Volume AMA: Paloma's SDK Upgrade + Pigeon Feed Updates
Overview
Big congratulations to the Paloma Network for the massive success of the Cosmos SDK 50 upgrade! This brings Paloma up to the speed and capacity of leading blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. The host of this week’s AMA episode, Taariq Lewis @LewisTaariq, CEO of VolumeFi (volume.finance) offers a post-mortem on this significant milestone allowing Paloma to take advantage of all the new features of the best version of Cosmos SDK, including optimistic execution and a speed boost with block times reduced to 500 milliseconds. The team goes all hands on deck to debug and fix issues to keep the network stable.
The road is now clear to get Pigeon Feed up and running. For the rest of April, Paloma will be mainly focused on Pigeon Feed, and it is expected that validators will be able to claim their GRAIN rewards from the target chain by month’s end.
Once relaying issues are addressed, more Palomabots will be launched to showcase the power of the Paloma network.
Definitions
AMA - Ask Me Anything
Validator - or Pigeon in Paloma-speak, a participant in a blockchain network responsible for validating new transactions and maintaining the security of the blockchain.
GRAINS - Paloma’s native token (unlisted).
Optimistic Execution - enables Cosmos SDK chains to build blocks with ground-breaking velocity, pushing the limits of block times and efficiency.
Pigeon Feed - the on-chain marketplace for message relaying on Paloma.
Gravity Bridge - is a purpose-built, fully decentralized, trustless blockchain that bridges assets between the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems.
Fee burning - refers to permanently removing or destroying a portion of the transaction fees or tokens used within a blockchain network. This process is typically implemented to reduce the total supply of tokens or to incentivize holders by increasing the scarcity of the remaining tokens.
Intro
The host welcomes everyone to Volume’s Twitter Spaces. He congratulates all Pigeons on the success of the Cosmos SDK upgrade.
“We are now officially over a year old on mainnet, and we’ve upgraded to the most advanced version of Cosmos SDK. We’re making sure that the network is stable, so we are working hard at it. We are going to crush it!”
Taariq shares a brief background about Volume.
“Our goal is decentralized bots on blockchains, decentralized trading bots, decentralized lending bots, all managed by Paloma validator set. Our goal is to increase bots across all blockchains, make them work, and make them work fast. ”
He adds that the focus is for Paloma validators to get paid to manage transactions remotely across multiple blockchains while ensuring that those transactions are executed quickly.
Cosmos SDK Upgrade Post-Mortem
The team continues to work through bugs and issues after the upgrade to Cosmos SDK 50.5 last week. Taariq reports that three major debugging issues are being addressed. There was a remote signer issue despite the upgrade to tmkms, where validators were unable to sign blocks and failed on the consensus level. The upgrade handler bug is under review by Binary Builders who are working on the fix. The team is tracking down AppHash and RPC failures to fix the errors. Despite the challenges during the transition, Taariq assures that the upgrade is a success and they are working towards resolving the issues.
“I want to say that the upgrade was a massive success if all we have are these three errors. It means that the upgrade was a good effort. It didn't kill the network. We didn't have a chain halt. We could have had to roll back. We did not. The network continued moving. The network is cranking!”
The success is a great testament to the hard work of Christian, ByteBandit, Vera, and the rest of the protocol engineering team.
This week, Paloma will be focused on debugging relays and AppHash errors. They are unable to launch new bots because the relays are not working properly. The team is working on getting more snapshots available for validators and start working from there.
“We're going to be working down, trying to debug, trying to fix, trying to attack them so that we can bring back all the validators. We want all our validators back up.”
The goal is to get all validators back online by the end of the week and get relaying back to full functionality.
“We want to get back to a stable network so we can start taking advantage of the superpower of the Cosmos SDK 50.5 version.”
Getting Ready for Pigeon Feed
Following the upgrade to Cosmos 50.5, Pigeon Feed needs to restart. Its architecture was built to reward validators with GRAINS. After addressing a potential security risk identified last week, the road is now clear to get Pigeon Feed up and running. Refunds from Volume will be phasing out as validators will now be able to collect GRAINS on the target chain as a reward for relaying messages. Validators will then be able to swap their GRAINS into ETH.
Pigeon Feed will be the team’s focus for the rest of April and Taariq anticipates that validators will be getting rewards on the target chain by month’s end.
The Paloma Chain gets a speed boost with the Cosmos SDK upgrade, as block times will speed up from 750 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds. Enabled for optimistic execution, Paloma will be as powerful as some of the leading blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem.
“We're going to start doing a lot of things that make Paloma as powerful as Injective, as powerful as SEI, and as powerful as Monad. Lots of great technology that we're going to put and send straight to market immediately.”
The Gravity Bridge will be upgraded after Pigeon Feed. Taariq states that is likely that the Gravity Bridge tax will be burned.
“Instead of redistributing the Gravity Bridge tax, which will be around 10% of anything that's going across the Bridge, the fees will simply be burned. That will reduce the deflationary process for the fees.”
The value of grains will be supported, and if there are less GRAINS as folks are coming across the bridge to liquidate, GRAINS will go up in value.
Taking lessons from Sommelier and their discussions about burning fees to help those who are staking, Taariq explains that Sommelier is a zero inflation chain while Paloma is a 7% inflation chain, so burning fees may be more productive because it will raise the value of the GRAIN token.
More Palomabots
Taariq announces that more Palomabots will be launched once relaying goes back up.
“Validators are going to be very happy with us. We have a lot of bots that are going to launch on Paloma. We're going to be knocking out. So very, very excited to share that.”
More people will be coming on board to help with debugging and resolving transition issues. He thanks the Vitwit team for helping the team with migration and development. They will be back to help debug so that Paloma can fix, stabilize, and expand.
Closing
Taariq thanks everyone for listening to today’s AMA episode. As the Paloma Network is now in the same league as the most advanced chains in the Cosmos ecosystem, he reiterates that the team will continue to debug, fix the issues and scale the network.
“We're now in the most advanced chain of the Cosmos ecosystem, and we broke it a bit. We're going to fix it, and then we're going to run it, and we're going to scale it! We're going to make sure everybody has GRAINS that they can buy and sell.”
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!
