Witnet

<p><strong>A  month for the books, for Witnet and for the broader cryptocurrency industry. Read on to learn about everything that happened in the Witverse!</strong></p><h3 id="the-elephant-in-the-room">The elephant in the room</h3><p>This has been a truly historic month in cryptocurrency. We have never seen anything like the FTX implosion.</p><p>Rest  assured, Witnet has absolutely no exposure to FTX, Genesis, BlockFi, or  any other cryptocurrency exchange, lender, or custodial. The Witnet  Foundation holds all assets in traditional banks, or cold storage. We  have advocated heavily for all users to perform cold storage whenever  possible. That is no different for your WIT, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or  whatever digital currency you hold. If you need to take self custody of  your WIT, take a look at <a href="https://medium.com/witnet/how-to-use-sheikah-as-a-wit-wallet-dde1da5bdc1a" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">this article</a> for how to do so.</p><p>These  are difficult times for the broader cryptocurrency market and we are  still recommending everyone take full control of your funds.</p><p>Without further ado, let’s jump into November!</p><h3 id="consensus-disruption">Consensus disruption</h3><p>In  early November, November 2nd to be exact, Witnet experienced a network  disruption that caused an inability for nodes to reach superblock  consensus.</p><p>On  November 2nd, Hetzner blocked mining cryptocurrencies on their  platform. Hetzner is a massive cloud provider, or VPS service. They are  generally considered the cheapest service compared to other VPS  infrastructure companies and that is why 16% of nodes run on it to  validate Ethereum transactions, and a whopping 40% on Solana. The major  difference is that up to 80% of Witnet nodes were using it on the Witnet  network because of the high profitability margins.</p><p>Witnet  operates on what is known as a superblock consensus; every 10 blocks  100 nodes in the Active Reputation Set (ARS) come together to vote on  the previous 10 blocks. If 2/3rds of nodes vote in agreement, then the  10 blocks are considered final.</p><p>Now,  when Hetzner abruptly blocked cryptocurrency mining, this decimated the  nodes in the ARS. Essentially it took a LOT of nodes out of the pool  that can be used to vote on the superblock. As mentioned, 80% of nodes  were most likely down for a period due to this ban, which meant that  there were quite a lot of nodes immediately out of the ARS.</p><p>Now,  this isn’t inherently a problem because there are mechanisms in place  that allow the network to enter into a recovery. However, the next issue  that we found was that many nodes were utilizing firewalls to connect  to the network. This meant that firewall nodes needed to connect to  public IPs in order to broadcast transactions, mine blocks, and  essentially communicate to the network.</p><p>This  created a system that had a “hub and spoke” mechanism, inadvertently.  Basically there was a lot of hubs that were connecting these firewalled  nodes to the network. When the network saw the disruption, there were  far less “hub” nodes that created sinlge points of failure.</p><p>At  this point, the recovery mechanism wasn’t able to be implemented  automatically because nodes were voting out of sequence for superblocks.  Consensus was finally reached on November 5th because of a manual  recovery that put trusted nodes at the head of voting on superblocks.  This was part of witnet-rust 1.5.4.  The trusted set of nodes was in place for 7 days, and was withdrawn on  November 12th after it was clear the network was back to normal.</p><p>Since  the manual recovery was implemented we haven’t seen any further  disruptions. If you want a fantastic summary of what happened, take a  look at Adan’s article <a href="https://medium.com/witnet/a-post-mortem-of-the-november-2-consensus-disruption-episode-in-the-witnet-blockchain-5589c2215caf" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a>.</p><p>If  we’ve learned anything, it’s that we need to be using multiple cloud  providers to spread out our nodes. We will also be harping on the  importance of using public IPs when connecting to the network to avoid  single points of failure.</p><p>Now, let’s get on to some more lighthearted news!</p><h3 id="chain-updates">Chain updates</h3><p>We’ve added Arbitrum Nitro Goerli as one of our newest chain integrations.</p><p>Last  month, we announced the Dogechain testnet, and now Witnet is fully live  on Dogechain mainnet providing price feeds and randomness.</p><p>We’ve additionally added Bobabeam testnet, Bobabase. This is a layer two scaling solution utilizng the Boba network on Moonbeam.</p><p>All  of these integrations means Witnet is the oracle of choice for their  growing TVL. We are looking at Ultron, Starknet, and Obscuro as our next  chain integrations for the future.</p><h3 id="data-feeds-and-protocols">Data feeds and protocols</h3><p>ETH/USD  is now live on our Arbitrum testnet. As for Bobabase, we’ve added  BOBA/USDT and GLMR/USDT which are the native tokens for the Boba and  Moonbeam networks. Finally, we’ve added DOGE/USD to Dogechain mainnet.  All feeds are free to read from in contract storage on their respective  networks!</p><p>Witnet  total value secured is close to $5 million. As we’ve seen TVL shrink  due to users pulling their tokens off defi applications, and lowering  asset prices, Witnet’s isn’t immune to the ripples of the massive bear  market. The Witnet TVS is shrinking proportionally to the rest of the  industry. It is worth it to note however, that we’ve have two protocols,  Chee Finance and Toucan Protocol that have added to our TVS. Chee, on  Meter has $360k in TVL and Toucan has $449k. The former was a protocol  we were unaware that was using Witnet and are delighted to bring them  into our family.</p><p>We  are monitoring the ecosystem closely to see varying chains and  protocols and how they are reacting to the FTX implosion. It is  important to stay vigilant and reassess where to extend our resources  and grants.</p><h3 id="grant-program">Grant program</h3><p>The  Witnet grant program has found another exciting opportunity in Pool  Together, a liquid staking protocol on a few EVM chains. Witnet is  extending a grant to them and we are still working out the details of  the collaboration.</p><p>As  mentioned last month, Witnet offered a grant to Toucan Protocol for 6  months of price feed subsidization. This grant is expected to be  concluded in April, when we will reassess and decide how to move  forward. Toucan has been a great partner and we’re so excited to keep  working with them. The current funding for projects using Witnet through  the foundation grant is up to $4,950!</p><h3 id="network-statistics">Network statistics</h3><p>Despite the network issues early in November, the Witnet network saw some incredible growth in data feeds.</p><p>We  saw a 30% increase in total data request from October to November to  67,900, a 32% increase in HTTP GET and a 38% increase in HTTP POST.  There were 255,355 HTTP GET requests and 7,006 HTTP POST requests in  November. Interestingly enough, there was a decrease of randomness  oracle requests from 436 to 382. We attribute the growth of price feeds  to Toucan and other protocols that are using the network  permissionlessly. We will find you!</p><h3 id="protocol-discussion">Protocol discussion</h3><p>We’ve  been talking about a few protocol discussions on Github and Discord  about how Witnet will move into the future. Every community call has  focused on a few discussions, and this call was focused on the upcoming  decentralized bridge.</p><p>The  decentralized bridge is a huge step in Witnet’s long term  sustainability. Currently the Witnet Foundation operates a centralized  version of the bridge that allowed for early adoption and seamless  interaction and payment with EVM chains. The time has now come for a  decentralized version of this that allows for anyone to operate a bridge  node, receive payment in an EVM chain coin, and relay the request to  the Witnet sidechain (paying the fulfillers in WIT) and earning a fee  for doing so. We expect the bridge to look like an optimistic rollup  bridge of sorts.</p><p>This is a massive development in the ecosystem and we are looking forward to officially release it to the public.</p><h3 id="announcements">Announcements</h3><p>Last  month, we announced that the EVM bridge had a release so community  members can take a look at the beginnings of the construction. You can  find this on our <a href="https://github.com/witnet/witnet-solidity-bridge" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Github</a>.</p><p>The  light wallet is still expected for February! We are getting really  close to releasing it to the public and have been testing all the  features daily.</p><p>The <a href="https://github.com/witnet/web3-jsonrpc-gateway" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">web3-json-rpc</a> was released recently and goes hand in hand with the decentralized bridge discussed above. Check this out on our Github here.</p><p>The  Witnet whitepaper turned 5 this past Saturday (November 26, 2022). We  also celebrated the 2 year birthday in October. Since the network went  mainnet, we’ve seen total data requests and value transfers hit 1  million each, a staggering number in just 2 years.</p><h3 id="november-takeaways">November takeaways</h3><p>We  will be harping on this a lot in the foreseeable future and it relates  directly to the network disruption in early November. Node operators  must be more vigilante about spreading nodes to multiple cloud providers  so as there isn’t a single point of failure if an issue like Hetzner  happens again.</p><p>We  are also highly, highly encouraging node operators to utilize public  IPs to help peers find each other in times of turbulence like we saw  earlier this month.</p><h3 id="that-s-all-for-this-month">That’s all for this month</h3><p>And  what a month it has been. Thank you everyone for sticking with us  through the network disruption and the FTX collapse. It has been quite  an interesting month to say the least. See you on December 28th for the  next community call!</p><p><strong>Connect with Witnet:</strong></p><p><a href="https://witnet.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Website</a> | <a href="https://github.com/witnet" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">GitHub</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/witnet_io" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://discord.gg/X4uurfP" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Discord</a> | <a href="https://t.me/witnetio" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Telegram</a> | <a href="https://reddit.com/r/witnet" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Reddit</a> | <a href="https://www.youtube.com/witnetfoundation" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">YouTube</a></p>

November Community Call and Monthly Roundup

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Witnet

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