In our last update we announced that we had completed all the features for Koinos mainnet, (everything in our burn down chart) and were getting ready to launch version 0.4.0 of Harbinger (V4). On August 23rd, we did just that!

The FIRST blockchain…

V4 is now the first fully functional blockchain ever to use proof-of-burn as a consensus algorithm. The first ever free-to-use blockchain thanks to the Mana system and Mana delegations. And the first ever blockchain capable of evolution because it has an on-chain decentralized governance system that can add new business logic to the blockchain as smart contracts through in-band upgrades (no “Eth 2.0” hard forks).

To learn more about how Koinos works, check out the unified whitepaper.

The Launch Livestream

For the launch of V4 we decided to do something different, and a bit risky. We decided to have blockchain architect, Michael Vandeberg, relaunch the blockchain live on discord. It was a brave decision for Michael to take on this added pressure when launching a blockchain is already stressful enough, but this shows just how confident he was in Koinos. The event wasn’t without its issues … turns out discord has some work to do on its livestream feature!

Michael relaunched the testnet in a few minutes and then proceeded to add all of the mainnet system features as smart contracts, demonstrating the in-band upgradeability of Koinos. New to Harbinger were the governance smart contract and, of course, the proof-of-burn smart contract. Start-to-finish the whole thing took about 40 minutes.

Watching the livestream and seeing how smooth the launch went, people probably didn’t realize the difficulty level of what was being done. The process of booting up most blockchains is typically far more difficult and time consuming, with some taking weeks to do what Michael did in just a few minutes.

If you haven’t already seen it, you can view the livestream here:

Harbinger V4

The relaunched testnet with proof-of-burn has been performing largely without incident and has now surpassed its 200,000th block! Many community members are running nodes, producing blocks, building dApps, and finding bugs, which is great.

Luke Willis, who is building a burn pool along with Kui Xi He, ran into comparison problems with UInt8Array which require a fix. This is exactly what a testnet is for; to find bugs as opposed to changing the architecture. So far, all of the issues we are seeing are the kind that the architecture was designed to make it fast and easy to fix. None require alterations to the blockchain framework, and all can either be fixed without touching consensus at all, or through an in-band upgrade.

The Burn Down

Our burn down chart was intended to give people insight into all the work needed to deliver Koinos mainnet. Not only is all of that work done, but since the launch of V4 there have been no issues that would prevent this version of Koinos from being launched as the mainnet. That means there’s basically no work that we have to do. There’s just work that we can do to improve the performance and developer experience of Koinos, while we are giving the testnet sufficient time to soak.

That means there’s really not much point in updating the burn down chart anymore, so instead we’ll be using these posts to provide more general updates on the project.

We have created a list of items that we would like to complete for the mainnet and prioritized those that would ideally get done prior to the release. We expect to get through the high priority items fairly quickly, but again these do not have to be done prior to the release of mainnet.

New stories

Error Score on Fork Bombing (koinos-p2p #221)

Do not produce on fork blocks (koinos-chain #746)

[FEATURE]: Minimum Block Time (koinos-system-contracts-as #35)

These stories are mainly aimed at increasing the stability of the network and mitigating potential attacks, but implementing these features would not require a hard fork which means they could have been implemented after the release of the mainnet.

Now that V4 is live, we are beginning to discuss internally when the snapshot should occur and, of course, when the mainnet can go live! So stay tuned for an update on these critical dates.

Time to Build

As you can see, things are starting to move fast, so now is definitely the time to get to work building an application and a business that takes advantage of the infinite opportunities created by the world’s first free-to-use blockchain. If you’re struggling to figure out how best to use Koinos, or just want to build your application better and faster, Koinos Group is here to help. Schedule a free consultation today at koinos.group.