“Cross-chain nodes don’t have any advanced performance requirements” —VP Lini

On January 30th Wanchain officially released the details of the Storeman Staking Rewards Pilot Program. Earlier this week, the global vice president of Wanchain, Lini, had a Q&A session about the pilot program with members of the Wanchain community. The following is a translation of the of the Q&A article from the original Chinese.

Recap

To see the details of the pilot plan released previously, check out our Medium article. Firstly in order to clear up any misconceptions, please be clear that this pilot program is for Storeman cross chain node rewards. It is NOT related to block producer rewards, nor is it a super node reward as in DPOS, rather it is the pilot program for the Storeman nodes which process cross chain transactions. While this time is just for Storeman nodes, Wanchain’s PoS system will soon be implemented and made available to the public as well, so please stay tuned for more news on that front.

Community member @gogo：Are there any performance requirements for those who wish to participate as nodes in the Storeman Pilot Program?

Lini: There are no performance requirements. This pilot plan is an trial run for when the real system rolls out publicly. Currently the Wanchain Foundation is running the Storeman nodes, soon we will begin recruiting for the Storeman system and it will be open to everyone. Compared to consensus nodes, Cross-chain nodes have relatively low performance requirements. They need only to participate in multiparty computing in order to verify and sign the transaction. PoS consensus nodes, on the other hand, have relatively higher performance requirements, as they are involved maintaining consensus and in elections.

Community member:@浮夸怎么了：When will the Storeman node system be opened publicly? Will it be in the second quarter this year?

Lini: The pilot program will run for three months, primarily to give all WAN holders the opportunity to participate and receive some rewards. In the next phase Storeman node participation will be long term and WAN holders will also have the chance to participate in PoS consensus with their WAN. In other words they will be able to participate in both PoS consensus and as Storeman node operators. The timing for the next phase has not yet been determined since in this phase participation will be open to everyone — individuals, institutions, community groups, etc., and there will be specific hardware requirements. We can help any interested organizations or individuals in testing to see if they meet the requirements, and we welcome everyone to participate in the election to become a node. Some time after the first phase concludes in July, Storeman node and consensus participation will be open to the public. The specific date has not yet been set, but it will be before the end of 2019. We will certainly be listening to the community and taking their opinion into account when deciding the start date.

Community member @0.5m2阳光: Will node operators be able to freely join and leave whenever they wish?

Lini: Participants are free to stake or withdraw their stake whenever they wish, but withdrawal and return of staked assets will be delayed for a period of time to ensure that there is no malicious behavior during the operation of the Storeman node. In PoS consensus, smaller holders of WAN will also have the opportunity to participate through delegation. Rewards are not allocated by super nodes, but rather are automatically allocated by the WanPoS protocol in order to ensure a fair distribution. This is one of the innovations of WanPoS — fairness is procedurally guaranteed. The block rewards will come from a 10% reserve of the total tokens (21 million), which is in accordance with the plan laid out in our whitepaper. You’re welcome to take a look at our 2019 roadmap, we are confident we will hit all our milestones according to schedule.

Community member@吴迪：Is there any relationship between PoS nodes and cross-chain? For example, across ETH or across BTC? And if there is a relationship, the price of WAN should be very important, right? The lower the price, the less secure it would be?

Lini: First of all, the price of the currency and the PoS mechanism are not really related. There is a certain relationship with the cross-chain nodes, but it will not be particularly large. In any case, everyone uses BTC as their pricing standard, so of course there will be some volatility when crossing chains, but it will not be so big. We will dynamically adjust the required staking amount for Storeman nodes to ensure the security of BTC, ETH, and all other cross chain token transactions. The relationship with price should actually be greater with PoW consensus, as in PoS there is no need to worry about hash rates.

Community member @Aaron-Xu: Will Wanchain implement cross chain links with any well-known platform coins, such as BNB?

Lini: Our development team is currently researching several well-known public chains, but we are also listening to the feedback from the community to help us choose which platforms to connect with next. For us, the community’s opinions come first. At present, Wanchain already has a framework for connecting ERC20 tokens, and adding new ERC20 token connections is relatively convenient. We are currently considering connecting with a number of well known chains such as EOS, Tron, BCH, and others. Other chains mentioned by the community such as BTM, ONT, etc. are also excellent projects and will be considered eventually. As a cross-chain project, it is natural to think that the more chains crossed the better, and that crossing more chains will lead to an increase in value. However, we still need to do everything step by step. While the chain being connected does not need to do anything, every new link to a public chain requires Wanchain to set up the cross chain mechanism. At present, it takes 2–8 weeks to connect, test, and deploy an ERC-20 standard token on Wanchain, depending on the situation.

I’d like to end with a big thanks to the community for all your support!

The following is a list of wallets which support WAN：

The above wallets are only the ones officially recognized by Wanchain to support WAN, it is not an exhaustive list of all wallets with WAN support.

Important Warning:

In order to prevent the loss of any user’s assets, please take note: