PoS

Mining Rig Makers Race to Create Next-Gen Ethereum Miner Before Staking-Only Kicks In

21/12/2020 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum network’s 2.0 transition has pushed the protocol to become one of the largest staking networks in the world with 1,683,905 ether locked into the contract worth $1 billion today. According to reports from China, while proof-of-work ethereum miners have two years left to mine the leading crypto asset, ten Chinese mining rig manufacturers are reportedly racing to create a next-generation ether mining rig.

The Ethereum 2.0 project has become one of the biggest proof-of-stake (PoS) networks worldwide but while people can stake, miners still have two years to leverage ASIC mining via proof-of-work (PoW).

According to etherscan.io stats, the ETH 2.0 contract has 1,683,905 ether locked up which is equivalent to more than $1 billion USD using today’s exchange rates. This week, regional reports from China disclose that ten mining rig manufacturers are allegedly “speeding up” development for a new type of ethereum miner.

The reason for the rush to build a next-generation ethereum miner is because of the limited time left PoW will be available. Financial columnist Vincent He said that an ethereum mining rig called the “E7” was produced by Bitmain in July 2020. According to reports at the time, the E7 produced 800 megahash per second (MH/s).

However, there was never any mass production of the E7’s sales even though monitored data had shown the miners were operating in the wild. A new miner being discussed and speculated upon is called the “E9” miner and Vincent He says that theoretically, the E9 has twice the performance speeds of the E7.

If a person was to leverage a theoretical E9 model with 1600MH/s, then the person could make $52 per day per machine with electrical rates at $0.06 per kWh. The miner would be ridiculously profitable if prices remained the same or climbed higher, as today’s top machine only has an output of 720MH/s.

The machine is manufactured by the company Innosilicon and the A10 Pro+ Ethminer was just released this month. In fact, for the ethash consensus algorithm, Innosilicon commands the top ethereum-based miners with hashrates between 485MH/s to 720MH/s.

There have also been rumors of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) ethereum mining solutions being invoked over the next two years as well. Right now, people estimate a stash of 32 ETH ($20,778) will accrue roughly 13% or $2,800 annually if ETH prices are at $650 per unit.

An Innosilicon A10 Pro+ Ethminer ranges in price between $6,500 to $7k per unit. It would take more than 250 days to pay off the machine at $0.06 per kWh and using today’s ETH exchange rates. In time, ethereum miners may find it more valuable to start staking ethereum or wait for machines like the theoretical E9.

What do you think about Chinese mining manufacturers doubling down to create a next-generation ethereum mining rig? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

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Free TON Community’s Meritocratic Token Distribution Model to Revolutionize Tokenomics

15/12/2020 by Idelto Editor

Free TON is a community driven PoS network with a focus on decentralized governance. It is based on the open-source TON project which was previously developed by Telegram. Free TON never had an ICO and will never have a token sale. Instead the project implements a distribution model that will revolutionize tokenomics. This also makes it stand at par or exceed in terms of decentralization other popular PoS networks, such as Kosmos or Polkadot.

Free TON Token Now on Bitcoin.com Exchange

Free TON is a community powered movement for a free and open decentralised internet. It’s a next-gen blockchain technology that belongs to no one and to everyone at the same time. The network does not have an owner or centralized management that decides what should be done or when, nor what tools or projects should run on it. Instead, Free TON practices decentralized governance principles empowering the community to engage, contribute and make decisions.

Technology-wise Free TON is the first multi-threaded, multi-shareded, highly scalable blockchain with low latency. It has an advanced Proof-of-Stake consensus and versatile smart contract platform supporting several high level computer languages. Free TON promotes a unique concept of End-to-End Decentralization.

The community driven project was created after the U.S. SEC forced private messaging giant Telegram to let go of its very highly anticipated Telegram Open Network (TON). Thanks to this you can now get yourself involved with the future of decentralization. To get started, it was recently announced that Bitcoin.com Exchange will be listing the Free TON token on 15 December, 2020.

The Meritocratic Token Distribution Model

Free TON never had nor intends to have any token sales. Instead, the Free TON community practices a meritocratic token distribution model where ton crystal tokens are distributed for free to the community against contribution to the ecosystem. It is done either through contests (never grants that mean centralized decision making) or through collaboration proposals with partners who want to enable their use case on the Free TON network.

As of December 10, Free TON has 272 independent validators and is aiming to exceed 400 validators by the time of an anticipated mainnet announcement scheduled for December 22, 2020. This makes Free TON the most decentralized PoS network. Importantly, these validators were chosen through a series of contests in Q3 2020 where teams were competing on performance.

To learn more about Free TON’s revolutionizing Tokenomics read the community’s Declaration of Decentralization. For more on how Free TON was born out of the abandonment of the the Telegram Open Network by the private messaging giant Telegram due to the U.S. SEC, read Free TON, From an Abandoned Project to the Frontier of PoS Networks.

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Free TON, From an Abandoned Project to the Frontier of PoS Networks

09/12/2020 by Idelto Editor

The Durov brothers fought a long and exhaustive battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the Telegram Open Network (TON)’s acceptance in the United States, which ended with an official announcement that the further development of the project was abandoned. However, the TON project was fully open-source. Using the TON repositories a group of independent enthusiasts came together, forked the best that has been built by the original Telegram team and ventured into a long journey of building Free TON.

The Free TON Community

Similar to many other PoS networks aiming at decentralized governance, there is a declaration underpinning the philosophical foundations of Free TON as a community and as a decentralized network. As the Declaration of Decentralization, a founding document behind Free TON, was being drafted a growing number of contributors have been joining the project – both on the technology and community development side, forming the Free TON community, by now forming one of the largest independent networks on the digital assert landscape.

How it all started? Well, there were people who were involved and interested in TON from the start. They became excited about launching the project as a community — spreading the word to their own networks. Eventually, it grew quickly from there as a community-driven project. Today, Free TON is a vivid community of 30k+ people all over the world, contributing daily to the ever growing codebase of the network. The Free TON contributors are much more community-centric. A wide range of technical developments have been made such as highly improved tooling and a multitude of protocol changes.

Key differences between the original vision of TON and the Free TON as it stands today can be summarized in three key statements:

(a) No corporate entity behind – Telegram as a messaging platform and as a business has publicly abstained from being involved further. In the words of one of the most active Free TON community members, Mitja Goroshevsky, “… when so many people spent so much of their time and effort on the project, just to have it suddenly yanked from their hands on the basis that money was raised in a way someone didn’t like, that’s devastating.” Today, the community is both the founding fathers and the key asset of the Free TON as an ecosystem.

(b) The protocol is built upon the ideals of decentralization upon both, the network and the governance layer. The original design was technology oriented and had little thought given to the game-theoretical aspects of the governance layer. Validators would vote to approve protocol changes… That’s about as far as the design went. Durov’s team was focusing on the tech and cost-load efficiency, not the tokenomics. There was simply no vision about how to involve the community in the platform’s governance.

(c) Distributional decentralization – the distribution of tokens happens as this is being written on a per-merit basis based on the proposals that are submitted on the Free TON Community Forum and voted for by the community and the validators.

But What Really Sets Free TON Apart?

The Technology

In production, the Free TON blockchain achieves transaction speeds of less than 0.2 seconds, throughput of more than 10k TPS, with highly competitive transaction cost (less than 0.001% of transaction amount), and theoretically embeds infinite scalability through multi-threaded sharded architecture.

Distributional Democracy

Community-launched, Free TON has never undergone an ICO of any sort, neither had the tokens been distributed according to monetary contribution of any sort. The challenge was to design game-theoretically coherent distributional mechanics while bound by the rules of PoS.

The design finally assumed is called the Meritocratic Token Distribution model. It starts from the community proposing a contest in which all other members can participate. The contest is debated, and soft majority voting is used to decide whether a proposal should proceed.

Access Democracy

Another major aspect and core principle of Free TON is staying open source, community driven, and governed as much as possible on top of its own blockchain, which will protect against not only from potential hacker and security attacks on the network, but also ensure the stability via truly democractic/meritocratic on-chain approach to the evolution of the Network.

The Internet was born free and decentralized, then big corporations and big states took charge of it, now it’s time to return it to users and its decentralized origins, as Bitcoin once did in the financial industry.

Where Does Free TON Stand Now?

Today on December 8, 2020 initial members of Free TON blockchain announced the launch of more than 400 independent validators on December 22, 2020, making Free TON one the most truly distributed blockchains launched to date.

Free TON has the potential to change the blockchain industry carrying it closed to the frontier of mass adoption of applications like payments systems (think of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal), Messaging (Telegram, Whatsapp, WeChat), social media (Twitter, Facebook) and fulfill one of most prominent dreams of all Internet evangelists – a truly decentralized backbone infrastructure for the Internet itself.

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Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Threshold Met: Proof-of-Stake ‘Beacon’ Chain Starts in 7 Days

24/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum network’s ETH 2.0 contract has crossed the threshold needed to initiate the upcoming upgrade. Currently, there’s more 694,368 ether worth over $422 million resting in the contract, as developers hope the proof-of-stake launch will begin on December 1.

At the end of the first week of November, the Ethereum Foundation initiated the first process of the highly anticipated Ethereum 2.0 (ETH 2.0) upgrade specifications, which detailed the initial rules of the genesis phase 0. The genesis phase 0 contract specification noted that there needed to be approximately 524,288 ETH and at least 16,384 validators to invoke the proof-of-stake process.

The requirements needed to kickstart Ethereum 2.0 for December 1, mandated that the threshold be met by November 24, 2020. Additionally, a web portal called Launch Pad was published so users can learn how to be an ETH validator and secure the blockchain.

The requirements needed to spark the genesis phase 0 process were officially completed on the 24th and there’s now 694,368 ether worth $422 million in the contract.

The contract address has seen approximately 16,736 transactions of around 32 ether per transaction. 32 ETH is what is needed to become a validator and earn a stake on the Ethereum chain. At the current exchange rate of $608 per ether, it costs close to $20k per staking validator. Roughly the last 25% of the ether needed to meet the threshold was deposited into the contract in less than a four-hour timespan.

Screenshot from an editorial called “The Genesis of a Beacon Chain” written by Ben Edgington.

Following the deposit milestone, a great number of Ethereum proponents and developers celebrated. “We reached it,” said Ethereum 2.0 R&D member Hsiao-Wei Wang. “Thanks to all the Eth2 teams and the community that wrote the history. And thanks to the Ethereum critics who made us stronger. Don’t forget to update your Eth2 client in a couple days,” Wang added.

The “Eth 2.0 Deposit Contract – Progress Meter Bot” also tweeted about the landmark occasion and stated:

We have liftoff. Thank you to the devs, the researchers, educators, and community members who made this happen. See you on December 1st @ noon UTC.

Many Ethereum supporters also understand that the Ethereum 2.0 genesis phase 0 will initially start with the “Beacon” blockchain, a baby-step that will make it so the upgrade will have less of an impact on the main network. The ETH 2.0 upgrade will start in seven days’ time and the Beacon chain will begin the first of four initial phases.

Estimates say that Ethereum 2.0 validators could earn about 20% in annualized rewards. After the requirements were filled, Ethereum proponent Tom Shaughnessy said that the Ethereum 2.0 launch “got more attention in an hour than every other layer 1 did this entire year put together.”

Ethereum Foundation member Hudson Jameson tweeted about how the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon chain launch will happen the day prior, and what needs to happen in order to create a successful launch.

“The beacon chain marks the beginning of the transition to Eth 2.0, but that doesn’t mean that everything immediately changes,” Jameson wrote. “Eth 2.0 is a multi-year process and the first few pieces of that process won’t heavily affect the current Ethereum mainnet.”

Jameson also stressed that whatever happens, the Ethereum community should be impressed with the Ethereum 2.0 development team. He also explained when he thought the Beacon chain launch would begin.

“My opinion (not an official stance of the Ethereum Foundation) is that we will launch between December 1st and December 5th,” Jameson concluded. “I base this on how quickly deposits are coming in as of the last 48 hours.”

At the time of publication, ethereum (ETH) is trading for $608 per ether, as the token has gained 26% during the last seven days and 49% in the last 30 days.

What do you think about the culmination of the highly anticipated Ethereum 2.0 launch? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

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ETH 2.0 Scheduled for December, Vitalik Deposits $1.4M Worth of Ether Into Phase 0 Contract

07/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

This December the cryptocurrency community may see the first introductory phase of the highly anticipated Ethereum 2.0 consensus change. On Wednesday, the Ethereum Foundation published ETH 2.0 specifications explaining how the genesis phase will be invoked. Moreover, on November 5, Ethereum’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin sent 3,200 ETH to the genesis phase deposit contract in order to begin staking after the shift.

For quite some time now, the ETH 2.0 transition was postponed and it seems the first phase is set to begin on or around December 1, 2020. The first stage of ETH 2.0 is often referred to as “phase 0” and Ethereum developers claim the transition will reduce energy consumption. The blockchain will also introduce shard chains, but most people these days are discussing how proof-of-stake (PoS) will be implemented.

Being a PoS blockchain, ETH owners will be able to stake their coins and run validator nodes. Anyone will be able to stake within the Ethereum network, as long as the owner owns a minimum of 32 ETH. According to the Ethereum Foundation, ETH 2.0 is shipping in phases and network participants can see the roadmap here.

ETH 2.0 Scheduled for December, Vitalik Deposits $1.4M Worth of Ether Into Phase 0 Contract — The phase 0 contract address on November 6, 2020.

On Wednesday, November 4, the Ethereum Foundation’s Danny Ryan published an update called “eth2 quick update no. 19.” The update shows the specifications for the phase 0 launch, which is expected to happen on or around December 1. Additionally, Ryan published the mainnet deposit contract address that will be used to trigger the staking deployment.

“To trigger genesis at this time,” Ryan wrote. “There must be at least 16,384 32 ETH validator deposits 7 days prior to December 1. If not, genesis will be triggered 7 days after this threshold has been met (whenever that may be).”

Ryan also detailed that the mainnet Launch Pad is up and running, and he stressed that people should make sure they leverage the correct deposit contract address. “Check, double-check, triple-check the deposit contract address before sending any funds anywhere,” Ryan stressed.

In addition to the announcement from the Ethereum Foundation, the cryptocurrency’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin has sent funds to the deposit contract address. According to the Etherscan data, Buterin sent 3,200 ETH ($1.4 million using today’s exchange rates) to the address. At the time of publication, there’s approximately 39,173 ether worth $17.3 million held in the ETH 2.0 contract address.

A number of Ethereum proponents are excited about the ETH 2.0 phase 0, but ETH 2.0 has had its share of skeptics as well. A Medium post called “The Real Challenge for Ethereum 2.0” written by Robert Greenfield IV notes that “plutocracy is a threat to ‘decentralized equity.’”

In the blog post, Greenfield says that the emerging blockchain sector might be “doomed to inherit the inequities of the traditional technology sector.”

Meanwhile, in another blog post author, Adam Cochran, shows seven reasons why “ETH 2.0 will create the next economic shift.”

Cochran further states:

The best reason for this growth, and one that only ETH 2.0 can really claim, is actual demand for the asset, as use for gas in a decentralized computer. With the release of ETH 2.0 (among other improvements) we’re going to see ETH drastically increase its tx/s and therefore its commercial and consumer viability. Gas clogs, high transaction costs, long wait times in dapps all go away, even in a busy market.

Meanwhile, the other roadmap phases (1 & 2) are expected to launch during the next few years and the network will likely operate a lot differently. Ethereum proponents hope that the phase 0 launch will be successful and everything will work smoothly according to plan.

With approximately 39,173 ETH in the deposit contract address today, the deposit address needs around 485,115 more ETH to initiate the trigger’s 524,288 ETH threshold.

What do you think about the Ethereum 2.0 launch expected to happen this December? Let us know in the comments section below.

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