Unification: A New Chain Born
FUND-MainNet-2, wFUND, the last xFUND, Shibarium, and all else that’s ahead!
The Unification Foundation is proud to announce the successful upgrade of the FUND Mainchain MainNet on June 8th,11:00:00 UTC.
The Unification family including the Foundation, Validators, and participating delegators all came together to successfully complete a historic update on the Unification network to v2.
At 11:00:00 UTC on June 8th, 2022, MainNet successfully halted as per the governance proposal. Validator operators each exported the chain’s state as of FUND-Mainchain-MainNet-1 block #11,039,060 from their node’s chain data to a new genesis and ran the genesis migration process, which transformed the genesis export to the new Cosmos SDK v0.42.x format.
Validator operators were in constant communication via Telegram and Discord, cross-referencing their SHA256 hash results of the migrated genesis, to ensure that all operators had exported and migrated correctly.
Once genesis hashes had been verified between operators as all matching, the operators restarted their nodes with the new genesis, initialising FUND-MainNet-2. At 14:00:00 UTC — the new genesis time specified in the governance proposal — the nodes began communicating with each other to propose and sign the first block. After a relatively short (and nerve-wracking) time > ⅔ Validator power reached consensus, block 1 was produced, and the new chain was born!
The update required massive cooperation, participation, and appropriately, unity among all members to enable a successful update and was able to proceed in a historic 3 hours as planned with the minimally possible downtime, continuing Unification’s stance among the most efficient Blockchains for enterprise and DeFi, which give reason to the continuation of government, consortium and corporate partners who have grown with the Foundation since the initial MainNet launch in 2020.
Unifications’s Web Wallet & Explorer have also been updated to accurately reflect/take advantage of all new changes, with more new features including additional governance coming to web formats as a result of the upgrades soon.
Explorer
https://explorer.unification.io/
Web Wallet
BEACON/WRKchain Improvements
The FUND MainNet has already experienced a significant increase in speed and energy effectiveness, following the update, which is in place even before the emergence of Beacon/WRKchain updates which will take these optimizations even further.
Network Improvements Made Possible & wFUND
The update not only enables massive speed and efficiency, but it also opens the door for new features of existing tools including Beacons, and perhaps most importantly lays the path to cross-compatibility of FUND across not only our internal network but also via all EVM and Cosmos compatible protocols, products and platforms.
These actions will be possible through the emergence of wFUND, which will be released with the launch of the Gravity Bridge protocols as a part of the next platform. wFUND is already in plan for Private TestNet use of several large-scale projects for oracles and additional usage and will continue to grow in usage with all options including a large-scale L2 project which Unification is strongly collaborating on the development of.
Additionally, the upgrade to Cosmos SDK 0.42.x has opened the doors for many existing third-party tools to easily interact with FUND-MainNet-2 out of the box, with little or no additional configuration, thanks to the standardized gRPC interface and REST endpoints. These include Ledger integration, Keplr wallet integration, and the Big Dipper explorer to name just a few.
Gladly, future updates are now possible to be rolled out in a much easier manner without the need for Validators to coordinate an aggregate push, and indeed, work has already begun on the next update to facilitate wFUND and IBC integration!
Unification Community Development Fund
As promised, the community fund has distributed an xFUND grant to those who assisted with the update, particularly during the TestNet phase which allowed a smooth upgrade. These funds have been distributed to all Validators who started and helped with the Testnet Process (increasing the grant to 6 xFUND).
The success and participation of the program & distribution showcases the continued collaborative support of the community & foundation together and will continue for the next Testnet/Mainnet updates planned for the upcoming months.
(Proof of) the last xFUND
Following discussions in the Unification Telegram group, there was a request for the Foundation to ensure the guarantee of no future increases in xFUND emissions.
There are no plans for the Foundation to allow additional increases even through proposals, and the Foundation will take the following actions to remove any technical possibilities for future extensions:
- The emissions algorithm will be disabled once the final emission is complete and submitted as a Beacon.
- Following the final xFUND emission, there will be a one month grace period for Validator operators to claim and mint their accrued emissions.
- At the end of the one month grace period, any unclaimed xFUND will be lost leaving a total supply of less than 10,000
- At the end of the one month grace period, the signing key used to claim xFUND in the smart contract will be revoked and destroyed at the contract level, effectively disabling the claim/mint process. Without a valid key it will not be possible to mint new xFUND (including any unclaimed emissions, so take advantage of the one month grace period).
As the innovative design of xFUND emissions would cease emissions after a key burn, the plan outlined is the right balance to ensure proof of the end of emissions while allowing the current schedule to continue.
Also, to prevent any pesky recursive division, the final xFUND emitted on August 22 (as scheduled) will be divided into 20, not the usual 24.
Shibarium
The Shibarium Private Alpha TestNet has been successfully running for a number of weeks and is allowing our team of developers to create the necessary support tools prior to the public Beta TestNet deployment. The primary tool under heavy development is the wallet application, which is intended to be an all-inclusive application covering two-way asset transfers between L1 and L2, asset transfers on each respective level, staking/delegating, and in future releases, Shibaswap integration, which will also be deployed on L2.
Shibarium is being built on and improving well established, battle-tested and robust technology with xFUND, and particularly Oracle of Oracles (OoO) — which will play a key role in the network and as AMM.
The Shibarium Public Beta TestNet is planned for deployment in Q3, to coincide with the FUND TestNet upgrade which includes the much anticipated IBC/Gravity/wFUND updates. The public Beta TestNet will allow parties to fully interact with the network, including the validation process.
The Coming Months for Unification
The Unification Foundation has continued innovative development since its inception in 2017, through many phases of the blockchain market and will continue to innovate with and serve the market. We look forward to what’s planned for the next few months with Shibarium, the last xFUND, the next update on the MainNet and the birth of wFUND.
The anticipated time for the following updates will be in Q3 and the team will start to work with the Validator community on elements of the launch and upgrade already.
