Volume AMA: Paloma Mainnet Upgrade, Operator Keys, & More Bots
Overview
In this week’s AMA episode, Taariq Lewis @LewisTaariq, CEO of VolumeFi (volume.finance) takes a deep-dive into Paloma and Pigeon V1.10 which introduces Pigeon operator keys allowing validators to use multiple signing keys to relay more messages in one transaction block on the Paloma network. The new version also includes fixes to the Gravity Bridge to prepare for the launching of the GRAIN token.
The upcoming upgrade of the Compass-EVM to automatically deploy to all six chains will require a redeployment of all Palomabots to restart bot activity. Once Compass-EVM is deployed, another round of 0.1 ETH will be airdropped to all active validators on the mainnet to help with rising gas fees.
Pigeon Feed enabling validators to set their own fees for relaying messages is top of the agenda for the remaining part of the year.
Fueled by the successful launch of Paloma and Curve bots which yielded over $14K in volume, and the early success of the Gnosis Euro Swaps which earned $100K in transactions last weekend, Volume will continue to build more bots to demonstrate real use and real value.
Definitions
AMA - Ask Me Anything
Validator - or Pigeon in Paloma-speak, is a participant on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain whose job is to validate transactions on the network for rewards.
RPC endpoint - a Remote Procedure Call node, is a system that bridges decentralized applications (dApps) with the blockchain.
Mempool - or memory pool refers to a backlog of pending and unconfirmed transactions in a blockchain.
Gravity Bridge - a purpose-built, fully decentralized, trustless blockchain that bridges assets between the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems.
GRAIN - also called Pigeon feed, is Paloma’s (unlisted) token.
Compass-EVM - a smart contract written in Vyper that allows you to run any other smart contract with arbitrary transaction data.
ETH - or Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network and is the second most popular digital token after bitcoin (BTC).
Gas - the fee required to conduct transactions or execute contracts on the Ethereum network.
Airdrop - a method used by cryptocurrency projects to distribute their tokens to a large number of people for free.
EURe - a fully authorized and regulated euro stablecoin for Web3 available on Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis. It enables users to send and receive euros between any bank account and Web3 wallet.
Intro
Taariq welcomes everyone to Volume’s Twitter Spaces. He shares a background about Volume.
“Volume is a software company and we are working on the Paloma blockchain protocol. Our goal is decentralized custody and decentralized trading bots, and we have a new goal, which is decentralized lending. These are all managed across chains by the Paloma validator set.”
He adds that Paloma is validator-centric, and the goal is to enable more revenue and profits for validators.
Paloma and Pigeon V 1.10.0
Taariq announces the upgrade to Pigeon V1.10 introducing Pigeon operator keys and other enhancements for target chain communications.
Communicating across chains is message-intensive. Coming from the vision for this message economy, Paloma wants to ensure that Pigeons can handle a message as well as monitor RPC endpoints on every chain supported by Paloma, namely, Ethereum, BNB, Gnosis, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism. He shares the vision for validators where they can do more work.
“If validators can do more work than just validating blocks if they can send messages, attest data, then we can create a whole new economy and a new industry of validators and decentralized data centers doing more and more work.”
The introduction of Pigeon operator keys will allow validators to relay as many messages as possible in one transaction block on the Paloma network without account sequence mismatch issues.
“Paloma, today, is the only Cosmos SDK chain that allows validators to use more keys to send more messages.”
With Pigeon feed, validators will be rewarded on the number of messages they send. They can make money for as many transactions per block as the block size is filled.
“We want filled blocks. We want flat, overweight, heavy blocks which are slowing down the entire network because that means there's demand versus empty blocks.”
This new feature has been tested in a private testnet where it worked flawlessly. However, an issue was discovered in testnet that caused stuck transactions in the Paloma mempool. The team is currently investigating the bug which might be caused by an artifact of a priority mempool issue or the migration to the new consensus layer, CometBFT.
Taariq shares that they are engaging the services of the Vitwit team as Paloma upgrades to Paloma to Cosmos-SDK V0.50 and CometBFT 0.38.
Gravity Bridge
Taariq shares that Pigeon V 1.10 also improves on the Gravity bridge. He explains that Gravity works in two ways. One is used in arbitrary logic calls to execute bots while the other is batching which is the movement of tokens across the network. A bug was discovered in one of the batches which was sending the same token in an infinite loop.
This happened during mainnet testing where Pigeons were unable to verify the event nonce due to the speed of the network. The fix has been shipped and there will be a new event nonce on the Compass EVM contract so that Pigeons can track and attest to that nonce and that the GRAIN token has successfully crossed the bridge. This upgrade requires the redeployment of Compass EVM with the new vision of Paloma and Pigeon.
Compass-EVM Upgrade
Compass-EVM is being upgraded to automatically redeploy to all six chains. The deployment will be successful if all validators have RPC endpoints that are working.
While Taariq points out that Volume does not want to centralize validators across one RPC endpoint provider, Pigeons need to stay alive because testing and running data centers cost money.
“We want to make sure that the validators can get RPC endpoint services without breaking the bank and spending more money ahead of launching the GRAIN token. We want to make sure the validators can preserve cash and still stay in the network.”
He encourages everyone to get on board and check out Nodies. Nodies offer free RPC endpoints for Paloma validators. With the new Compass-EVM, all Paloma and Curve bots will be brought back and redeployed pointing to the new contracts to take advantage of the new pigeon key functionality.
ETH Airdrop for Validators
Taariq announces that another round of ETH will be airdropped to all Paloma validators. For the first time in the history of the network, many bots were failing because of insufficient gas. The 0.1 ETH that validators had to pay for gas was not enough due to rising gas prices.
“Once Compass-EVM is deployed, we're going to airdrop another 0.1 ETH to all validators who are active on mainnet, so they can handle gas on Ethereum.
It will be an open-air drop to all active validators. This will help when the bots come back online so that validators can handle the higher gas fees.
Pigeon Feed
Pigeon feed is next on the agenda for November, which gives control of setting fees over to the validators.
“Validators get to set what fees they want to relay messages across chains. They get to set it themselves. Fees are payable in GRAINS on the target chain and therefore we'll need pools.”
Users will be able to buy GRAINS in a pool and then pay for relaying messages. Validators can sell GRAINS in a pool to pay to maintain their data centers.
“It means that Paloma is now an economy. So for all the validators that are on the network, it will now give them the ability to set fees for sending messages.”
Milestones and New Goals
As Paloma continues to ship more upgrades and redeploy Compass-EVM, Taariq sets goals for Volume and Palomabots.
“We've had about $14 million in transactions on the network, which you can think of as 14 million in TVL. Our view is that the bots are going to get more work as we continue to ship more of these upgrades. Our goal is that at least by the end of the year we’d like to see at least see if we can hit 20 million in volume on the bots. Why have 20 go for 50?”
He notes that being able to deliver more volume on the bots means that the network is getting a workout with real use.
“It's not fake use, it's not made up use, it's not bot, it's not fake bots, it's real bots with real value.”
He cites the soft launch of the Gnosis bot EURe last week yielded $100k in volume, by far the fastest and most successful bot without much push. He believes that bots that can off-ramp to euros are going to be big so they will continue to build them.
He stresses that as more people are informed about how Palomabots work, more people will want to use them.
“Here's the open source code, here are the bots that run on Paloma. You can fork, you can copy, you can do whatever you want, please give it a try.”
More bots are in development and will be launched after undergoing testing. He mentions his excitement about the collaboration with Curve to keep building bots. The Curve bots are TWAP and Limit Order, and Gnosis Off-Ramp bots which are being improved to do TWAPs.
Closing
Taariq gives special thanks to validators on the testnet and mainnet for their contribution to the network.
“The march continues to get GRAIN on the EVM, so you can sell it, make some money, and come back and do some more business. Invest in faster data centers, bigger servers, and essentially handling yet more messages.”
Stay tuned for the next AMA!
To find out more about Volume, check out Volume Finance (https://volume.finance/), join the Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Ebh6YjMShu), and follow us on Twitter (@Volumefi). Check out Paloma Chain on palomachain.com (https://www.palomachain.com/), follow them on Twitter (@palomachain), and join the flock on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/tNqkNHvVNc). Coo!
