Hard Fork Process and Information
This hard fork will position us to succeed against our well-capitalized competition in the decentralized space as we go to market with our Storage product, Xa Net Services
Details
The project team has announced a hard fork to come most likely before the end of 2022. Hard forks are typically quite rare, with the last one all the way back in 2019. There are a couple of goals with this change, all have to do with building a more robust distributed storage network and creating an environment that can effectively succeed against major players outside of our space. Once software is developed and tested, the process itself is straightforward. Everyone updates in advance of a specified blockheight and the chain continues running as if nothing had happened, except for the new rules introduced by the fork.
The first change is to reclaim the coins that have been sent to a “burn address” for the last 2 years. Originally, the project had a developer fee of 10% from each block but we set that to go away in year 2, thinking the project would gain enough value to attract funding in multiple other ways. Today, we have determined there is great value in capturing those coins for distribution to our network, the Storage Providers in the the form of Rebates, Incentives and Storage Rent. There is just shy of 1.58M coins on this address and we will claim all of them to be added to the current Network Development wallets.
At the beginning block, we agreed to friendly relations with the project we forked from. For reasons on their side, it didn’t happen. One of those reasons is the founder providing an address for a large gift of coins for which he already knew he didn’t have credentials for and which was totally lost. The effect was us coding into the Genesis block a 300,000SCP coin burn. We intend to claw these back and also put them to work for Storage Providers.
SPF tokens have a current supply of 200M and are managed by the project team for the benefit of the Storage Network and Product. These tokens earn a 10% percent payout from all storage contracts and are held by the project and stakeholders. Our intention is to give this token more utility in network operations and incentive structures to assist with network development as we gain more customers on the XNS platform. Storage Providers will have more of a stake in the network. We are adding 200M to the total supply but changing these such that they do not earn anything unless tied to an address with at least one working storage contract. In the future, these tokens will likely make up the pool for a Proof of Stake architecture if we go that route.
A last potential change is to the mining algorithm. We have not yet determined if that will occur on this fork. Watch this article for updates.
Process
Our developers are currently making changes to the blockchain, wallet and contracting software to accommodate the changes above. Our goal is to have testable software and a testnet operational late in the week of the 12th. Once we validate the changes work w/o issue, we will release the software, first to mining pools and exchanges. Then we will release to the general public. This is a mandatory update and we’ll have instructions if there are any special issues or requirements. Next week, we will determine a blockheight for the fork and announce it here as well.
