On Saturday, February 23rd at 20:00 UTC, the rewards activation for ZelNodes occurred via a ZelCash Network Upgrade spork. Each future block find was then split: 75% to POW, 15% to BAMF, 6.25% to Super, and 3.75% to Basic node operators. The Zel Computational Network was live.

Since activation, many ZelCash holders have elected to stand up ZelNodes of all tiers, on VPS and personal hardware, to provide computing power to the network and generate passive income via ZelCash rewards. Some quick statistics of the Zel Network:

As of Mar 01 2019, there are 443 ZelNodes stood up

ZelNodes stood up This represents about 15,065,000 ZelCash locked up by ZelNodes

— or — ~27.3% of circulating ZelCash (55,190,750 circulating)

Another ~9,400,000 ZelCash is locked up in the Foundation (6.3 Mil) accounts and Core Team lockup holdings (3.1 Mil), for a total of about 44% locked ZelCash

The estimated computing power on-network is derived assuming the standard system specifications recommended to host each tier of ZelNode. These numbers are fluid and will continually be improved for accuracy as the network grows.

Equivalent 1,740 vCores (1 vCore=1 VPS thread @ ~2.2GHz) 4,980 GB of RAM 88,400 GB of SSD drive space

The ZelNodes Grafana Dashboard provides these statistics and more, including geographic and VPS/server location distribution, ZelNode status of each IP, pricing data, and more. The Dashboarding team have done a spectacular job in almost no time. Also the Scripting team provided a huge amount of work to get the install script working by activation to helping beginners stand up ZelNodes.

ZelNode Activation

Overall, the ZelNodes launch went extremely well. The chain experienced no downtime, POW persisted, rewards started at the correct block height, and active ZelNodes began receiving rewards immediately.

There were, however, a few bugs that are important to address ASAP. These include:

Some ZelNode payments aren’t being enforced during block find and thus the entire block reward was sent to POW.

Network consensus on ZelNode rewards scheduling via ZelNode voting could act non-predictably, which resulted in a more “random” rewards schedule (i.e. some nodes could be paid out more than once in a row. This will still be possible in the future as it is always statistically possible, but should occur less frequently).

The ZelCore full node wallet implementation has some small- to medium bugs which create confusion for users not familiar with full node operation. ZelCore will be continually updated aiming to create a very easy-to-use full node and ZelNode manager experience.

The above issues and more will be addressed with a binary update coming March 1st, with activation scheduled for March 6th. Typically, ZelNode Network Updates will happen roughly every 4–8 weeks, to quickly integrate new features and expand usability of the decentralized network to get ready for dapp/smart contract development in the near future. The Zel Team will firstly work on decentralizing the ZelCore backend infrastructure to provide a proof-of-concept about the usability of the computing network.

There will be a script for upgrading your ZelNode provided by the Zel Team to easily upgrade binaries on the ZelNode VPS/server now and in the future.