A week into mainnet

Dev update

Mainnet launch

First of all, thanks for following our progress over this last week. We’ve just launched mainnet, and now that we’re a week in, we’d like to send out a little recap of how it’s gone along with an FAQ regarding the upcoming coin swap.

Just to ensure that we’re all on the same page here, let us remind everyone that this project is not a Boolberry (BBR) fork. Zano runs on a deeply refactored core, one that adds a lot of new functionality. The total amount of added/rewritten code exceeds the entire CryptoNote codebase that Boolberry contains.

While developing Zano, we’ve paid extra attention to code security and stability and ran countless test networks over the last year of development. However, a project like this is a huge undertaking and all possible precautions needed to be considered during launch. During our preparation for launch, we’ve run a few public testnet iterations and performed a stress test with hundreds of thousands of transactions; results were stable.

Mainnet launch itself looked like this: we prepared the source code and generated the genesis block a few hours before launch. In order to prove that it wasn’t premined we added hash the a074236b1354901d5dbc029c0ac4c05c948182c34f3030f32b0c93aee7ba275c, sha3–256 from that day’s headline “Liverpool beat Barcelona: Greatest Champions League comebacks of all time”. Then we prepared and started seed nodes, added genesis data to it, nonce, and it went live.

The moment it went live, the team was closely monitoring network performance and noticed a few irregularities. First, we’ve found that some node’s targets weren’t calculated correctly. This was fixed within an hour, and we published the update right away. The next day we faced another issue with pool daemons, it was fixed again in an hour, and we’ve since pushed the update. The last problem we encountered was caused by wrong system time on one of the nodes, even though the Zano system was built to be resistant to any type of timestamp attacks, a small issue in optimization code caused nodes to switch under these certain conditions. We caught it, and it was fixed immediately. Since then the network has been stable and performing as expected.

There was also a discussion during launch about improving the PoS consensus, brought up by Max Sanchez (CTO VeriBlock). This prompted us to find a solution that we’ll talk more about it in future posts. We’d like to thank him for his input; it was very helpful.

The last thing to mention is that we’re still paying extra attention to the network performance and actively looking for potential issues. That’s why logs are set to the debugging level and may take up more space than expected. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for being the part of the project at this early stage.

What happens next?

The next milestone for us here will be the coinswap launch. For obvious reasons, we want to be absolutely sure that the network is stable before we move onto that phase.

As that approaches, we’d like to spend some time to answer a few coinswap related questions that have been coming up on social media since we announced mainnet. Here’s a brief FAQ for everyone. If anything is left unanswered here, please keep reaching out, and we’ll do our best to reply to your questions.

How many coins are reserved for the coinswap. Why is the current emission 17,5 mil?

Out of the ≈17.5 mil in the current Zano emission, 13827203.0 is reserved for the BBR coinswap (this is equal to amount of BBR eligible to swap by the time swap will conclude). 3690000 is reserved by the team.

H ow long is the swap?

The coinswap will take place over a year with a swap ratio that decreases over time. For the first three months, the Boolberry to Zano ratio will be 1:1. After that, the initial swap period ratio will start linearly decreasing until it reaches 0 at the first anniversary of the launch.

Will I keep my swapped BBR?

No, BBR coins swapped to Zano will be burned.

How to verify the burnt coins

Transactions will be considered burned if the output keys are zero. This guarantees that this output is impossible to spend. To ensure that the transaction is burned you can find it in block explorer and check that your output keys are zero.

What will happen with unswapped and why?

It’s likely that a certain amount of reserved BBR coins won’t be swapped for Zano for various reasons. Our plan for these unswapped coins (whatever the amount turns out to be) will be to release half of them back into emission. The other half will remain locked in a viewable address reserved for project expenses. We’ll be going into this in more detail in an upcoming post.

How are they put back into emission without a fork?

There is a mechanism put in place that tracks transactions sent to the zero pubkey and deducts the amount of coins used in that transaction from total number of emitted coins. This will be a transparent process, allowing the whole community to follow it as it happens.

Will team stake their premine coins?

No, as long as team remains in control of these funds they won’t be staked.

Is there any way to prove it?

This article (https://docs.zano.org/docs/proof-of-stake-estimation) explains how to calculate the right amount of coins involved in stacking. This number should lower than the amount of emitted coins plus swapped coins. These numbers are available on the Zano block explorer (https://explorer.zano.org) and the Boolberry block explorer (https://explorer.boolberry.com) for swapped BBR coins.

When you start staking does it only use whatever coins are currently in the wallet or will new deposits be staked as well?

Coins deposited to the wallet counted towards stacking amount as soon as they get 10 confirmations on the network

Is there any precedence given to the age of the staked coin?

No, all coins are equal in that regard

How does the size of the staked coins affect staking?

Please refer to that article https://docs.zano.org/docs/proof-of-stake-estimation

This is just the first week of progress and we’re excited to keep moving the project forward. To learn more about what’s coming, we invite you to take a look at the product roadmap on the website here: https://zano.org/roadmap.html