For transparency’s sake, I will say that freezing the chain will mostly be beneficial to the team for developing the future of Plasm Network, on the other hand, freezing will not have any clear benefits for the community or non-developers following Plasm Network compared to only blocking the transaction of the chain.
These are the issues that we are facing right now:
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We want to prevent a handful of parties from owning the majority of the network token supply.
- The 1st lockdrop had a predetermined supply and there will be more tokens for the 2nd and 3rd. So we knew there was very little risk for not blocking transactions. But the 2nd lockdrop’s supply was very huge and the risk of a majority attack is not just a fantasy.
- Premature network evaluation can damage the overall security of the network in the long-run
To solve this problem, we are considering freezing the chain.
These are the facts about the situation at hand:
- We have to freeze the chain in order to migrate to PoS (to become a Parachain to be exact). The only question is when and for how long. And I understand that roughly a month of freezing is well… really freezing
- Freezing means no more additional blocks will be propagated to the main chain, it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to connect to the main net RPC or have the chain database wiped out. You can still sync or query from other nodes, you just can’t add more blocks
- Dusty network will not be affected in any way, so developers or potential developers won’t have anything to worry about
- PLM tokens at this point in time do not have any price and should not have any price. Considering that the vast majority of chain events were transactions, blocking TX or putting a full freeze on the chain is pretty much the same thing for dApp developers
- Block headers with no state transition of value is just bloat for the root chain (imagine that bloat accumulating every 10 seconds)
- The Plasm dev team and Stake Technology was and is always about making a smart contract platform for old and new dApp developers. Our priority will always be for developers, not traders or other related parties
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Most of our team schedule is dependant on Parity Tech’s announcements. We can only give general boundaries to avoid any false promises or additional changes in plans
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Unlike Polkadot or Kusama, Plasm Network does not implement the Democracy module or any on-chain governance at the moment (but we will love to do it in the near future), which means we have no purpose to keep a chain that can’t send transactions and yet makes new blocks, other than to give passive rewards to the validators
- The sole purpose of Plasm main net as a PoA chain is to fairly distribute the network tokens before we become a public permissionless Parachain. Developing and showing next-gen blockchain technology is mostly delegated to Dusty first and gets implemented to the main net later
- Freezing a chain means one less headache for the team
I completely agree that we can just temporarily halt all transactions until Parity officially announces their schedule for the Polkadot Network’s Parachain auction with a concrete date, and then we can freeze our chain for the migration. It is true that freezing the chain may damage Plasm Network’s integrity and our team’s reputation as well. However, that will be the same for banning transactions mid-way of a network’s life-cycle without adding value to the chain, albeit to a lesser degree.
Considering that we are a PoA chain at the moment and all development is done on Dusty first, at least from what I can see (which can definitely be wrong), the beneficiary for not freezing the chain are the validators. To some, only blocking transactions for the network without any purpose (i.e., DeGov) might seem a little bit unfair. On the other hand, freezing is a global thing (and we have to freeze the chain anyway if we’re going to be a Parachain). Having said this, the act of “freezing” a network could be overkill.
In short; whether it be freezing or only blocking transactions, either option will solve the issue that I stated earlier, and both of them have their ups and downs that Plasm Network will have to face. I know the phrase “freezing the entire main network” sounds scary, but they’re really not that big of a deal in our current network phase.
Freezing now: the dev team gets to sleep
Blocking transactions first and freezing later: the validators get to sleep
For the rest of the community members or potential DeFi or DAOs thinking of migrating to Plasm Network, nothing really changes.
There are no single solutions for this problem and neither freezing nor blocking transactions will be the perfect solution. We are just doing what we can to make this network grow. It just happens to be that we think development is more important for an infant network than anything else.