Originally published 5th May 2021
New Substrate implementation
In line with the previous blog post and video, a new Acuity Substrate node implementation has been released.
The previous implementation was based on Kusama, which was causing a number of problems. The new implementation is based on substrate-node-template and has the following advantages:
- It is now possible to become a validator on the Acuity network. This is an important step for Acuity to become fully decentralized. The process for setting up an Acuity validator node is very similar to Polkadot.
- The Contracts pallet has been enabled. This is key to deploying the Features brought across from MIX and also the Atomic Swap decentralized exchange functionality.
- If there is a problem with using the Contracts pallet, the EVM pallet can be enabled and the contracts compiled with the standard Solidity to EVM compiler.
- The codebase can be easily updated for Acuity to be able to become a parachain on Polkadot or Kusama.
Unfortunately, because it was not possible to upgrade the Acuity blockchain directly to the new runtime a hard spoon had to be performed. This involved taking a snapshot of all the ACU balances and unclaimed MIX balances and creating a new genesis specification. This has the following disadvantages:
- 2,000,000 blocks of history are no longer archived on the main chain.
- Account identity information has been lost. Registrars will need to enabled and on-chain identities re-established.
- The council has been reset and will need to be voted in again.
- Nominators will need to re-bond their stake and controller accounts.
Community discussions moving to Matrix
Until now the Discord and Telegram platforms have been the main places for discussions about Acuity. Ultimately, the goal is for these discussions to move to Acuity itself. In the mean time another group chat platform will become the primary place to discuss Acuity: Matrix.
Matrix has a lot in common with Acuity. It is open source, non-proprietary, and permissionlessly extensible. It is also quite different. It is more ephemeral and can be private, whereas Acuity is permanent and fully public. Acuity does not have the concept of a "home server", it is entirely serverless.
The Acuity Community on Matrix has been created. All Acuity group messaging communities including Discord and Telegram will now be strictly moderated. Only constructive messages will be permitted and there will be no price discussion.