XX Network Runtime Upgrade '206' Complete

On 28th June 2024, preparations began for the XX Network’s blockchain to receive a suite of upgrades for the first time in almost two years. This has now happened.

Upgrade Schedule

The highly anticipated software update that XX Network’s nodes now run was prepared by original team member Bernie Cardoso, with further support in documentation and release binaries from Keith Millette.

The upgrade was firstly voted on from 28th June by the council and reached a majority in less than half an hour. It then moved to the tech committee who fast tracked it and then a 5 day public referendum passed on July 4th. The Network then automatically updated to version 206 at around 5am UTC on July 5th. With tens of millions of XX Coins backing the changes, it was great to witness the network actively involved in governance.

Substrate, the framework upon which XX’s blockchain was built, allows for improvements to be made to the runtime environment quickly and neatly through governance. The upgrade automatically happened across the network a day after the referendum passed.

What the Runtime Update Contained

The Substrate framework consists of modules for various functions, otherwise known as ‘pallets’ and two of these were enabled/updated.

Firstly, the Bridge pallet was enabled. The bridge, for turning Native XX into Wrapped XX (WXX) and vice versa, has been planned since the outset of the network and it is finally coming into fruition. The first step was for this functionality to be enabled at the blockchain level. Now this has happened, the bridge application for people to use is launching imminently at https://bridge.xx.network.

Secondly, the NFT pallet (formerly known as the ‘uniques’ pallet) was upgraded to the latest version. This contains improvements to make it easier to develop with, and may facilitate the porting of any other Substrate-based NFT applications to XX relatively easily.

There were other updates also to keep the substrate version up to date and other minor changes within the chain binary. You can read the release notes here.

Reallocation of Liquidity Reward Coins

The second part of this update makes a change to an original decision to allocate 50M XX Coins to liquidity rewards for the bridge. The change makes it so that 10M coins remain there, and 40M coins have gone to the native staking rewards pool. Essentially, 50M coins were deemed an unnecessarily large amount for bridge liquidity rewards and would likely be unused (at least, for a very long time). Bernie explained that the Network set out with 300M coins for staking rewards, so this movement is simply going from one type to another:

“…The staking rewards allocation at genesis was 300M but only 250M were in the rewards pool. The other 50M were locked up in the bridge account for liquidity provision rewards programs. But that’s a very large value. At the time and even now it’s still a large value. So we are reallocating 40M from liquidity provision rewards to native staking rewards.”

Max Supply Side Effect

The side effect of this reallocation is that any inflation of the XX Coin supply will be delayed.

Before this reallocation, there were around 150M XX Coins in the staking rewards pool. The current rate at which these were being distributed to stakers is in the region of 66,000XX per day. Presuming this figure remains about the same, this means it will take around 6.2 years until any inflation occurs in the network (where the network would have to mint new coins to pay staking rewards). The reallocation adds another 1.6 years to that, so the network remains inflation free (i.e no more than 1,000,000,000 coins in the supply) until at least the year 2032.

The economics whitepaper will eventually be amended to illustrate this.

Bridge Announcement

The official public interface to the bridge itself will be revealed during the Blockchain Expo event hosted by the Turkish community likely on July 5th with special guests Mário Yaksetig (in person) and David Chaum (remotely). It will be a desktop (browser) web app with a mobile version coming shortly thereafter.

Curious Nodes

If, like me, you’re a node runner and are curious to check whether your node has received the upgrade, you can run the following one-line command in a terminal session on your node to check your runtime version.

curl --data '{"jsonrpc": "2.0","method":"state_getRuntimeVersion","params":[],"id": 0}' -H 'Content-type:application/json' http://localhost:9933

You’re looking for the response to include “specVersion”:206″. Before the update, it would have read 205.

Chain Binary Update to v0.2.6

There is also a chain binary that node operators can choose to update. If your node is running v0.2.5-1 or newer, it is not mandatory. However, it is likely a good idea to be futureproofed for a while if you keep your node up to date. You can follow Keith’s excellent instructions for checking your binary version and upgrading it.

If your node is running v0.2.5 (not -1 or -2), then you may find it has crashed as part of the runtime upgrade and you are required to update the chain binary, as above.

A quick way to see the chain binaries run by all nodes across the network is on the telemetry page that nodes call in to.

TL;DR

The upgrades and launch of the bridge are two key milestones depicted in recent roadmaps and are vital to progress the strategy of a multi-network presence of XX through bridging to other blockchains, to facilitate XX Native NFTs and to reallocate XX coins to the staking rewards pool for better use and to stave off any network inflation for the foreseeable future.