As you may have seen lots has been cooking in the Bacon Protocol the last few weeks! The team and the community are running fast together to move the protocol forward.
Today, we’re releasing a significant update to the protocol that increases security, improves usability, and reduces gas fees. We’re also announcing the completion of the recent security audit.
Along with that, here are a few of the biggest news to catch up on from April:
Three big updates to the protocol were released today along with a number of small adjustments.
The BlockSec team has been digging deep into the smart contract code and working with the team to increase security across the board. They came highly recommended and have advanced tools and techniques that we were highly impressed by. You can find the new audit here.
The audit identified a handful of risks in the current contract implementation that have been fixed or mitigated. Most of the findings were small and fixing them helped shore up the depth of the protocol’s defense.
Two of the risks were classified as High severity. Neither of those risks could have been exploited at any point because of other measures in place. They have also been fixed in the contracts and released as an extra precaution.
As part of the audit fixes and as described previously, both $BACON and $BHOME have been changed from ERC-777 tokens to ERC-20 tokens. The ERC-777 standard can have advantages and makes it harder to accidentally lock tokens up by sending them to the wrong place.
Despite those advantages, ERC-777 support across the ecosystem has lagged and the increased risk of reentrancy bugs made it clear that ERC-20 is still the best option. This was a small change to the contracts and shouldn’t affect day-to-day usage of either token. It will increase security and open up many more possibilities for integration with other projects.
High gas fees to buy and sell bHOME and claim BACON have been on our radar and a consistent problem raised by the community. Our first design for the bHOME staking and BACON rewards system was meant to make it easier-to-use and more precise than other protocols we saw.
We knew there was a chance it would have higher gas fees, but our estimates predicted a small increase, not the large fees that we’re seeing. Part of this is because the protocol was so popular -- more transactions meant higher gas for staking. The worst part is that this punished the protocol’s most fervent supporters that wanted to stake more and more bHOME.
The past month, we’ve become experts on the gas system and had a new systems architect join the team that went through the contracts and transactions to find the problems. So far, he was able to bring gas costs down by 50%, which is a huge improvement! But, not good enough, knowing how fast the protocol is growing. We’re now deep in a new approach that will grow with the protocol.
So, today, we’ve paused the connection between BACON claiming and bHOME buying and selling. This will make gas costs for bHOME transactions only a bit more expensive than a token transfer.
This does mean BACON claiming will not be available for the next two weeks while we finish reworking that part of the contract. Don’t worry, you will still be earning rewards that will be available to claim on-chain again shortly, but with much lower gas fees.