2019 is well underway now. It’s starting out as a rough one for some of the world’s leading governments. The US Federal Government is locked in its longest shutdown in history and Britain’s Parliament had a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Theresa May following its largest defeat of a parliament measure in UK history. So, it turns out that governance is hard everywhere. We should remember this when we hit the inevitable bumps in the road for blockchain governance.
But so far, so good. Telos has managed to avoid a number of problems that EOS had endured at this point in its history. Telos RAM is stable and predictable for developers and users to purchase, trading just under the published guidance price of 1 TLOS/KB. The network has not paused and there have been no unresponsive or not working BPs on the network. The rules and automated systems are doing an excellent job of keeping the network humming along very well. More BPs have joined the Telos mainnet and by this point the vast majority of Telos BPs have had the opportunity to prove themselves by actually producing blocks on the network. In fact, more BPs have produced blocks on the Telos mainnet in one month than on EOS mainnet in its entire history.
One big event this week was the Telos Original Snapshot. The numbers are still being tallied, but it appears that there are at least 26,000 active accounts that had performed at least one transaction by block 6,000,000. (Mined by EOS Detriot, by the way.) That’s a pretty impressive figure for a new blockchain 29 days after activating. There was some concern voiced before the snapshot about it setting off a pump and dump, as snapshots sometimes do. I wasn’t expecting much of this because Telos will be taking regular monthly snapshots so the benefit of buying a bunch of Telos to get recorded on a snapshot and then selling it are limited. Exchanges showed very little dumping after the snapshot. On ChainRift, for example the TLOS/EOS price rose about 10% an hour before the snapshot and fell another 10% after the snapshot, but within an hour this had stabilized back to the pre-snapshot levels.
So things are going extremely well for Telos so far. Our main objectives are to attract new apps to deploy on the chain, to continue development of new code like IPFS and REX, to update the governance smart contracts and push out more education pieces about how the governance works and how to participate. Look for a Telos User Guide from me with articles to make this easy starting next week.
— Douglas Horn
Here’s what happened this week:
- Telos Original Snapshot
- Telos Code Updates to Oak 1.6.
- CODEX Lists Telos Trading Pairs
- Telos BPs Lead in Speed
- BP Growth and Enforcement Continues
- GoodBlock Kicked for 2 Hours
Telos Original Snapshot
On January 17th at 13:21:35 UTC, the Telos mainnet hit block 6 million and the Telos Original Snapshot was taken. The snapshot records values for every Telos mainnet account that has performed at least one action so far and is deemed an active account. Developers are welcome to use this snapshot for future airdrops, particularly if they want to reward the current active Telos users. (The genesis snapshot files are available on the Telos Github repository for anyone who wants to use that instead.) The Telos Foundation will supply RAM necessary to host this snapshot on the chain so that individual developers do not have to buy RAM for this.
This snapshot is currently being processed and will be written to the chain soon. Once there, developers can use the snapshot and users can look up their accounts to see their balances. The work behind capturing the snapshot to the chain is being performed by BPs CalEOS, GoodBlock, Kainos BP, and Telos Madrid.
You can read more about the snapshot process here: https://medium.com/@goodblock_info/the-telos-original-snapshot-behind-the-scenes-e5e15d1f69db
Telos Code Updates to Oak 1.6.0
Block.one recently released a new code version 1.6.0 which includes numerous small improvements including a significant speed improvement in executing smart contract actions. The improvement may speed the network by 35 percent for token transfers. The Telos core developers have performed an upstream merge to incorporate this code with the Telos improvements and issued a new version of the Telos software: Oak 1.6.0. A new Telos stagenet is being spun up to test the new software before implementation.
The Telos block producers test all new versions of the Telos software on a private staging network, a “stagenet,” for at least 24 hours to assess it for performance and potential errors before exposing the software to the Telos mainnet. (Remarkably, Telos is the only EOSIO chain to perform this basic computer security practice.) Once version 1.6.0 completes live network testing on the new stagenet, it will be implemented on the Telos testnet and mainnet.
Read about the new performance advances of EOSIO 1.6.0 here: https://medium.com/eosio/eosio-version-1-6-0-a50b3bac20f4
Telos BPs Lead in Speed
This week 35 block producers produced blocks on the Telos mainnet. Of those 26 were measured as consistently having CPU speeds of less than 1.8 milliseconds on the AlohaEOS reference CPU test. In contrast, over the same period, the EOS mainnet had 22 BPs produce blocks with only 17 of them consistently measured at less than 1.8 ms on the same test.
In our first month, Telos BPs are not only meeting the same standard for computing infrastructure as EOS, they are exceeding it. Congratulations Telos BPs!
CODEX Lists Telos Trading Pairs
The exchange CODEX (codex.one) announced on December 18th, 2018 that they intended to list Telos pairs BTC/TLOS, EOS/TLOS, ETH/TLOS and USDT/TLOS for trading. This week trading began for TLOS with both Bitcoin and EOS. More pairs are expected to be added soon. Welcome to the Telos family, CODEX!
BP Growth and Enforcement Continues
56 block producers have now met the Telos BP standards and have registered on the Telos mainnet. Half of these were members of the Telos Launch Group and half were not. This represents a lot of growth. Telos block producers must meet a set of minimum requirements that include disclosing information about each BP’s ownership, infrastructure, API endpoints, and contact information. BPs must also present a website for users and perform at least 7 days producing on the Telos testnet before registering on the mainnet. There are currently more new BPs on the Telos testnet suggesting more next week.
This week there was one incident of a block producer, teloshexagon, registering directly on the Telos mainnet without meeting any of the minimum requirements. The block producer has been kicked from the mainnet and may register again once it has met the requirements.
GoodBlock Kicked for 2 Hours
The Telos mainnet does not only remove block producers for failing to meet minimum requirements, it also temporarily kicks them for failing to produce 15% or more of the expected blocks in any rotation period. This week, GoodBlock’s block producer, goodblocktls, had the dubious honor of being the first block producer to be kicked following a system error (quickly corrected). The GoodBlock BP was removed for approximately two hours and then returned to service.
Telos removes non-producing BPs to aid in network security and resiliency. It is the only EOSIO chain to do so. Any BP that doesn’t meet the standard (even GoodBlock) is rotated out of production so that a productive BP can take its place. This function, along with the enforcement of BP minimum requirements leads to a better network.
An incident report with details of the BP downtime is here: https://medium.com/@goodblock_info/incident-report-7cb780511959
More about GoodBlock can be found at: www.goodblock.io
Join us on Twitter @GoodBlockio
Vote for GoodBlock on the Telos Blockchain Network @goodblocktls