Kulupu's 2020: year in review

[sorpaas]

This post is a look-back at what happened in the Kulupu community in year 2020.

The first-ever Re-Genesis process in the Substrate ecosystem

Back in September 2019, Kulupu was launched as the first-ever no-premine Proof of Work blockchain in the Substrate ecosystem. In May 2020, Kulupu also became the first-ever blockchain to conduct a Re-Genesis process in production in the Substrate ecosystem.

Re-Genesis is used in Substrate to conduct hard forks. It is especially useful when the difference between old and new runtime is too big, or if there are significant consensus layer changes. Kulupu's Re-Genesis process was also called "era transitions", and we documented the transition in May here. Re-Genesis is also one of the proposed method in Substrate for doing swappable consensus.

Review: The Re-Genesis process in Kulupu was done in a quite successful way. Only minimal downtime was recorded on the hard fork day and the transition went smoothly.

Signed mining and reward lock

Enacted in September 2020, signed mining and reward lock are probably one of the biggest changes for Kulupu this year. Signed mining requires miners to hold the coinbase private key locally, and combined with reward lock, they make centralized mining pools impossible. The reward lock also forces the miners to "have a holding" in Kulupu, and provides incentives for them to participate in Kulupu governance.

Review: Signed mining and reward lock functioned to some extent. However, as the network hashrate is still relatively small, we still had time when the majority of the hashrate was dominated by a few miners.

Precautions against double spend attacks

While double spend attacks never happened on the Kulupu network so far, following some incidents on other blockchains, we decided to implement a mitigation, called weak subjectivity. The mitigation has made into Kulupu's v2.2.0 release.

51% attacks are not preventable. However, we can optimize for particular cases. In weak subjectivity, we make double spend attacks against trading exchanges significantly harder (for a slight increase in chances of network partitions). In this way we make 51% attacks much harder to be profitable.

Review: The mitigations are deployed and live in Kulupu. We will continue to refine our weak subjectivity algorithm in the future.

Surviving a pump and dump

After exchange listed Kulupu coin back in August 2020, Kulupu suffered probably one of the worst pump and dump due to speculations.

Review: Kulupu lost a community due to this issue, and we learned the hard way how to handle situations like this in the future. Proactively clarifying misinformation and DYOR reminders are important to keep the community healthy. As a place consisting of mostly volunteers, we should do everything we can to make sure our development community is able to focus on development.

Community building and governance

The year 2020, in total of 19 democracy referendums have been tabled and voted. The community voted to change the flat 60 KLP emission curve to (tentatively) halving emission curve. Voluntary taxation was enabled to provide funding to Kulupu's decentralized treasury. We also voted on many runtime upgrades. Kulupu's council has seen 40 council motions.

Review: In many ways, Kulupu's democracy module used to propose referendums worked well. There were some criticism that requiring a super-majority for a referendum to pass is not fair, but many others agreed that in a system where changes should be done only with good amount of scrutiny, this is a good compromise. In the mean time, Kulupu's council suffered from serious inactivity problems. We're working on refining the council voting rules to hopefully make the situation better in the future.