With the first six months behind us, we have maintained our focused on executing roadmap deliverables and also pushed out a few maintenance updates along the way. Inside this update we will be discussing our progress on the Polygon Bridge, Core maintenance, On-Chain Governance, Community events, and other noteworthy developments.
Polygon Bridge
Earlier in the year, after our developers completed their research on how the smart contract mechanism would interact with the two blockchains (Ghost & Polygon), our developers published the basic contract interface. This is a set of predefined functions and specifications the bridge must adhere to in order to interact with other contracts or applications within the two blockchain’s environments. This interface specifies the function names, arguments, and return values among other parameters.
Continuing the development, the next step was to develop the data structures and controller contracts. The controller contracts will serve as intermediaries between user interactions and the underlying smart contract, coordinating actions and managing data flow. The data structure serves as an organizer and is used to store data in a way that facilitates efficient access, necessary manipulation & retrieval of data.
Moreover, development on the actual smart contract itself continued as the burn and mint functions were implemented. For a two-way bridge to be interoperable, there has to be a way for users to both, be able to mint the wrapped coins, and burn them when they want to move back to the main chain. This is a very important area of the bridge as these functions naturally manipulate the tokenomics of the wrapped coin. In order to protect the bridge, logic statements and functional tests have been incorporated into the burn/mint mechanism. In simple terms, this protects the blockchain from bad actors artificially inflating the supply.
Going back to data retrieval for a second, its important to understand how the bridge will gain access to certain data that it normally does not have access to, due to the blockchain’s isolated and deterministic environment. This is solved by adding an oracle. The role of the oracle is to provide trustless data to the smart contract itself. This bridges the gap between the two blockchains, as Polygon normally would not have access to Ghost’s blockchain data, i.e., tokenomics and conversion rates included.
At current press time, our developers are nearing the final testing phase for the polygon bridge. A testnet has been deployed and has been proven successful already. This is far from a final checkoff, but still a very exciting and huge accomplishment nonetheless. We will keep you updated as we get closer to production.
Core Maintenance
During testing of our upcoming on-chain governance model, one of our cryptographers noticed block 754789 experienced an issue where the block contained data with coins being sent to OP_RETURN, which then caused the AGVR protocol to reject this specific type of output. A hotfix was deployed only hours later and the blockchain resumed normal operations. To read more about this, click here.
With the OP_RETURN bug resolved, we took a look at our core and decided to push out some maintenance updates to improve overall efficiency. Some of these maintenance items include improving sync times with the blockchain. Specifically, with the AGVR protocol, there are times where users can experience longer than usual sync times due to the nature of the protocol.
In addition, with Bitcoin’s latest releases, we decided to match our codebase to be up to date with the latest upstream. This will include adding Taproot to the codebase, but not fully implemented. There still has to be some changes made to make Taproot compatible for Ghost’s code, explicitly speaking, how Taproot will interoperate with RingCT and Bulletproofs.
On-Chain Governance
With the aforementioned core maintenance, we are also working on getting on-chain governance into production ASAP. This is a long awaited feature that every decentralized project should have. We completed our research on how this governance model will work last year, but are just now able to develop it due to other deliverables taking priority. The framework for this model is available on our GitHub now. We are actively in testing phase, so final tweaks are being made to ensure that the voting mechanism is trustless.
More on this, earlier in the year functional tests and logical statements were included to ensure RingCT will seamlessly work with on-chain governance since both of these protocols work at the consensus level.
Community Events and Updates
On June 22nd, Ghost turned 3 years old! We celebrated with another successful baking competition and enjoyed seeing the delicious creations our community baked. The winners of this year’s baking contest are below.
Following our 3rd birthday, as per our consensus, Ghost observed its 2nd block reward reduction at block height 788400. The current total block subsidy is now 10.8 $GHOST, down form 11.4 $GHOST. The current reward distribution is now as follows, 5.400 $GHOST for Veterans, 3.672 $GHOST for the Miner, and 1.728 $GHOST for the Development Fund.
If you haven't already downloaded SHELTR, our mobile wallet, we highly recommend you do so. SHELTR is not just any mobile wallet, it’s a PWA (Progressive Web Application). PWAs are known for their awesome features that make them feel like native apps, and SHELTR is no exception. It has a seamless and smooth user interface that makes it easy to use for everyone. You can read all about SHELTR here.
Be sure you stay tuned for more updates regarding our development of the Polygon bridge. We are excited to share with the world this ground breaking deliverable.
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