Hello d=0, welcome decentralization! 🙂
Epoch 257 marks a major milestone in the history of Cardano. This is the first epoch where 100% of all blocks are produced by community pools and I dare to say that we are now the most decentralized blockchain in the world. Thanks to pool.pm we also have this amazing image of all 2391 active pools and 677 retired ones that gone through this journey with us:
Cardano360 March Mini
If you haven’t had the time to watch the full Cardano360 show from March, there is good news: from now on there will be a summary for the Cardano360 shows called Cardano360 Mini. It summarizes the most important points from over 3 hours of Cardano360 into very condensed 7 minutes of pure information. Truly everyone has the time to watch it 🙂
New IOHK Blog Posts
Cardano’s secure switch to decentralization
Randomness is something many people do not really care about but it is an essential part of many cryptographic techniques which you are using everyday. Randomness will also play a key role in the upcoming epoch, why this is the case, how it works and what you can do to help creating additional randomness is covered here in this blog post: Cardano’s secure switch to decentralization
I will also do my part for randomness and submit some unpredictable transactions.
Decentralization: to D=0 Day and beyond
March 31st will be forever known as Cardanos D-Day, the day where the d parameter was set to 0 therefore handing over the block production over to community pools and waving goodbye to the federated block producers. Why it’s significant and what’s next can be found in this article: Decentralization: to D=0 Day and beyond
If you prefer listening, this article is also available on Soundcloud:
Everything you need to know about our new Plutus Pioneer Program
If you are one of those people who are desperate to get into Plutus, the smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain, then there is good news for you: Learn Plutus and become a certified Plutus Pioneer with the new series of interactive training courses – starting next week
Performance for 256
|======================================================================================|
| Leader | Ideal | Luck | Adopted | Confirmed | Missed | Ghosted | Stolen | Invalid |
|======================================================================================|
| 62 | 56.05 | 110.62% | 60 | 60 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
|======================================================================================|So lets take a brief look at epoch 256: We were assigned 62 slots and produced all of them, however we encountered one ghosted and one stolen block. The stolen block was due to slot battle and the ghosted block was due to a so called height battle. A height battle mostly happens when there there are two blocks that are for slots very close together and therefore the time to distribute the block is very short. When Pool A produces a block and Pool B produces the next block, but has not yet received the previous block of Pool A, the block of Pool A will be orphaned and not included in the chain.
But the big question is, why did the block of Pool A did not make it to Pool B in time. Well, this can have two reasons. Either Pool A is badly connected to other nodes in the network and thus has a high propagation delay of its produced blocks or Pool B is badly connected to other nodes in the network and thus has a high delay when receiving other blocks.
As we do report additional details to pooltool.io we can check our propagation delays, and they currently look like this:
So you can see, that we are on average well below 0.5s propagation time for producing and receiving blocks which is very good. So it was because the other pool is very poorly connected to the network and thus did not receive my block in the appropriate time. Just to note, the blocks were 3 seconds apart, that’s more than enough time if you are operating your pool in the correct way.
Overall the epoch ended good for us with ~107% luck.
Assigned Slots for 257
|======================================================================================|
| Leader | Ideal | Luck | Adopted | Confirmed | Missed | Ghosted | Stolen | Invalid |
|======================================================================================|
| 67 | 56.89 | 117.77% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|======================================================================================|In Epoch 257 we were assigned 67 leader slots which is a luck of ~118%. As we have seen during the last epochs we will most likely lose a few blocks to slot battles, height battles or other issues we can not influence. It will still be a quite good epoch for us.
That’s it for today, talk to you soon! 🙂