By Douglas Horn, Goodblock.io
The Telos Original Snapshot, a record of all Telos blockchain accounts that have been used at least once, has occurred at block 6,000,000 of the Telos mainnet. This happened on January 17th at 13:21:35 UTC. While the final snapshot itself is still being tallied and verified, we do know there are well over 25,000 active Telos accounts that have opted-in by performing actions. This number has grown quickly from 5-6,000 just a few weeks ago.
How we make the snapshot
How do you take a snapshot, anyway? The Telos mainnet blockchain grows one block every half second, so there’s no way to get a full and verifiable reading of every account on the live chain. Instead, someone has to make a copy of the blockchain replayed up to block 6,000,000 and then pause it so that the accounts can be queried at an exact block height without constantly changing. Three block producers, KainosBP, Telos Madrid, and GoodBlock are performing this. Each will create an independent snapshot looking at accounts to see which have performed at least one action, and combining the liquid and staked token balances into a single value. These three snapshots will then be compared with each other for validation.
Once the snapshots are reviewed and validated against one another to produce a snapshot that all agree on, it will be saved to the Telos Github snapshots repository. CalEOS will then write the snapshot to a table on-chain so that it is available to any apps that want to airdrop tokens to active Telos users. The Telos Foundation is granting the RAM to allow this. Any apps using the snapshot will not have to buy large amounts of RAM to create airdrops, which is a benefit for both the developers and the network. Once the Telos Original Snapshot is written to the chain, users will be able to view it as well and find the account names and token values recorded.
We should have final stats on the snapshot in 24-48 hours. I will post another article with all the statistics and simple instructions for how to look at this table on the blockchain and verify that any given account is included and what token value is recorded for that account.
Look for more information on the snapshot soon. It is likely to be first published on the Github snapshot repository: https://github.com/Telos-Foundation/snapshots
About the author: Douglas Horn is the Telos architect and whitepaper author, and the founder of GoodBlock, a block producer and app developer for the Telos Blockchain Network.
More about GoodBlock.io at https://www.goodblock.io/
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