XELIS blockDAG, each block is strategically assigned a topological height — termed topoheight — based on its height within the directed acyclic graph. This topoheight conveys the block’s order, with blocks possessing higher topoheights considered later in the sequence. This topological ordering facilitates a clear and consistent understanding of the chronological relationships among blocks, ensuring the network’s transactions and sequence.

This system adapts dynamically to network demands by allowing simultaneous propagation of multiple blocks, forming a complex, interconnected web rather than a linear, monolithic chain. This method eliminates the dilemma of nodes deciding which block to orphan into a new chain during simultaneous block creation. Instead, the BlockDAG integrates all blocks, leveraging their cumulative difficulty — the sum of the total difficulty of all preceding blocks or ‘tips’ — to determine their sequence in the ledger. This method elevates the network’s scalability and significantly strengthens its security.

The block topological height within the XELIS chain acts like a dynamic pointer that can adjust in real-time during chain reorganizations until its block height surpasses the chain’s stable height. In scenarios where multiple branches exist within the DAG, the topological order becomes pivotal, ensuring a deterministic sequence based on the cumulative difficulty of each branch. This not only maintains the integrity and continuity of the ledger but also prevents potential conflicts.

The strategic selection of Rust as the programming foundation of XELIS is deliberate and purposeful. Rust’s reputation for preventing common security vulnerabilities associated with less safe languages positions XELIS to handle an array of complex operations and manage large-scale transactional loads with consistent high performance. This ensures that XELIS is not only a platform built with current technological standards in mind but one that is also future-proof, ready to adapt and evolve as demands and challenges in the digital transaction space grow.

The XELIS BlockDAG

Homomorphic Encryption and Privacy

XELIS incorporates Homomorphic Encryption (HE) using the ElGamal encryption system to ensure high transaction privacy. This advanced cryptographic technique allows for computations to be performed directly on ciphertexts, meaning that XELIS can perform secure operations without revealing the plaintext data. This capability is crucial for maintaining the confidentiality of transaction amounts and account balances, providing a superior level of confidentiality surpassing many of today’s existing cryptocurrencies.

Homomorphic Encryption in XELIS, for example, is a significant advancement in privacy technology. It enables the network to relentlessly uphold the anonymity and security of user data, even while facilitating complex operations that would typically compromise privacy in traditional systems. For instance, HE allows the network to execute aggregate functions, such as summing transaction values or verifying account balances, without decrypting the involved data. This secures user information against external threats and prevents potential internal leaks during data processing.

The implementation of HE in XELIS is particularly noteworthy for its contribution to the platform’s overall efficiency. By enabling secure, on-the-fly data processing, HE significantly reduces the overhead associated with data encryption and decryption processes. This optimization is crucial for maintaining high throughput rates even as the network scales. The dual benefits of enhanced security and operational efficiency are central to the XELIS architectural philosophy, which emphasizes its commitment to innovating crypto’s capabilities.

Scalability and Performance

XELIS boasts exceptionally high performance, with transaction verification and execution times averaging around 0.40 milliseconds per transaction. This speed includes the application of Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Homomorphic Encryption, which are generally resource-intensive processes. Theoretically, XELIS is engineered to handle up to 2500 transactions per second (TPS), a rate that is tempered in practice by the network’s average block time of 15 seconds.

Mining XELIS

The mining mechanism within XELIS is deliberately designed to be CPU-friendly at its inception, promoting an egalitarian distribution of mining opportunities. CPU mining was strategically chosen to avoid the pitfalls of mining centralization seen in networks that favor more specialized hardware, such as ASICs. By limiting the performance gap between GPUs and CPUs to a modest ratio of 3–4x, XELIS encourages a more uniform and democratic participation in the mining process.

GPU mining software will be left for the community to build since they are historically more powerful and updated regularly by dedicated miner developers.

This CPU launch encourages inclusivity and strengthens the network’s decentralization. A broad base of miners from diverse geographical and economic backgrounds bolstering network security and resilience against coordinated attacks or failures. The commitment to maintaining a level playing field among miners and the XELIS dedication to fairness and accessibility.

XELIS distinguishes its mining architecture from conventional blockchain networks by employing a unique format called the BlockMiner, which is sent to miners in hex format. This consists of several key components, including a 32-byte header work hash, timestamp, nonce, extra nonce, and miner public key, totaling 120 bytes. The header work hash is crucial as it is immutable and derived using the Blake3 hashing algorithm. It includes essential block data like block version, block height, and hashes of the tips and transaction hashes.

The mining process in XELIS involves calculating the Proof of Work (POW) hash from the BlockMiner format and comparing it against the target difficulty. This approach uses the Blake3 hashing algorithm for all calculations except the POW hash. Miners receive updates on new block work or transaction additions to the mempool via a GetWork WebSocket server, ensuring they always work with the most current data.

To start mining on Mainnet: GitHub

Governance and Community-driven Development

XELIS is distinctively community-driven, eschewing the traditional corporate-backed model of development. The platform employs a decreasing dev fee structure, beginning at 15% of the block reward, to fund ongoing development and network support. This approach secures the project’s sustainability while aligning its growth with the community’s interests and involvement.

The governance framework of XELIS is also of particular note. Before integrating Smart Contracts, the community plays an active role in shaping the network’s evolution through open discussions and decision-making processes. This participatory model keeps the development aligned with user interests and promotes transparency and accountability within the XELIS ecosystem.

Smart Contracts and Beyond

As XELIS looks to the future, the planned integration of Smart Contracts is a climactic enhancement that will expand the platform’s capabilities. The introduction of Smart Contracts is set to catalyze the development of a diverse range of applications, from automated financial services to complex decentralized applications (dApps). This strategic expansion will significantly broaden the utility and appeal of XELIS, potentially transforming it into a cornerstone technology for decentralized finance (DeFi) and beyond.

With its mainnet launch imminent, XELIS is on the brink of setting new industry standards for privacy, security, and scalability in crypto technology. The XELIS project combines blockDAG and advanced cryptographic techniques with a solid commitment to decentralization and community-driven development. This positions XELIS to transform the potential of blockchain within the cryptosphere. As the network moves forward, it promises not only to meet the current demands of the digital economy but also to innovate and lead in the creation of future blockchain solutions.

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N. R. Crowningshield | Bubblegum Lightning

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