BZE in Cosmos

As you may know we moved to a new chain based on Cosmos SDK and we can say it was the best decision ever. We unlocked amazing features and a stable blockchain ready for the future. The SDK and its modularity gives us the power to develop features we couldn’t dream of implementing on the old blockchain. With the new network we found amazing support and managed to attract a group of people that are not just hosting validators but also lend a hand whenever is needed. Their experience and involvement is more valuable than a server hosting a validator.

Swap outcome

On August 16, 2022 the swap period ended as we announced in this tweet. A total of 103,920,383.53 BZE were claimed out of the initial 400,000,000 coins minted as announced in this post.

On the new blockchain 400,000,000 BZE coins will be issued for the swap.

300,000,000 BZE allocated to users that swap from old blockchain

100,000,000 BZE allocated to development fund (used for farming on ETH/BSC chains, airdrops, listings, bounties, marketing and swap support from exchanges and third party wallets)

Users will receive coins on a 10:1 ratio on the new blockchain, meaning that for 10 BZE on v4 network the user will receive 1 BZE on v5 network.

The old blockchain was stopped at this date and moved to the trash, making swaps impossible since then.

Now since a lot of coins remained unclaimed we have some burning to do. The initial 100M BZE announced to be used as development fund will be lowered to 30M and the difference of 70M plus the unclaimed 196M BZE coins will be burned in 2 steps. This gives us the opportunity to lower the circulating supply with approximately 266M BZE. The burning events will be discussed with the community and announced when the time comes. Amounts burned might slightly change if the community decides to use more funds than those already allocated from development fund for external incentives on Osmosis liquidity pool.

Last few months

Now let’s recap what happened with our network since we started the new chain:

1. v5.0.1 — was our first official release of the new blockchain. We used this version to start the swap and distribute coins to holders. It did a beautiful job and everything went well. With some help from our validators — kudos to MZONDER and Goooodnes — we even started an IBC relayer between BZE and Osmosis blockchain. Everything was fine until a security breach was discovered in Cosmos SDK and a small bug in our codebase that didn’t allow us to update expired IBC clients.
2. v5.1.0 and v5.1.1 — were the versions needed to patch the security issue mentioned above and add some small changes. This had to be done as fast as possible so we had to focus entirely on upgrading the network. During this times most of our validators were very responsive and willing to do whatever they can in order to secure our network — the only issue being that our top validator, called “Centera’s Autostaking Validator”, owner couldn’t be reached so we had a major halt of the chain. This is the reason stakers should consider delegating their coins to multiple validators and keep the voting power ratio balanced across the validators list. Water under the bridge, we learnt a lot during this upgrade and we became better Cosmos “navigators”.
3. v5.1.2 — This is the latest upgrade and it was needed to fix the expired IBC clients. Since we already had experience with the previous upgrade we decided to use a governance proposal this time. The software upgrade governance proposal is a very powerful way to upgrade a Cosmos based blockchain. Even if it took more time, because voting period for a proposal is 5 days long, things went smooth and the coordination of our validators was flawless.

Even though the 3 points above seem to be plain and simple they were big deals and required a lot of time. Remember we are also learning “how to Cosmos” just like our community members that swapped their coins from a BTC/Zcash based blockchain.

In the last few months we gained a lot of experience that will make things move faster. The pace is increasing and we’re already close to another upgrade. The test network will be upgraded with our next release candidate by the end of 2022. The new version will include bug fixes and new features which will be described when they are announced.

Thanks to all community members and special thanks to Erialos, Vidulum Team, The Chicken Coop, MZONDER and all BZE validators.

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