The Last xFund: & The Next Chapter

2022 has been a year of building new paradigms and new beginnings to the world of Unification.

As a part of this new beginning, The Unification Foundation recently surpassed a very important milestone with the successful emission of the last xFUND.

The last xFUND & Final Claims:

On August 22nd, we saw the final halving and the minting of the last xFUND successfully emerge for the final possible cap of 10000 xFUND.

As previously published in “(Proof of) the last xFUND”, xFUND claims are possible for a month following the last claim, which would set the last claim day as September 22nd, 2022.

Any xFUNDs not claimed by that point will be considered burnt and unclaimable by smart contract.

Given this, it’s possible that the final supply will be slightly less than the 10k planned. (At the time of this writing — the current supply stands at 9888)

Shibaswap Bonus

In addition to the xFUNDS in the claims portal, unclaimed xFUNDS from the xFUND yield portal & Shibaswap Portal will be available for withdrawal until at least the beginning 2023. A governance proposal is planned for shortly after, and if passed, will allow the xFUNDs to be relegated to the Unification Community Fund rewarding those who work to move the networks forward by contributing via innovation & community effort.

The Network Upgrade

The last halving coincides with the beginning of the new testnet which will set the stage for the upgrade of the Unification Network that the Foundation has worked on very diligently over the past year.

The tools available for the next upgrade are much simpler and more efficient, not requiring timed coordination of a manual network stoppage. Instead, the upgrade process can be fully automated, thanks to the in-place state migration tools included in the v0.42.x branch of the Cosmos SDK, the Cosmos SDK upgrade module, and the Cosmovisor application.

In order to take advantage of upgrade automation, validator operators will need to make some slight modifications to their node configuration and install Cosmovisor prior to the upgrade height. A full guide on how to migrate using Cosmovisor to manage/run the UND binary is available here, and a guide to configuring Cosmovisor to be ready for the upgrade is available here.

The updates will finally introduce the IBC toolset required to move towards the deployment of wrapped FUND (also referred to as wFUND) to the ecosphere. We anticipate wrapped FUND to introduce further liquidity and utility with OoO and future updates.

In addition to IBC integration, the update introduces many optimisations and improvements to the BEACON, WrkChain and Enterprise modules. BEACON and WrkChain submissions are now pruned at 50,000 entries in order to optimise the state database size (this equates to around 1 month’s worth of submission data at 1 submission per minute).

BEACON and WrkChain operators now have the capability to spend their Enterprise FUND to increase their storage capacity up to 600,000 (which equates to around 1 year’s worth of data submissions). New query endpoints have also been added to help keep track of storage usage.

In the Enterprise module, all Enterprise FUND spent on BEACON and WrkChain transactions (registration, submission and storage purchases) are tracked in-state — both for each Enterprise account and as a network total — making it much simpler to query how much Enterprise FUND has been used and therefore released into the circulating FUND supply.

OoO

The upgrades to the network have continued to bring further improvements/efficiency to OoO. The most significant update introduced ad-hoc query functionality, allowing users to query any token pair supported by a number of prominent DEXs (as long as they have sufficient liquidity), in addition to the existing Finchains query functionality.

As previously discussed, we plan to see the utilization of OoO as an efficient heart of our partner work with Shibarium, as a standard choice for all native and bridged projects.

It’s noted that given the further availability and affordability of wrapped FUND, future updates of OoO may allow the use of wrapped FUND in addition to xFUND. Any changes will be widely discussed and put to consensus via governance with the community before entering production.

Merge

With the upcoming ETH2 PoS Merge, we will endeavor to continue supporting the original fork in addition to the new ETH2 network. Given that Unification looks to support all expansions of decentralization, we believe providing the best tools possible for all channels serve the greater blockchain world.

Governance

In the last few months we are happy and proud to see a resurgence of the role of community, especially our validators group who have helped to progress the work, impact, and messaging of the Unification Network forward.

We are proud to continue this work by further developing easy to use governance tools/channels following the release of the next network update.

Shibarium

Last but not least, Unification’s advisory work with Shibarium continues toward the fourth successful alpha and public testnets, still in plans for end of the quarter release or sometime shortly thereafter.

The initial public beta testnet will focus on the developer/delegator sector in order to enable a robust and ready network to serve the Shib Army once ready.

The public beta will also allow a much wider opportunity for open testing and bug fixing, ensuring a secure and streamlined mainnet launch.

The testnet will be open to any validator wishing to join — indeed, it is encouraged, especially for operators intending to join the mainnet upon launch.

The Next Chapter:

As discussed above & beyond, it is evident that Unification has never been about a single utility, but rather a plethora of toolkits intended to progress the blockchain world forward.

The next chapter will see a congruence of these tools, bringing further synergy to all elements of the toolkit, environment, and blockchain world as a whole.

Important Links

GitHub: https://github.com/unification-com

Telegram: https://t.me/unificationfoundation

Discord: https://discord.com/channels/725618617525207042

Website: www.unification.com