Network Gradually Phases in Highest-Performing Infrastructure Providers from Moonriver and the Moonbase Alpha TestNet
Singapore – December 21, 2021 – Moonbeam, the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, has begun decentralization and added 24 third-party collators to the active collator set. This marks the beginning of phase one of the Moonbeam launch process, which gradually phases in functionality to ensure network stability. This is the final phase before the network’s full go-live, which is expected to happen in mid-January when Moonbeam will be fully live with the EVM, and balance transfers enabled.
In this phase, 24 third-party collators will join the 8 existing collators in the active set, which are currently run by PureStake and the Moonbeam Foundation. An additional 16 collators will join the active set later in the launch process, bringing the pre-launch collator set to an eventual 48 collators. This early emphasis on decentralization is in line with the Moonbeam team’s overall decentralization strategy, which, in the case of collators, improves the censorship resistance and liveness of the network.
The 40 new collators have been selected by the Moonbeam Foundation from amongst the best-performing collators on the Moonriver and Moonbase Alpha networks. In particular, the Foundation ran a multi-week series of load tests on Moonbase Alpha in which anyone could participate. The pre-launch collator set includes those collators who demonstrated excellent performance across these key metrics:
- Transactions included in each block
- Weight per block produced
- Total block production
- Avoidance of centralized hosting providers
This process, while competitive, helps ensure the Moonbeam rollout is stable and secure.
There are several technology-related updates that will take place in this phase. Today, a collator election took place and expanded the active collator set to 32. Governance participation was available for genesis token holders and collators through Sudo, the superuser key, which will later be removed. In the current phase, staking will be managed by the Moonbeam Foundation. There will be no balance transfers at this point, and authorship eligibility will be set to 1%, resulting in one collator being eligible to produce any given block.
However, end-users will have the same limitations as in phase zero. The limited functionality in phase one means that end users cannot claim rewards, stake, execute balance transfers, or deploy smart contracts quite yet. To learn more about the future launch steps, view the Moonbeam launch process.
About the Moonbeam Network
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Following Moonriver’s tremendous success on Kusama as the most active deployment destination for over 80 DApps, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/.
