ANN: GeekCash will Migration to Polkadot / Substrate
Last year, we spent a lot of time researching and preparing for the launch of Testnet with the Cosmos SDK. However, we were more convinced by Polkadot and Substrave for the purpose of the project.
The Geek Team can now announce that the current GeekCash based on Dash will be migrating to the Polkadot/Substrate codebase.
Why migrate?
MasterNode was a breakthrough idea several years ago. But after a period of implementation it has shown some disadvantages that are no longer suitable for the strong development and vision of the Geek ecosystem.
GEEK will be using Polkadot and Substrate as a modular framework. Not only does this mean we will benefit from the work of the framework’s developers moving forward, we will also be able to incorporate some standard Substrate modules from the default Substrate Runtime Module Library (SRML) into our own. This grants us a large amount of freedom over the GEEK blockchain’s logic, letting us change data types, add or remove modules, and, crucially, create our own custom, storage-related modules.
Polkadot is an inter-chain blockchain protocol and serves as the foundation for an internet of blockchains. Polkadot solves interoperability and scalability by allowing all interconnected chains to share in security through a central blockchain: the Polkadot relay-chain. GeekCash will function as a chain within this network.
Substrate is a next-generation, modular blockchain framework and used to build Polkadot. All chains built with Substrate can negatively interact with the Polkadot relay-chain. The new Geek chain will be built using Substrate.
Maybe, you already know Polkadot and Substrate, we will re-introduce the highlights so you can basically get the advantages and features that Geek will inherit.
What is Polkadot?
Polkadot is an open-source, inter-chain blockchain protocol that allows independent blockchains to transfer messages and exchange information in a trustless fashion. Empowering a united network of participants that benefit from the protection of shared security, it serves as a foundation in the creation of an interoperable, scalable and decentralized internet (Web3.0). A heterogenous and multi-chain technology, Polkadot makes no assumptions about the nature of the structure of the participants in the network. Even non-blockchain systems and data structures can be integrated if they fulfil a set of criteria. What is more, interchain transactability allows for the sharing of unique features and the pooling of security through the enforcement of order and the validation of the messages sent between chains. On this foundation, an ecosystem of DApps and services is being built that will distribute power and equity for the common good, of which Geek will now be a part.
Governance
Polkadot has a sophisticated system of governance in which all DOT (Polkadot native token) holders have a say. Proposals can be suggested either by a DOT holder or by the Council. Both need to be agreed by a stake-weighted referendum.
All DOT holders can register to be considered for the Council. The Council consists of 23 members, with a fixed term of one month. Its role is simply to represent passive stakeholders, submit important proposals and, in exceptional circumstances, cancel uncontroversially dangerous or malicious proposals.
Council proposals have the benefit of requiring a lower number of ayes to pass in a referendum compared to a public proposal. Council proposals need to be supported by a strict majority of Council members, with no veto. Dangerous or malicious proposals may only be cancelled with a unanimous vote.
A Technical Committee (consisting of teams that implemented or formally specified the protocol in Polkadot) exists with the sole purpose of detecting issues such as bugs in the code and to fast-track emergency upgrades or changes to the chain. Teams may be added or removed by a majority vote from the Council.
The use of Treasury funds is ultimately controlled by all DOT holders via referendum. The Treasury raises funds by channeling some of the validator rewards (from minting) and by channeling a fraction of the transaction fees and slashings (the fine paid by a validator who acts maliciously or incompetently). These funds are used to pay for the smooth running of the system and the wider ecosystem (marketing, community events and outreach).
Nominated Proof of Stake
Nominated proof of stake (NPoS) is an adaptation of proof of stake (PoS) in which an unlimited number of token holders can back a large but limited number of validators (expected to be in the order of hundreds at genesis). The elected validators are responsible for running the relay chain.
This allows for a massive amount of stake to back validators, much higher than any single user’s holding. As the nominators share possible slashings as well as economic rewards with the validators they back, they are economically incentivized to choose validators with a strong record of performance and security practices.
Using a system of proportional representation, every minority in the nominator set gets to elect a number of validators in proportion to their stake, with no minority underrepresented.
As such, NPoS is not only much more efficient than proof of work (PoW), but also considerably more secure and decentralized than PoS schemes without stake delegation, where only a few whales (owners of a large amount of tokens) can ever become validators.
Block Production and Consensus
The validators elected using NPoS are responsible for receiving, validating and republishing blocks on the relay chain using a hybrid consensus protocol that splits the finality gadget (GRANDPA) from the block production mechanism (BABE).
This combination allows 1) probabilistic finality by BABE due to its chain selection rule, where after a certain time the block will be finalized with a probability close to one and 2) provable and deterministic finality by GRANDPA, where finalized blocks stay final forever.
Combining the mechanisms avoids the chance of unknowingly following the wrong fork (a hazard of probabilistic finality) and allows the rapid finalization of blocks, as the slower finality mechanism finalizes blocks separately without risking slower transaction processing or stalling.
GRANDPA: Finality gadget
GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive ANcestor Deriving Prefix Agreement) is the finality gadget that is implemented for the Polkadot Relay Chain.
It works in a partially synchronous network model as long as 2/3 of nodes are honest and can cope with 1/5 Byzantine nodes in an asynchronous setting.
A notable distinction is that GRANDPA reaches agreements on chains rather than blocks, greatly speeding up the finalization process, even after long-term network partitioning or other networking failures.
In other words, as soon as more than 2/3 of validators attest to a chain containing a certain block, all blocks leading up to that one are finalized at once.
BABE
BABE (Blind Assignment for Blockchain Extension) is the block production mechanism that runs between the validator nodes and determines the authors of new blocks. BABE is comparable as an algorithm to Ouroboros Praos, with some key differences in chain selection rule and slot time adjustments. BABE assigns block production slots to validators according to stake and using the Polkadot randomness cycle.
Validators in Polkadot will participate in a lottery in every slot that will tell them whether or not they are the block producer candidate for that slot. Slots are discrete units of time, nominally 6 seconds in length. Because of this randomness mechanism, multiple validators could be candidates for the same slot. Other times, a slot could be empty, resulting in inconsistent block time.
Multiple Validators per Slot
When multiple validators are block producer candidates in a given slot, all will produce a block and broadcast it to the network. At that point, it’s a race. The validator whose block reaches most of the network first wins. Depending on network topology and latency, both chains will continue to build in some capacity, until finalization kicks in and amputates a fork. See Fork Choice below for how that works.
No Validators in Slot
When no validators have rolled low enough in the randomness lottery to qualify for block production, a slot can remain seemingly blockless. We avoid this by running a secondary, round-robin style validator selection algorithm in the background. The validators selected to produce blocks through this algorithm always produce blocks, but these secondary blocks are ignored if the same slot also produces a primary block from a VRF-selected validator. Thus, a slot can have either a primary or a secondary block, and no slots are ever skipped.
Relay-chain
The relay-chain is the central chain in the Polkadot network and is secured by validators. Polkadot uses NPoS (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) as its mechanism for selecting the validator set. To maximize chain security, it requires validators secure the relay-chain by staking DOTs, the native token of the Polkadot protocol, and tasks nominators with selecting good validators by nominating their stake to them. The relay-chain is composed of a small variety of transaction types that provide the functionality to participate in NPoS, to interact with the governance mechanism and to conduct auctions for parachain slots (a topic that will be covered shortly). This is where the utility and economics of the DOT token comes in.
The responsibility of the relay-chain is the achievement of consensus and transaction delivery among the large number of data structures that are linked with it. These application-specific data structures are called parallelized chains, or parachains. Within the Polkadot ecosystem Shift will function as a parachain and, through the use of the relay-chain as a source of shared security, be able to communicate and transact with all other parachains in a trustless fashion.
Parachains
Polkadot consists of many parachains with potentially differing characteristics. Parachains function independently and have their own state transition and validator sets, while sharing networking and the consensus layer with the relay-chain. As this networking and consensus layer is provisioned by Polkadot, parachain developers are able to focus on creating applications with their own unique features.
In order to share security in the context of interoperability, each parachain needs to lease a parachain slot on the relay-chain. A parachain slot is essentially a license for cross-chain validation and provides a parachain with unlimited access to cross-chain transactions to be included on the relay-chain. Parachain slots are acquirable through the aforementioned auctions, in which DOTs are “bonded” on the Polkadot relay-chain as a form of collateral.
Parachain-threads (Parathreads)
Once Polkadot has been launched, the number of available parachain slots will be dynamically limited. Due to the fact that parachain slots can only be acquired through auctions, it is likely that their cost will rapidly increase (due to a large amount of DOTs needing to be locked over a long period of time) and even become infeasible for smaller projects. That is why, for the purpose of fair distribution of the ability to share in security, in addition to those standard parachain slots some slots are set aside to run so-called parathreads. Parathreads function in exactly the same manner as parachains, but differ in their economic cost. While parachains have unlimited access to the relay-chain during the lease contract, parathreads bid on a per-block basis to be included on the relay-chain. This allows smaller parachain projects to temporarily participate in Polkadot security (on a block by block basis) without the need to lease a dedicated parachain slot. A parathread is thus a way to distribute the scarce number of parachain slots among a number of competing resources—parachain-threads, hence its name.
Bridges
The last of the three principal components Polkadot introduces are bridges. Bridges are connecting layers that will enable existing blockchains with their own state histories and methods of consensus to link with Polkadot without having to be a native parachain. Examples of existing blockchains that could potentially be “bridged” include Bitcoin and that of the Ethereum network. This functionality has great relevance to GEEK as bridges will allow users to transact a wider array of tokens into GEEK without the necessity of going through exchanges.
On-chain Consensus Upgrades Without Hardforks
Like all software, blockchains need upgrades to stay relevant and improve over time. However, upgrading conventional chains requires what are called “hard forks”, which create two separate transaction histories that can splinter a community in two and often take months of work. Polkadot enables forkless upgrades, allowing blockchains to evolve and adapt easily as better technology becomes available.
When taken together, these core features open a world of possibility for new services that put people back in control of their own digital lives. Several teams are already building impactful solutions for Polkadot for a range of applications, including finance, gaming, digital identity, IoT, supply chain management, social networking and cloud technologies. Web3 Foundation, the organization responsible for stewarding the development of Polkadot, supports many of these teams with grants, funding projects at all levels of the web3 technology stack, from low-level infrastructure to ecosystem components such as wallets, parachains, bridges and tooling.
Day by day, the Polkadot ecosystem is growing larger and more robust as teams realize the benefits and efficiency of deploying their project to Polkadot. Polkadot’s unique design gives projects more possibilities for innovation and flexible iteration than was ever possible in previous networks. By bringing multiple specialized chains together into one scalable network, Polkadot enables blockchain technology to reach its full potential for real-world use cases, giving rise to new markets and paving the way for future decentralized economies.
What is Substrate?
Substrate is a next-generation framework for blockchain development and underlies the building of Polkadot and its chains. Both Polkadot and Substrate are a product of the same creators: founded by the Web3 Foundation, researched by Inria Paris and ETH Zurich and developed by Parity Technologies. The most important part of understanding the difference between Polkadot and Substrate is that while Polkadot is the relay-chain within its ecosystem, Substrate is the blockchain framework used by any native chain in the network, including Polkadot itself. Although Polkadot is itself built with Substrate and projects built with Substrate can run natively on Polkadot, anyone can use Substrate to build new blockchains without being dependent on the development of Polkadot.
Substrate is both a library for building new blockchains, as well as a “skeleton key” of a blockchain client that is able to synchronize with any Substrate-based chain. This is why all parachains in the Polkadot network run parallel to the relay-chain. Substrate chains have three distinct features that make them, and thus GEEK, next-generation:
- A dynamic, self-defining state-transition function (STF).
- Light-client functionality.
- A progressive, hybrid consensus algorithm with fast block production and adaptive, definite finality.
In addition, Substrate supports writing smart contracts with Wasm (WebAssembly). It means that any language that can compile to Wasm could be used to write these contracts.
What is Next?
We will try to launch testnet in the next few weeks. With the option of Substrate for the new chain will be great expectations when launching the Mainnet. We are confident that this will mark a new era for the GEEK ecosystem.
Conclusion
With open source, anyone can own a chain with the most advanced blockchain technology. However, its value does not depend on technology but on the number of users in the ecosystem. Understanding that, Geek Team has been doing this well.
Ah almost forgot, another important detail in the change is that we decided to Max Supply to 9B instead of 3.6B to accommodate micro transactions and not only pay bonus for content on Morioh but also We partner with a few other social networks that are part of the GEEK ecosystem. So with the current GEEK in the old chain when moving to the new chain will be increased by 2.5 times. For example you have 1000 GEEK will increase by: 1000 * 2.5 = 2500.
This plan is only expected, can be changed to match the actual time.
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