Telos Network — Weekly Report — August 9, 2018

Reaching Further

When we announced the Telos network, we had so much ground to cover, not only to manage the launch of a new chain, but also to keep pace with the progress of the EOS network. EOS has accomplished a lot in a short time. But frankly, so have we at Telos. This week these accomplishments started becoming evident, given the many improvements Telos has added.

Our major governance documents are now being discussed in committee and should be available for public disclosure and comment soon. Telos governance goes much farther than it’s counterpart in EOS. We have also advanced several new network functions that offer clear advantages to the EOS approach. These include inverse-weighted voting and rotating BPs to improve network security and resilience. With these milestones, Telos is showing that it will absolutely live up to all of its promises. Telos is even going further by introducing important new standards that are common on Ethereum but have not yet been introduced into the EOSIO ecosystem — such as the TIP-5 (Telos Improvement Proposal), the EOSIO equivalent of the venerable Ethereum ERC-20 token standard. We look forward to seeing these Telos innovations at work initially on the Telos blockchain, and hopefully on the EOS blockchain soon thereafter. These are exciting milestones along the path for Telos. Each week we just keep reaching further ahead towards the vision of what Telos can offer.

- Douglas Horn

Here’s what we’ve accomplished this week:

Decided first possible Telos network launch date Implemented critical path management Voted to make Telos Foundation Voting Tokens fully transparent Advanced compensation research and tracking Completed VotingWeights action Advanced RotateBPs action Prepared to launch Telos Testnet Stage 2 Added governance documents including Telos ‘constitution’ Created TIP-5 standard, the first “ERC-20” token standard for EOSIO Joined by Telos Lynx wallet Scheduled Network restart experiments

1. Decided first possible Telos network launch date

As part of the weekly call on Tuesday, August 7th, the Telos Contributors Group discussed updating the publicly announced “launch” date for the Telos network. The date had originally been proposed as “sometime in August” during the Telos announcement and had not been updated since. Publicly announcing a more accurate date should aid in educating the public about the launch and helping to better facilitate communications with exchanges and DApp developers.

Based on internal discussions with several working group chairs, it was proposed on the call that the date of September 24th be listed as the first date for a “go/no-go” vote on the launch. Based on subsequent discussion after the call, this date was pushed back to September 28th, 2018. This is the date for the first “go/no-go” vote on launching the Telos network. It is agreed that for a “go” vote to be cast, a member must agree that all functions of the network have been deployed, are functioning as expected, have been tested for at least 24 hours, and that other promised functions including approved governance documents, a tested and working ratification/amendment contract, arbitration contract, enforcement of BP minimums, and worker proposal system contract are in place. Date of first go/no-go vote for Telos network launch is: September 28th, 2018.

2. Implemented critical path management

The Telos Contributors Group expanded its toolset adoption to include critical path management using TeamGantt, a Trello plug-in.

3. Voted to make Telos Foundation voting tokens fully transparent

In the Tuesday August 7th call, the members voted unanimously to adopt total transparency about Telos Foundation Voting Tokens. These tokens are to be distributed to voting members of the Telos Foundation DAO. The previous week’s meeting saw a vote to report the identities (in some cases, long established crypto handles) of the voting members of the Telos Foundation. The question remained open, however, whether the voting tokens associated with each voter would be revealed so that Telos Foundation voters would be voting openly on all issues or whether voting via a secret ballot may prove necessary to protect the identities of participants (where harm may occur, ie: if a participant lived under the rule of an oppressive government).

After careful consideration of the demographics of our constituents, the Contributors voted unanimously (with one member noting reservations) to associate token accounts with the names of each voter so that all Telos Foundation voting will be fully transparent.

4. Advanced compensation research and tracking

The compensation committee advanced Telos Founders Rewards Pool tracking on several fronts. First, two separate compensation consultants joined the group to help ensure the values placed on various types of contributor work reflect data-driven, real world figures. Second, EOS Detroit’s Rob Konsdorf unveiled a nearly complete work tracking app for the project.

5. Completed VotingWeights action

The Telos Inverse-weighted voting action has been completed by Ed Silva and team, and merged into the developer branch of the Telos github repository. This is an important new innovation in the EOSIO world. Testing is ongoing on the Telos testnet.

6. Advanced RotateBPs action

Peter Bue and team are pressing further ahead on developing the RotateBPs action which sets up a floating schedule of block producers to rotate in and out of service in order to regularly test the readiness of standby BPs while providing scheduled maintenance for top 21 BPs. This function also includes the ability to remove non-producing BPs, who are quickly rotated out of the schedule so as to improve network security. A first working version of this new feature is expected in a few days.

7. Preparing to launch Telos Testnet Stage 2

The Telos Testnet Stage 1.1 will continue for another few days. Stage 1.1 has come to incorporate many steps and tests expected for Stage 2. The testnet is currently comprised of over 30 BPs that are regularly rotated in and out of service (manually, by voting) so that all nodes are given a chance to produce blocks and to test network dynamics. Once the Rotate BPs action is ready to test, rotation will be automated by this function and further tested using voting. The testnet has a total of 48 registered peers.

8. Added governance documents including Telos ‘Constitution’

Last week, the human-language portion of the “regproducer” Ricardian contract was submitted to the Governance working group for discussion along with an overview of all the expected Telos governance documents. This week the “regproducer” contract was discussed with an eye towards inviting feedback from the general membership.

This week also saw the addition of the Telos “Constitution” to the Governance Working Group. This document is actually called the Telos Network Operating Agreement based on the idea that calling such a document a “Constitution” may be a bit self-aggrandizing for what is essentially an operating agreement or set of bylaws. The author of this draft, Douglas Horn, proposed that a less grandiose name may be more acceptable to some terrestrial governments when dealing with the document. The Telos Network Operating Agreement reads more like a business contract than the previously proposed EOS “Constitution.”

9. Created TIP-5 standard, the first “ERC-20” token standard for EOSIO

Until this week, the EOSIO world did not have the equivalent of Ethereum’s well known and prolific “ERC-20” standard for fungible tokens such as utility tokens. Craig Branscom proposed, implemented, and tested the first such standard, called TIP-5. The TIP-5 standard recreates all the standardized functions of the familiar ERC-20 token for Telos and EOS. This is now another function where Telos leads EOS development. We will, of course, share the TIP-5 standard with EOS in the hopes that they will adopt it soon.

10. Joined by Telos Lynx wallet

Telos has been joined by the Lynx wallet team, creators of an advanced EOSIO wallet that includes an in-wallet go-to market/decentralized exchange. Lynx has launched a TelosLynx channel on Telegram and is discussing with the Telos development working group both integrating Lynx with the Telos blockchain, and implementing cross-chain atomic swaps. Now that the TIP-5 standard is complete, Craig Branscom and team are exploring adding Plasma technology to Telos so that it can provide atomic-swaps with any other Plasma-enabled blockchain.

11. Scheduled Network restart experiments

Peter Bue, Jerry Huff, and J.T. Buice, among others on the Network Working Group are implementing a set of tests and protocols to experiment with pausing and restarting the Telos network without requiring a full restart. They are also looking at implementing rolling updates for seamless network upgrades.

Current contributors to the Telos network include:

Telos Launch Group member teams

Beyond Bitcoin Hangouts, BlindBlocArt, CalEOS, CSX Community, Discover Telos, EOS Barcelona, EOS Detroit, EOS Green, Eos in Space, EOS Metal, EOS Miami, EOS Sweden (swedencornet), EOS the World, EOS UK, EOS Van, GoodBlock.io, Hellenic Open Systems, Infinity Bloc, Keten.io (Dutch EOS), Telos Africa, Telos Russia, Telos Vancouver, Z-Meta

Telos Launch Group additional participants

Alejandro Pacheco, Jerry Huff, CJ Anders, Shaheen Counts, Jon McGuffin, CryptoMooner, Duane Phillipi, Trenton Bullock, Fieldy Young, genereos1, Jen Morrow, Masha, Kloud Wing, Eon Ha, LIang Suilong, Maurice Stephens, L Asher Corson, Mikel, Andrew U, Raj, Sean Xa, Telos Canton, Ovidiu Craciun, Azad Halim, Duane Phillippi, JT Buice, Munachi Ogueke, Nathan Rempel, Vladimir Pugachev, Matt Johnson, Nathan Rempel, Rob James

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