Countdown to Launch — What to Expect

Phase 1 | Mainnet launch

At genesis, the network will be unstable and we anticipate something will go wrong. The network will inevitably halt as validators find their footing, and should something go catastrophically wrong, we will need to perform a rollback to the genesis state.

Roughly, we estimate that it could take somewhere between a few weeks to a few months for the network to become stable.

Key takeaways:

Staking, slashing, and governance are features that will be enabled at launch as modules in the SDK.

Before Phase 1, we highly encourage you to join the testnet.

Before Phase 1, delegators should become familiar with the list of validators and decide which ones to stake atoms with.

During Phase 1, atom holders should get familiar with staking, unstaking, and restaking.

Phase 2 | Enable transfers

At launch, the transferring of atoms will be explicitly disabled. This means that while atoms will be allocated to fundraiser participants in the genesis, atom holders will not initially have the ability to move them around. Yes, this means that no exchange activity can occur in the meanwhile.

The goal here is to ensure network stability and iron out any bugs before atoms become transferable. Actually enabling transfers will be left to governance.

Phase 3 | IBC launch

As of this writing, the interoperability mechanism of the Cosmos Network, the Interblockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, is in the final stages of specification and is largely implemented.

After mainnet is stabilized, transfers are activated, and IBC is completed, governance will vote on a Software Upgrade Proposal (SUP) for a code update to enable zones to start opening up IBC connections to the Cosmos Hub.

Then the fun begins.

You can refer to the GitHub issue which addresses Phases 1–3 here: Issue #1053. Comments are welcome on the issue, as this is a discussion topic that’s relevant to the broader atom holder community.

Phase 4 | Ethermint & Photon Hardspoon

Ethermint development is currently on hold and will undergo a massive redesign. The prior approach to Ethermint wrapped geth in the ABCI interface so it could run on Tendermint. In the new proposed version of the design, instead of shoehorning the Cosmos stack into the existing geth codebase, Ethermint will utilize lower-level components of geth to provide the EVM and Ethereum transaction semantics as a module within the Cosmos-SDK. We are targeting Q4 of 2018 for an initial implementation of this new design.

As for what to do about the photon, the decision is up to atom holders to vote on: