On june 14th, we submitted the Global Stake Proposal. June 21th, the DAO reached majority agreement passing it. After going into a development sprint, on july 5th, we successfully deployed to devnet starting an extensive testing phase. Soon, we will deploy to testnet and finally to mainnet.
Read this article to understand the present flaw in Commune and how the Global Stake Proposal solves it.
Here is a rundown of what this update means, how it changes the landscape of Commune and how it affects you:
The way you have to think about stake in Commune fundamentally changes. Before stake was local, meaning it could only exist and participate in one subnet at a time, limited to one locality. With global stake, this changes. You can stake to a key and register it to any subnet, using the stake in every subnet simultaneosly. Enabling you to participate and access every subnet with your stake at the same time
This means, that the proportion of stake active within a subnet can no longer determine its emissions. This is where the new rootnet (UID 0) comes in, where validators dont assign weights to modules, but to subnets. This makes the subnet emission allocation process easier to track and interpret. Rootnet weight set on UID 0 (itself) will recycle emissions.
The rootnet applies the first version of Yuma Consensus, which in short requires a majority of stake to set a non-zero weight on a subnet before it can effectively gain emissions.
The DAO treasury receives the rootnet UID 1, meaning allocated emissions will flow directly into the treasury. The general subnet (currently UID 0) will be migrated to UID 2.
Commune participants have to consider a couple of implications of this coming update:
Validators
The role of a validator becomes more intense, before you had to only pick one subnet to validate in order to receive the maximum possible APR. With global stake, maximizing APR means validating on every subnet, operating and maintaining the required validation infrastructure provided by the subnet founder.
If a subnet has 10% of the total emissions, then 10% of the total dividends you can earn are tied to validating on that subnet. This will lead to a vast increase in validation activity and decentralization.
Subnet Founders
As a subnet builder, you have to be prepared for this by ensuring your subnets validation is fully open source and compatible with validator decentralization, meaning the number of active validators can scale horizontally.
This enforces subnets to live up to the decentralization and trustless ethos of Commune. Also, you can plan with a big increase in validators joining your subnet and your architecture should manage to handle this uptick in traffic.
Delegators
Ensure that the Validator you are staked to, is active on enough subnets to provide an attractive APR.
Also, you can select validators based on how much their rootnet weights align with your opinion of how much each subnet should be rewarded. After deploying to mainnet, we will prioritize updating the CommuneX Explorer with an easy overview of the rootnet.
For the rest (miners, modules) nothing changes.
Conclusion
The global stake update is a significant step forward for Commune and lays the foundation for all further Protocol developments. It is also the first time, that Commune is in a stable place without any severe flaws. We strongly believe this will cause material improvements to the ecosystem landscape. We fully understand the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the rootnet as a subnet pricing mechanism and consider it an intermediary solution. After Commune and the ecosystem has adjusted to this update and stabilized, our development focus will go towards superseding the rootnet with something new.
CommuneX team
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