This week we’ve been in the 1559 State of Mind🔥! On August 5, the London Upgrade, which included EIP-1559, successfully introduced a deflationary mechanism to Ethereum. ETH is now being burned on every block. This is an exciting development for the entire ecosystem, and one with big implications for the xDai Network.
What does it mean for xDai? Well, since xDai closely follows the Ethereum patchset, expect London and EIP-1559 to arrive on xDai shortly. First up, the Kovan test network will upgrade, and once stress testing is complete, the xDai network will upgrade to London.
When the transition happens, xDai transaction fees will be divided into 2 types; priority fees and base fees. Priority fees will be sent to validators, and base fees will be burned. This means xDai will be burned on every block.
The burn🔥 will create a mismatch between burned xDai and the Dai used to create xDai, which will still be locked in the bridge contract. To maintain token & bridge equilibrium, the extra Dai in the contract must also be reduced in the same exact proportions.
The team is developing a mechanism to use the extra Dai to buyback-and-burn STAKE on Ethereum. This process will create a deflationary mechanism for STAKE with the aim of enhancing overall POSDAO security.
To give a sense of what this might look like, over 1M xDai has been spent in transaction fees in the past 90 days. After the London HF on xDai is activated, these fees can be redirected towards increased security with the STAKE buyback-and-burn initiative.
On August 5, Igor touched on this topic and other exciting developments coming to xDai during his keynote presentation at the Chainlink SmartCon Conference (his talk happened to occur at the same exact time the London upgrade on Ethereum went live 👽 🔮). If you missed it, we’re excited to share the recording when it becomes available.
In addition to these developments, we had another outstanding week of new project announcements and activity on xDai.
August 06 Weekly Highlights
Protocol
👨🏻💻 👩🏽💻 BlockScout is hiring! Seeking an experienced Elixir developer to join the team and help create the next generation of Ethereum-based applications. Learn More
BlockScout Block Explorer is the premier open-source explorer for EVM chains. It is developed and maintained by the xDai team as well as contributors from the community. This week a new roadmap was released with many exciting items for Q4 of 2021, including UI improvements, increased data availability, rollup support, and a new Ethereum Mainnet instance of Blockscout.
Tenderly integration was also added this week, providing a quick and easy way to monitor and get additional insights about any transaction.Staking Updates: Over 1.75M STAKE is now staked across Ethereum and xDai, with 1M+ in EasyStaking and 750K by all active pools in POSDAO. Staked STAKE on either platform can also be used for voting on snapshot proposals.
Projects
Genuino: Last week Genuino announced their xDai integration, and yesterday the first sale went live. After 24 hours there are still a very limited number (less than 20) of NFT packs available, which include a digital NFT + an authenticated AC Fiorentina Jersey for less than 200 xDai. If you are interested, these will not last long.
DIA’s decentralized, crowd-sourced data feeds are now available on xDai. Feeds include a broad set of DeFi and CeFi financial data to enable new decentralised applications based on accurate and transparent data points.
xDai Chain DIA oracle address: https://blockscout.com/xdai/mainnet/address/0xcF2374824C2Ff84F07Ff4adcA074dfeDDa5C7569/Celer cBridge incorporated the xDai network, providing another option for interoperability between xDai, Ethereum, Polygon, BSC and Arbitrum.
CryptEx Locker is now live on xDai, providing security features such as LP token locks and team vesting for projects launching on xDai.
HashEx auditing services also launched on xDai, including promotional pricing and an in-depth report for new projects using their smart contract auditing services.
EthereumPay (ePayProtocol) announced their platform on xDai which uses the ERC-1363 Payable Token to standardize payment processes.
The Token Engineering Commons (TEC) is an open source and collectively governed project for the responsible & ethical creation of public goods. Check out their primer on getting wxdai and learn more.
Last but not least, a useless-machine on the blockchain? Why not! Switch on the useless mev machine to send a transaction to the useless machine smart contract and deposit a small bounty. The bounty is a form of MEV (miner extractable value) that bots then extract by turning the machine off again. Functional art created by Maria Leonor Nogueira and Jannik Luhn and enabled by low tx fees on xDai.