Weekly Wings: July 26 - Paloma Upgrades to v1.6.0 and Pigeon 1.5.0, Project BirdFeed, and Paloma Gravity

Your 3 new Paloma hatchlings this week?

Welcome to the new Paloma. So many new birds are hatching this week that we can’t help but COO with all the great news. We’ve skipped a few weeks, so in this issue, we will cover the latest in protocol upgrades, upcoming decentralized application launches, and what you will expect from the Paloma ecosystem in the coming weeks. Expect more bots and more chains.

REMINDER WARNING: The Hatchling Paloma Network of “Messenger” (v1.3.1) is still young, and its Cosmwasm and EVM contracts are still unaudited. The GRAIN token is launched but not yet trading on any exchanges. Although the flock is flying on the messenger mainnet, it is still subject to the continued development of Paloma’s cross-chain messaging system as well as to the security guarantees offered by the GRAIN token. We expect “Messenger” to experience weekly chain halts and chain restarts. We also expect numerous undiscovered vulnerabilities. We also do not control nor influence the price of GRAINs. The community will strive to preserve stated but considers this mainnet high-risk. Proceed with caution.

1. Paloma v1.6.0 and Pigeon v1.5.0 Upgrades to the Testnest

The focus for Paloma v1.6.0 and Pigeon 1.5.0 will be to increase validator incentives for securing the Paloma network and ensuring that relay activities are profitable and dependable for developers that want to take advantage of the network power that is the pigeon validators. The new features that are included in the upgrades also includes those upgrades from Paloma v.1.5.0 and Pigeon v.1.4.0 and are as follows:

1. Paloma now requires a minimum Pigeon version in order for validators to join the network as relayers. This is done to ensure that validators are aware of when their pigeons are not up-to-date during upgrades.

2. Pigeon now supports Optimism-geth, meaning that Paloma’s Compass-EVM will deploy to any Optimism L2 blockchain roll-up.

3. Pigeon now supports Kava mainnet which means that Paloma’s Compass-EVM will deploy to the Kava chain and allow cross-chain execution between Kava and all other Paloma-supported mainnets.

4. Improved intelligence for validator jailing when pigeon restarts. We want to continue to make it easier for pigeons to restart and inform Paloma of its state.

5. Improved message-queue clean-up: When pigeons fail to deliver messages, we want to remove stale messages from the queue. Included in this release are improvements to queue processing. Messages that are stuck in the queue will now be deleted.

6. Project PigeonFeed Phase I: Paloma validators will be able to set their fees for the relay of messages after pricing in gas payments and protocol fees. PigeonFeed allows all validators to set their own price, and Paloma manages message routing based on price and performance to governance weights for message relay.

7. Gravity Bridge Phase I: Paloma now implements the first phase of its cross-chain bridge from the Cosmos-SDK to any target chain. Gravity, first developed by the Althea network team, allows any developer or user on Paloma to convert their liquidity positions into tokens that are available on Paloma for trading as well as can be bridged to other chains. Paloma’s bridge will also include slashing conditions for validators to adhere and ensure that messages and bridge assets are properly attested.

Stay up to date and follow the Paloma public repositories and the commits of ongoing upgrades to Paloma Cosmos-SDK blockchain here:

https://github.com/palomachain/paloma

https://github.com/palomachain/pigeon

2. Project BirdFeed: Phase I

Project BirdFeed delivers on the promise of Paloma to focus on validator happiness by making the Paloma relay network a profitable service that rewards validators in excess of their inflation rewards. PigeonFeed consists of the following functional areas:

1. Performance Weights:

   1. Pigeon Performance (Determined Governance Weights) are specified as performance metrics that come from each validator’s pigeon instance. The performance metrics are established by governance with a vote from the GRAIN-token holders of the network.

      1. Uptime: Measures uptime of the validator node.

      2. Success Rate: Measure the number of successfully relayed transactions for that particular pigeon

      3. Execution Time: Measures the execution time of the validator pigeon’s relay of cross-chain messages.

2. Relay Fees

   1. Relay fees are the fees paid by users to send a message via the Paloma network. These fees are broken into the following groups:

      1. Pigeon Gas Fee: This is the fee validators are able to set as their gas fee for delivering messages across the relay. Messages

      2. Security Fee: This fee is determined by governance and charged by the protocol as part of the total message relay fee. This fee is to refund valset updates from validators and can be controlled by governance.

      3. Community_Fund / Protocol Fee: This fee is distributed to all staking holders so that all stakers get to participate in the reward for securing the relay network with their stake.

         1. We propose a 20% or 30% of the total pigeon fee, but again, this will be decided by governance.

3. Paloma Scheduling

   1. Paloma users will now be able to schedule their cross-chain communications and specified time periods into the future. This will enable intents and latent orders to be placed on the Paloma blockchain for future execution.

3. Paloma Gravity: Phase I

The Volume team successfully tests the first phase of the Paloma Gravity module implementation for Paloma. The Gravity module is based on the Gravity project by the Althea network team that was implemented by such leading Cosmos-SDK chains such as Axelar, Gravity Bridge, Umee, and Injective. Paloma will deploy this same technology into its stack in order to create a secure bridge between Paloma and the target chains it will serve.

Paloma’s main goal with the bridge will be to create digital assets on Paloma that represent liquidity positions on target chains. In order to accomplish this, Paloma’s Gravity will need to successfully and securely execute the following transactions:

1. Send observed events to Paloma Gravity Bridge, also known as Compass-EVM, from any source chain on which the Paloma Compass is deployed. This will allow users to send liquidity to Compass that will spawn tokens on Paloma.

2. Sign valset and transactions in the Paloma Gravity Bridge. This already works and functions on Paloma for successful cross-chain arbitrary logic calls.

3. Relay transactions from the Paloma Gravity Bridge, or CompassEVM. This means that users who execute transactions with tokens on Paloma will be able to relay those tokens, and liquidity, to the target chains.

There is no new art being created with the Gravity bridge, but we hope new use cases that will be available to decentralized paloma applications such as https://palomabot.ai. We look forward to the Phase II implementation and then tests on Paloma testnest-15 testnet network.

Pigeon of the Week: White-collared pigeon

The white-collared pigeon (Columba albitorques) is a species of bird in the family Columbidae. The species is endemic to the Ethiopian highlands in Eritrea and Ethiopia. It occupies the countryside surrounding rocky cliffs and gorges and is also common in town centers. The species is monotypic.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collared_pigeon

Conclusions:

Paloma continues to innovate and iterate around its use case to create a compelling revenue opportunity for data center operators. Paloma’s launch of Paloma v.1.6.0 and Pigeon v1.5.0 continue the relentless engineering efforts of the VolumeFi team to make a truly useful L1 protocol with cross-chain features that make validators more money than just inflation. New features include the following:

• Tighter marriage between Paloma and Pigeon for easier upgrades

• Pigeon Feed for pigeons: Collect fat fees for relaying messages.

• Gravity: Create and relay Paloma tokens representing liquidity on any source chain.

• Paloma takes flight on Polygon, Optimism, and Kava, expanding well beyond the ETH EVM in the L2 ecosystem.

• New Paloma message queue management with scheduling and upgrades for faster execution and pigeon revenue generation opportunities.

We look forward to releasing these features to mainnet in the coming next two weeks and to further announce the launch of Paloma’s first bots at https://palomabot.ai. Please stay with the flock. More flights are about to take off.

To learn more about Paloma, please visit https://palomachain.com

To follow the project on Github, please star the project https://github.com/palomachain/paloma

To participate in the community, please join the Paloma Discord: https://discord.gg/HtUvgxvh5N