validator

Gnosis Chain spends $5M on validator incentive program for decentralization

The program offers 388 mGNO to each of the first ten validators that runs in a listed country.

Gnosis Builders, developer of blockchain network Gnosis Chain, has announced a $5 million project to increase the number and diversity of validators through incentive mechanisms. The new project is called “Gnosis VIP,” according to an April 18 announcement from the company.

As part of the new project, Gnosis is launching a “Geographic Diversity Program” that seeks to increase the number of countries Gnosis Chain validators are located within.

The network currently has over 100,000 validators spread across 60 countries, and the program’s goal is to increase the number of countries to 180 by year’s end, the announcement said.

According to the program’s official webpage, for each of the 90 countries listed, the first ten validators that start operating within them will receive 388 meta Gnosis (worth $1,368.18 at April 12 prices) over the course of six months. Meta Gnosis (mGNO) is the wrapped and staked version of the network’s native coin, Gnosis (GNO). Each mGNO can be redeemed for 1/32 GNO.

The first payment of 38 mGNO ($134) will be disbursed after the first 30 days the node operates. The size of the payment will increase each month, and the last payment at the end of the six months will be for 98 mGNO ($345.57).

Related: 1Inch network expands to Gnosis Chain and Avalanche

In an email statement to Cointelegraph, Gnosis CEO Martin Köppelmann expressed hope that the new program will help to improve both the security and performance of Gnosis Chain:

“A diverse validator set is paramount for a resilient and secure network […] Geographical diversity hedges the network against both natural and jurisdictional disasters [and] can also improve the performance of a network; by having validators located in different parts of the world, transactions can be processed more quickly and efficiently.”

Debates often rage in the crypto community over which networks are the most decentralized, with many experts claiming that a network cannot be scalable, secure, and decentralized at the same time. This conflict in design philosophy is often called the blockchain trilemma.

In his email statement, Köppelmann emphasized that geographical diversity is only one aspect of decentralization, and others are also important to ensure resilience and security.

TON validators receive single nominator smart contract

Orbs’ single-nominator contract offers independent validation for validators, safeguards against gas attacks and enables stake recovery during emergencies.

Orbs, a public blockchain infrastructure designed for mass usage applications and close integration, has announced the release of the single nominator smart contract for validators in the Telegram Open Network (TON), a decentralized layer-1 blockchain.

In the TON blockchain network, validators can use the single nominator, which provides an isolated cold wallet for securing their validation process. This feature is particularly useful for validators with enough self-stake to conduct independent validation without needing third-party nominators. This feature aims to enhance validators’ independence, security and protection against gas-spending attacks.

In blockchain technology, a nominator is an individual or entity participating in a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. This is done by staking their cryptocurrency holdings to support the network’s security and transaction processing.

The nominator essentially nominates a validator to represent their stake in the network and earn rewards on their behalf. The validator, in turn, is responsible for validating transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain. This process is essential to the security and efficiency of the blockchain network, as it ensures that only legitimate transactions are processed and recorded on the blockchain.

Smart contracts typically involve two or more parties agreeing on a set of rules or conditions that must be met before the contract can be executed. These rules are encoded into the smart contract, and when the specified conditions are met, the contract executes automatically, transferring funds or assets between the parties involved.

The single nominator smart contract provides an option for the core team’s nominator pool smart contract. The alternative was developed in-house to provide security for validators who stake their funds. The single nominator tool is now offered to the community as a free, open-source product.

Related: TON blockchain freezes $2.6B worth of inactive tokens

Orbs added that the single nominator contract offers protection against attack methods by keeping the validator node’s hot wallet separate from the principal staking funds. This separation safeguards the funds against gas spending attacks, and the owner can alter the validator address if the wallet is compromised. Moreover, the contract provides the ability to recover stakes during emergencies, such as elector upgrades.

The contract has been audited by CertiK, a Web3, blockchain and smart contract security firm, which recently announced a partnership with TON to audit future projects on the network.

Magazine: Green consumers want supply chain transparency via blockchain

Solana faces slowdown in block production, network restarted

The issue is linked to the recent network upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14, which slowed block finalization.

Solana network faced a slowdown in block production on Feb. 25 following an upgrade in the validator software. The incident resulted in disruptions to transactions and led validators to downgrade the software in an attempt to restore network performance. 

The technical issue started around 6:00 am UTC, leading validators to downgrade to version 1.13 to restore transactions in the network. The downgrade, however, was not enough to restore Solana to normal operations, forcing the decision to restart the network on v1.13.6.

“The network experienced a significant slowdown in block production that coincided with an upgrade to validator software. Engineers are still conducting a root cause analysis,” noted Solana’s compass website.

Related: The state of Solana: Will the layer-1 protocol rise again in 2023?

The issue is linked to the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14, which slowed block finalization. The Solana network is currently restarting, with 80% of active validators online necessary to resume operations:

“As more validators complete their restart this number will rise in line with the amount of stake they have delegated: this means larger validators such as CEX have an outsized impact on restart times.“

Solana’s validators discussed a solution to the incident in the hours following the issue. Infrastructure provider Chorus One noted on Twitter that the incident “demonstrated how genuinely decentralized the network is.“ It said:

“Without all these debates, we would be back up in an hour. But, every decision along the way – whether to downgrade, whether to restart, when to switch from downgrade approach to restart approach – is debated. Voting happens. We end up taking 8-10 hours to recovery, instead of 1.”

Solana is an open-source layer-1 blockchain. Its third-generation network architecture is designed to facilitate smart contracts and decentralized application creation. The Solana blockchain was launched during the crypto boom of 2017. The internal testnet of the project was released in 2018, followed by several testnet phases before the main network was officially launched in 2020.

‘Decentralized Infura’ may help prevent Ethereum app crashes: Interview

The initial Decentralized Infura marketplace, which is currently in development, is expected to include up to 10 Web3 data providers.

Infura is developing a decentralized marketplace of data providers that will help to prevent Web3 app crashes in the future, according to a Feb. 6 Cointelegraph interview with Infura researcher Patrick McCorry.

McCorry stated that the new “decentralized Infura” will help to ensure that blockchains remain decentralized by distributing data provider services among multiple providers in a marketplace. It will have “up to 10 providers initially” that will “work together to bootstrap the network and then […] Gradually iterate and get more players.” Some potential partners will meet at ETH Denver in late February or early March to discuss the project’s next steps.

The new project will not be a new blockchain. Instead, it will be a marketplace that matches consumers of blockchain data with data providers. The current centralized Infura will simply be one of the providers on the network, as McCorry explained:

“There’ll be a marketplace where basically the new providers will sign up […] They can place the resources that they have available, so they can say, ‘I can satisfy these requests at this price.’ Users could come along and then buy those resources and then it’s like a matchmaking service of users.”

McCorry believes this will make the Web3 ecosystem more resilient by allowing users to rapidly switch to a new provider if the one they are currently using experiences an outage. He also stated that the new decentralized Infura might be more censorship-resistant than the current service because providers will be spread out over many different geographical areas and operating under different jurisdictions.

“I think what’s important to highlight here is that the goal of decentralized Infura is not to fight against censorship, or to even enable that. The whole point of decentralized Infura is a reliability project, to guarantee that if we were to go offline another node will come along and pick up the traffic,” he said. However he added that the network would have providers in countries that are in different jurisdictions and subject to different rules.

“The way you get censorship resistance is geographical location. Now, if you’re in a country where you don’t have to abide by certain sanctions, you can facilitate the request. “

“It’s not the goal of decentralized infura to facilitate sanctioned transactions, but there will be nodes there who will be from different geographical location so they could potentially serve the request. Infura themselves as of course, an entity on that network will of course adhere to any sanctions or any requests in that regard.”

Related: Are we still mad at Metamask and Consensus for snooping on us?

Infura is a suite of APIs and developer tools that is used by Web3 app developers to pull data from blockchains. It is used by many different Web3 apps, including MetaMask, Gnosis, Aragon and others. It is also used by many centralized exchanges to track deposit and withdrawal transactions.

Although blockchain networks charge transaction fees to prevent too many transactions from overloading servers, these fees are only charged to users writing data to the blockchain. Infura has emerged as one way to charge developers or users for reading data, which does not usually incur a transaction fee on-chain.

As Infura has become increasingly used by developers, it has come under fire for allegedly being too centralized. In November 2020, the MetaMask wallet app stopped working for most users when Infura servers went down, and some centralized exchanges were prevented from getting accurate transaction data from it anymore. This led some critics to question whether Ethereum can be genuinely decentralized as long as developers depend on Infura to provide data for their users.

Parts of this article were based on an interview with Patrick McCorry conducted by Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton at Starkware Sessions 2023 in Tel Aviv.

Ava Labs partners with AWS to offer one-click node deployment

Other new features include a subnet deployment service and GovCloud integration for compliance-friendly Dapps

Ava Labs, the developer of the Avalanche network (AVAX), has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement new features intended to make running a node easier, according to a Jan. 11 blog post from Ava Labs.

The new features include one-click node deployment through the AWS Marketplace, AWS GovCloud integration for decentralized app (DApp) developers concerned about compliance, and the ability to create Avalanche subnets with just a few clicks.

In the announcement post, Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer stated that AWS has been an important part of the Avalanche ecosystem in the past, as it has allowed DApp developers to easily launch nodes to test their software. He expects these new features to make AWS even more useful to Avalanche DApp developers. He explained:

“It has been a huge boon for both individual and enterprise developers to be able to spin up nodes and test networks on the fly with AWS in whatever legal jurisdiction makes the most sense for them. I’m proud that we’ve implemented a protocol that can accommodate millions of participants with near-instant finality. Our work with Amazon can accelerate the positive impact of Avalanche.”

Related: Defrost Finance explains how it will compensate victims of hack

The response of the Avalanche community to the news has mostly been positive. One user posted a tutorial showing how to launch an Avalanche node using the new features:

Others focused on the price action resulting from the announcement:

AWS isn’t the first cloud-computing system that Ava Labs has partnered with. In December, it formed a similar relationship with Alibaba Cloud.

Cast your vote now!

Ethereum Shanghai upgrade: EIP-3651 to cut gas fees for key network participants

Traders using builders to execute their complex trades could save a significant chunk of their gas fees as they no longer have to pay for failed transactions.

Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade, the next major upgrade post Merge, is slated for the second half of 2023. The upgrade would be a key milestone as it would allow holders who have staked their Ether (ETH) for years to withdraw them systematically and make the network more scalable.

Apart from some of the major scalability upgrades, the key event would also tuck in a few minor Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs), including EIP-3651, EIP-3855 and EIP-3860. Among all the upcoming improvement proposals, EIP-3651, called WARM Coinbase, could be a game changer that could reduce network fees for some of the key network participants called builders.

Coinbase here is the name of the software that builders use to receive new tokens on the network. Every new transaction on the platform needs to interact with the Coinbase software multiple times, The first interaction costs more as the software needs to “warm” up, and then the fees decline as the interactions increase. However, with the introduction of EIP-3651, the Coinbase software will remain warm to begin with, thus requiring a lower gas fee to access it.

As the name suggests, builders are responsible for packaging Ethereum transactions into blocks, thus called block builders. These transactions are then forwarded to validators, who put them in the proper order in the blockchain.

Related: Vitalik reveals a new section in the Ethereum roadmap: The Scourge

These builders are paid by traders to arrange transactions in a block in a certain order, meaning traders pay higher gas fees to get their transactions validated earlier. Currently, Flashbots is the biggest builder in the Ethereum ecosystem accounting for 80% of relayed blocks.

While validators using builders will benefit the most from the upgrade, traders who use builders to execute their trades could also benefit, as they no longer have to pay transaction fees for failed trades. Traders are currently charged for failed transactions as well because miners need to confirm transactions to the chain whether they succeed or fail.

The testnet version for the Shanghai upgrade dubbed Shandong went live on Oct. 18, and Ethereum developers will be working on various implementations until September 2023.

Ethereum gone wrong? Here are 3 signs to keep an eye on during the Merge

The Ethereum merge is fast approaching and those with assets at stake should keep a close eye on the following data sources.

The assumption that Ethereum will just transition to a fully functional proof-of-stake (PoS) network after the Merge somewhat ignores the risk and effort necessary to move an asset that has a $193 billion market capitalization and 400 decentralized applications (DApps).

That is precisely why monitoring vital network conditions is essential for anyone willing to trade the event, which is scheduled for Sept. 14, according to ethernodes.org. More importantly, traders should be prepared to detect any alarming developments in case things go wrong.

Apart from the $34.2 billion in total value locked in smart contracts, another $5.3 billion in Ether (ETH) is staked on the Beacon Chain. The network is currently used by many tokens, oracle providers, stablecoins, layer-2 scalability solutions, synthetic assets, nonfungible items (NFT), DApps and cross-chain bridges.

This partially explains why the Merge has been postponed multiple times through the years and why it is deemed to be the most significant upgrade in the history of the network.

For this reason, three different testnets have undergone the Merge, with Goerli being the latest on Aug. 11. Curiously, minor issues were presented on all testnet implementations, including Ropsten and Sepolia. For instance, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden noted that “two different terminal blocks and lots of non-updated nodes” slightly slowed the process down.

The core of any blockchain network are its blocks

It doesn’t matter what the consensus mechanism is: All blockchains rely on new blocks being proposed and validated. There are established block parameters that must be followed even to be considered by the network participants.

In the case of the Ethereum Merge, an epoch is a bundle of up to 32 blocks that should be attested within six and a half minutes. Actively monitoring the Eth2 Beacon Chain mainnet from reputable sources like BeaconScan by Etherscan and Ethscan ETH2 Explorer by Redot is important.

Ethereum Beacon Chain epochs and blocks. Source: EtherScan

Red flags on this monitor would be low voting participation on the epochs, the lack of finality after thirteen minutes (2 epochs) or a grinding halt on proposed blocks.

Monitoring Infura’s Ethereum 2.0 API

Infura provides infrastructure for building decentralized applications, allowing developers to deploy their solutions without hosting their own full Ethereum node. The company is fully owned by the Ethereum venture capital group ConsenSys, which is controlled by Joseph Lubin.

According to Infura’s website, projects relying on its infrastructure include Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Gnosis, Brave, Decentraland and Web3 wallet provider MetaMask.

Infura API status page. Source: Infura

Thus, monitoring Infura’s API is a good starting point to evaluate DApps’ performance. In addition, their status page should reliably display real-time updates, considering how closely tied Infura works with the Ethereum ecosystem.

Related: ETH Merge, CoinGecko co-founder shares strategy for forked tokens

Slashings, are validators being penalized?

The Ethereum Merge consensus mechanism has embedded penalty rules designed to prevent attacks. Any validator deliberately misbehaving is slashed, meaning part of its respective 32 ETH stake is removed. Repetitive slashes will eventually cause the validator to be ejected from the network. Staking providers and the validator software have built-in protection to prevent someone from accidentally being slashed, for example, if their connection went down.

Slashed validators info. Source: BeaconScan

Traders need to understand that slashing is a standard action of the network, a protective measure, so it should not immediately be deemed unfavorable. A worrisome environment would be hundreds of validators being slashed simultaneously, potentially indicating that their software is not functioning as it should.

There are over 410,000 active validators, so even if 20% or 30% of them eventually went offline, the network would continue as designed. Monitoring slashing is a preemptive measure because it likely indicates that some service, such as a hosting provider, has gone offline or some incompatibility arose during the Merge.

Ethereum advocates should consider monitoring external data instead of just their own node and server. There could be delays or even erroneous warning signs, so using multiple sources of information could help one avoid being misled by data from a single website or a post on social networks.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.