Metronome Update — February 2019
February 2019 saw some milestone achievements from the Metronome team and reaffirmed the team’s goal of an Ethereum Classic chainhop — still on track for Q1, 2019. The team wanted to share February’s additional updates.
Validator Document Published
As a major milestone, the Metronome team published the documentation outlining how the validator network works. The code itself should be available to the public soon afterward. Both the code and the documentation it describes have undergone intense independent audits.
The document describes 1) the need for such a validator network, 2) how that network works, and 3) the phased approach toward increasingly decentralized cross-chain MET transfers.
To summarize: The validator network is a necessary piece of the Metronome ecosystem only when owners move MET between chains. Same-chain transactions will not require validator verification of transactions. When transferring MET tokens between different compatible blockchains, an off-chain and publicly-known entity will ensure the validity of exporting and importing MET tokens between chains. Hence, validators are responsible for observing a blockchain for events, validating cross chain transactions, and voting on the validity of that event.
There will be three phases to the validator network, and each phase is meant to introduce more decentralization to the process.
- Phase 1: Has a federated network of validators deploying contracts and verifying transactions.
- Phase 2: Has chain oracles providing the necessary information for cross-chain transactions to be verified and to vote upon events on chains (such as forks and attacks).
- Phase 3: Cross-chain validation provides a fully decentralized end state. The model mirrors that of the original Bitcoin blockchain — a full consensus protocol.
Community members are encouraged to collaborate on this document and provide feedback via GitHub issues.
Manoj Patidar AMA
Following the release of the Validator document, the Metronome team wanted to provide the community with the opportunity to ask one of the developers technical questions. Manoj Patidar was one of the developers building Metronome’s cross-chain capability, the validator document, and other parts of the Metronome ecosystem.
Taking place February 26th at 11 AM PT, the session focused primarily on technical questions surrounding the document and network function itself.
Most of the questions focused on the three-phase approach and the manner that future phases assign stake weight voting during a fork or transaction discrepancy.
Manoj explained: “[In phase three] Each lily pad (set of Metronome contracts) will generate a block every hour on [each] respective chain and their stake (i.e, share of global supply ) will [be] considered for transaction validations.” The amount of MET on a chain will have a direct proportional weighted vote to its share of the global MET supply. This also mitigates against the creation of numerous wallets for the sake of “vote” manipulation.
Manoj went on to discuss how the vision for phase two and its community oracles: “As the document describes, chains will look to the oracles for the community, who may be foundations or other publicly known entities on that chain, core devs, and such…” adding that “… the document also does note that phases 2 and 3 are still being built out and the validator document for those sections is meant to be a living document.”
The team is looking to schedule future AMAs, both technical and more general since they’ve been popular with the community.
Mobile Wallet Update
February saw two larger updates to the Metronome Wallet. Both versions 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 were released by the Metronome team. These updates included:
- Password reset capability
- Better backend node connectivity
- Windows auto-update feature
- General wallet optimization
Download the Metronome wallet for desktop or mobile to seamlessly interact with the Metronome Auction and Autonomous Converter Contract.
More to come,
The Metronome Team
