On December 12th, 2018 at 17:46 UTC, the six Appointed Block Producers (ABPs) of the Telos Launch Group executed the previously published launch script for the Telos Mainnet, bringing it into existence.

Like a rocket launch, there are distinct stages to the launch process: injection, validation, pre-activation, and activation.

The first transaction on the Telos Mainnet occurred 19 seconds later at block 39. This was the beginning of the injection stage when all 164,645 of the accounts and their keys and balances were written to the blockchain from the genesis snapshot file.

Once all the accounts were created, the validation stage began as the ABPs froze the chain at block 2,516 so that no transactions could change any of the injection values and each performed their own validation script to ensure that all accounts, keys, and balances had been correctly recorded on the Telos Mainnet. When all confirmed that the accounts had been correctly written, they published the public connection information so that independent validators can publicly test and ensure the community that the chain is starting off with correct values for everyone. This stage is scheduled to end on December 13th at 20:00 UTC.

The pre-activation stage begins at this point where the chain will once again start producing blocks again. At this point TLOS-holders can do almost any action on the blockchain. That means they can create new accounts, bid on namespaces, transfer their small amounts of TLOS that are already liquid, and perhaps most importantly, vote for block producers or assign their votes to proxies to vote for them. This will decide who the initial BPs running the network will be once it activates. The only thing that most TLOS holder can’t do is unstake their TLOS to make them liquid.

Every Telos account starts out with almost all of their tokens staked to NET and CPU and these cannot be moved until they are liquid. To make TLOS liquid, the owner needs to unstake them. This starts a 3 day process of unstaking, after which the tokens are liquid and can be moved. Unstaking is not permitted until the chain activates at block 1,000,000.

In the middle of the pre-activation stage will be the worldwide online conference Telos World 2018 on December 14th beginning at 15:00 UTC. Learn more about it at: https://medium.com/@telos21zephyr/the-telos-blockchain-is-going-global-discover-the-telos-world-2018-program-b0570f56bb86

On December 19th at 14:33 UTC, the Telos Mainnet is expected to reach block 1,000,000 when it will activate. At that point users may unstake their TLOS and perform any other action on the chain and the BPs who have the most votes at that time will begin running the chain and earning block rewards. It will take three days for unstaked TLOS tokens to become liquid and be transferred. This includes transferring tokens to exchanges. So the earliest that exchanges can be expected to have TLOS tokens to trade is December 22nd at 14:33 UTC.

Refer to the article “What happens when Telos votes to launch?” for an extended launch timeline: https://medium.com/@teloslogical/what-happens-when-telos-votes-to-launch-d18f8bd494f

Please check in on the Telos Telegram and Twitter for more information.