If you follow me you will know that 7 days ago I published a piece on Gridcoin v4.0.0.0 and questioned if it would have an impact on the amount of GRC staking and the quantity of stakers, its here if you didnt see it or forgot.
Im not going to mess around, as promised today I ran the same analysis again for the last 7,000 blocks and here is what we see:
Number of addresses that are staking
This dropped slightly from 2342 to 2250: In my view thats fairly insignificant variation.
Number of GRC staking
This increased from 104 Million to 153 Million: Now that is a significant result, and is showing improved health of the network.
So is CBR a success? Well I'd say ts too early to call. Just because more GRC was leveraged to stake in the last 7 days than the previous 7 days doesnt absolutely tell us anything. We can't assume 150 Million GRC are still staking right now, or will be tomorrow or the day after.
So what about Difficulty? Average daily Difficulty as reported by https://gridcoinstats.eu/ seems to be higher, around 5-6 for the last week, compared to more like 2 for the week prior, but it wasnt uncommon to see odd days with difficulty in the 5-6 range before. Clearly a consistent increase is significant, but again for it to be consistent it needs to remain.
My take
Early signs are that the change to CBR has brought benefits to the network in terms of more GRC online and staking, which is what its all about, if we assume this trend continues then the effort made by the devs has paid off.
I also want to say this switchover seems to have occurred with minimal technical or political issues, which both shows our devs doing a great job, and the power of the voting mechanism (and the desire to use it!) making our community a real cohesive group.