Previously the testnet release test-4.0.6 hard fork time was Friday 5th June 13:00 UTC which went through without a glitch. As the result today mainnet 4.0 was released.
As many of you know, BitShares mainnet release 4.0 was overdue since November 2019. With huge turbulence among the BitShares Consensus (Holders and their voting actions), the reactions of certain holders and majority of developers and managers around, meant that we missed our scheduled release.
How the media were describing it in 2020, we had ceased development. This wasn’t entirely true however. Consensus behind holders stopped supporting any new workers and development until certain compromises and requests were resolved. As one of these compromises, the only worker approved in 2020 was the Prelude Core 2020 worker.
As far as the development goes, we never stopped. Even without holder approved funding, BitShares still counts over 20 devoted and dedicated community developers. These developers made their contributions and commits entirely free, in order to band-aid BitShares when needed.
Finalizing BitShares 4.0 release was the primary goal of Prelude Core 2020 worker. Additionally, a few extra flavors were added as requested, approved through collaboration of the voting majority.
SOME HIGHLIGHTS
HTLC Operations (Optional) Memo
As described in the original issue:
"Introducing this feature is very helpful step to satisfy the future of Cross Chain Swaps, parties involved within the Cross Chain Swaps will have to communicate their external addresses or references and info within the HTLC transaction upon creation.
In case we implement Cross Chain Swap feature within our UI in future, the memo (optional) item field will be used to communicate and to confirm external addresses and will be used as reference for transaction." (Source: GitHub)
Share Market Fees to the Network
Long has the community been looking at considerate ways to improve BitShares mainnet income and thus perpetual sustainability. Transaction fees achieve this, however the challenge is for the Decentralized EXchange to always remain very competitive. This simple BSIP however, is a welcome ‘tweak’ to improve bottom line for asset owners and the blockchain, without increasing overall fees – so everyone wins. Being too cheap, or ‘near free for all’ has proven unsustainable.
“Every time a trade is executed (limit order is filled) and if there are market fees generated, a portion of the market fees goes to the network.
Example: The network percent of market fees is set to 50%, and 0.2% of trading volume is the set as market fee. Then 0.1% of trading volume goes to the network.” Source: GitHub
Everything else:
Multitude of improvements to Market Fee Sharing and Asset related parameters, bug fixes, node performance stability and functionality, changes to Elastic Search and more. You can also check the release notes for more details.
BitShares Mainnet Activation Date
All exchanges listing BTS tokens, API owners, block producers of BitShares and enthusiastic core token holders,
BitShares Mainnet 4.0 will be activated on July 30, 2020 13:55:00 UTC (2020-07-30T13:55:00Z).
Please upgrade your infrastructure prior to activation date in order to maintain healthy connection to the BitShares blockchain. You can download latest release from master branch on our GitHub at github.com/bitshares/
Conclusion
This release comes during uncertain global times for everyone, and following a period of very conservative utilization of BitShares reserves. It is a credit to the latest Core Dev team incarnation whose members rose to the challenge of continuing this critical work. This went beyond mere coding. Bringing this release to the community meant extensive engagement, great sacrifices and persistent management (even slow at the finish line), in order to align with the core token holder consensus and new implementation challenges.
The Mainnet release follows Testnet bedding and refinements. According to the info in the 4.0 milestone, the target schedule is:
Testnet release date: 29 MAY 2020 (Complete)
Testnet protocol activation: 5 JUN 2020 (Complete)
Mainnet release date: 30 JUN 2020 (Complete)
Mainnet protocol activation: 30 JUL 2020 (Pending)
Credit: BitShares.org
Thanks to all Contributors and Community members for support and trust in our vision and technology!