Incognito initiatives in Q3

Hi Incognito community,

It’s been almost 3 weeks since Privacy V2 - the biggest upgrade of Incognito so far. During the 3 weeks, besides supporting users’ issues post update, working on development stuff, the team also finalized initiatives we can commit to release in the next 3 months. A lesson from development’s delays in the past is that it’s better to only give and commit a plan/timeline for every two or three months since ideas and priority may change over time so a longer plan isn’t ideal for an R&D project like Incognito.

The following are what we will release in August, September, and October 2021:

Portal v4 (shipped)

A trustless Bitcoin bridge to make BTC shielding and unshielding 1) more secure by using multiple multisig wallets generated from beacon validators keys in the network, funds no longer managed by the team’s centralized service, 2) cheaper by allowing multiple unshieldings to execute in a batch and 3) less congestion by replacing out-chain transactions (in Bitcoin network) with higher fees to reduce waiting time.

Slashing v2 (shipped)

With slashing, the network will be able to detect inoperative and misbehaving validators and replace them with better validators. After slashing has been active for some time, this will increase the stability of the network as the network will utilize “healthy” validators. A different thing from slashing v1 is that rewards from slashed nodes will be distributed evenly to remaining validators in a committee.

pDEX v3 (end of Oct)

A new pDEX protocol that will focus on the following improvements: 1) Capital Efficiency with multiplied pricing curve setups. 2) Trading Experience with a hybrid of order-book and automated market-making (AMM) for slippage reduction. 3) Liquidity Mining with competitive rewards for liquidity providers (LPs) on multiple liquidity mining programs.

As for liquidity provision, the most popular method is currently the Provide feature, which is centralized. We’re going to end Provide and replace it with the liquidity mining above that enables you to earn crypto in return for providing liquidity. This will make the pDEX more sustainable and organic in the long term, and remove concerns around trusting the core team with your funds in Provide.

Note: Provide will still be maintained after the new pDEX for some time so that the migration can happen as smoothly as possible.

Mempool v2 (end of Oct)

A new mempool that will help increase throughput for transactions, is one of the most important building blocks for Incognito to reduce block time. Apart from this, the team will also work on performance improvements for bottlenecks in connection, storage as well as data verification. These will be input data for the team to be able to make decisions on block time reduction in the next quarter.

Staking flow v3 (shipped)

In staking flow v3, we introduce a new phase for staking flow called Sync pool. A node will get into the pool and wait in there until finishing sync prior to entering a pending committee queue, this will help mitigate for the node from slashing by missing votes because its data is not up to date. Besides, the team still continues researching for the new protocols with the goal of making the network more resilient.

That’s it for the development side in this quarter. In regards to the growth side, we’re seeking a couple of community managers who will help increase user engagement first and will push more effort on new user acquisition after pDEX v3 where users have a real utility for funds deposited in Incognito.

We’re really excited about the next steps after Privacy v2, hope you will too.

P/S: we will keep updating links for initiatives in the topic.

Cheers and thanks for your support!

25 Likes

I have a question about slashing v2. Sometimes we (pnode and vnode owners) encounter same problem - if there is not enough time for shard data sync or beacon sync after chain data wipe, we’ll get zero votes count. Check bellow:

What should we do then? Pnode owner will be slashed?

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Hey @Devenus,

Doesn’t this answer your question?

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Hi @Devenus, Staking flow v3’s sync pool will be a perfect solution for not enough sync time problem but it’s in a longer term.

The problem happened sometimes due to unbalanced nodes number among shards, I mean when a node was assigned to a shard with a short pending list, it unlikely has enough time for data sync so that it couldn’t vote/contribute to the network. That’s why we postponed enabling Slashing for a while and fixed unbalancing issue first. (You can find the fix here)

I believe the number of nodes in shards will be balanced out by the end of the month, so nodes will always have enough time for data sync (assuming total nodes is still remain as now)

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Thanks @duc, @abduraman. But as I understood, slashing v2 will be enabled in the early September, and staking flow v3 - late October. There is a chance for someone to be slashed during this period.

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Like I said, as long as the numbers of nodes among shards are balanced, your node will have enough time for data sync.

Hi guys, we just created a topic for introducing Slashing V2 here and updated the link to the post above as well. Thanks @adrian and @Devenus for pointing out potential issues the network may have with Slashing. I believe we now have a better plan for Slashing’s release.

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Hello guys, we just created a topic for introducing Staking Flow V3 here and updated the link to the post above as well.

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For 2021 Q4 or 2022 Q1, you may examine LayerZero (https://www.binance.com/en/blog/421499824684902766/ecosystem/binance-labs-and-multicoin-capital-coled-$6m-series-a-for-layerzero) to get rid of the costs of building/maintaining bridges to the other chains. FYI.

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Tagging @0xkraken here as she may find this interesting.

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In order to get the Q3 roadmap up-to-date, I just marked 3 initiatives delivered as shipped and updated the ship dates of pDEX v3 and Mempool v2 according to the current development progress. It seems like we can still hit all goals of Q3 as planned. cc @drusin

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Hey @duc,

Could you explain this issue further? For example, what are the bottlenecks? How will you increase the throughput? Currently does the mempool reject them if a lot of txs come? etc.

Thanks.

I just want to know if pnode is not longer used anymore? I just recently popped up and found I need to stake 1750 PRV to the node. It’s fine for me to stake but if the pnode is still running ?

Nodes that aren’t functioning properly get slashed with any staked PRV returned. There’s ways to fix your pnode to ensure it’s healthy, restake and begin to earn again.

https://we.incognito.org/t/slashing-is-live/13893

https://we.incognito.org/t/official-pnode-troubleshooting-guide/13718

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So right now I must stake 1850 PRV myself to run the node?

The short answer is, no you do not need the funds. Please read over the following guide:

Thanks. Eventually I stake 1750 PRV into the node.

Mind if I ask the node is healthy? I use the monitor nodes to check my node and said
Role: Syncing Shard 6
status: Online
Sync State: Beacon Stall

Are these status normal and working?

This means it is not working correctly. If you require further assistance please message @Support.