Weekly Dev Update #19

2019-12-01 — 4 min read

Overview

1 Rune Fee

Reasoning about gas costs on networks with non-deterministic fee schedules (such as Bitcoin) becomes unnecessarily complex. The issue is that the final gas cost cannot be known ahead of time so the system must cover any variability in the gas cost so that the user can be charged a flat rate. If the user is not charged anything, then the system can be depleted of funds, passing the cost back to stakers.

Additionally, swaps below 1 Rune bring negligible economic value to the network and saturate the mempool with low value transactions. As such the solution is to charge a flat 1 Rune fee (or 1 Rune equivalent) on all outgoing transactions (swap and withdrawals). This 1 Rune fee is moved into the Protocol Reserve and increases the network’s future income. When the nodes report on the final transaction, they include the observed transaction fee. This transaction fee is then reimbursed back to the pool that paid for it ( BNB.BNB, BTC.BTC, ETH.ETH etc).

There are cases that the outgoing transaction fee may exceed 1 Rune (Bitcoin in high use), but more than likely 1 Rune will be more than sufficient to cover the costs and ensure the network grows its reserves. Additionally, it sets a floor on the minimum transaction that the network will process. A swap of less than 1 Rune will end up becoming a donation to the network.

THORChain Development

The team are working on 4 parallel streams of effort. Cross-chain infrastructure has now been merged into a single repo called “THORNode”.

THORChain

Midgard Public API

Threshold Signature Scheme implementation

Front-end Integration for BEPSwap

THORChain

Much work has been done to refactor and clean up the codebase which will make public audits easier. This includes splitting up the keeper, separating out the events module and more. Smoke tests have been fully-integrated into the test schedule. Safer subtraction and division methods were added to prevent the likelihood of panic events.

Midgard Public API

Midgard is now ready for integration into the FrontEnd. The manner in which USD price of assets in now updated to source only from internal pool pricing. This includes BNB.BUSD, BNB.TUSD, BNB.USDS. ROI endpoints are now added.