27 Apr Symbol blockchain news update – 27/04/22
I seem to be back to daily posts again this week! Another short one today but I thought that I should say something about Gimre’s tweet which caused a bit of a backlash earlier today! 😅 I was also hoping to report on some other stuff as I think that there will be some announcements from the team coming soon but looks like it either won’t be today or it will be when I am fast asleep so I will keep my ear to the ground and update you once I know what mysteries lay ahead.
“Sub”and “main” chains 🥫🪱
Gimre seems to have stirred up some heated discussions with this tweet! 😂 I am not sure if this is a thought experiment or just stating that when they come to implement this it may be more sensible that NEM is used as the mainchain and that Symbol becomes a subChain.
It definitely ruffled a few feathers in the community but don’t freak out(!) Hatchet has clarified some points for us in this Discord post (included below):
- “main” and “sub” don’t confer any concept of value or priority. Especially after Gimre’s tweet – the amount of backlash he’s gotten is bizarre. He’s encouraging you to start thinking about other ideas, like an engineer.
- It confers which level will handle execution (subChain) and which level will handle consensus (mainChain), as well as where rollups will be created (sub) and where validity proofs will be stored (main). Modular blockchains are the future.
- The airdrop was so people would have both XEM and XYM. The fact that people are making “bets” on which coin will be more valuable and choosing only one is a bit sad.
I think that the first point is key here. Both the “main” and “sub” chains are required and one is not more important than the other, in fact I think that the team have been saying for a long time that they need better names – main and sub probably do imply importance. I would love to think more about this as an engineer but unfortunately, I lack the knowledge to do so 😁 Ignoring our ignorance, I think at the moment it is hard for any of us to visualise the options as we have not been involved in the discussions and don’t really know where to start with thinking about how this can and will be implemented along with the pros and cons of different configurations. Maybe this will become clearer in time which will allow some input from those in the community more knowledgeable than I! 😊
The last point on the XYM airdrop is equally true, I think that many of us sold their XEM after Symbol was launched and bought more XYM. I was one of these people 😢. In our defence, though there was no clear use case for NEM (or for that matter Symbol!) at the time. We certainly didn’t know anything about the plans for NEM and Symbol 2.0 and the concept of subChains. Had there been a clearer plan at the time of the snapshot then I think that maybe people wouldn’t have backed one horse to win and would have held on to their XEM. The world of NEM and Symbol was very different at that time and I think that the perception was that NEM would take a back seat to Symbol. This turned out not to be the case. If anything, it seems with the new supernode programme coming and future changes to a decent block reward model in the pipeline, that NEM is probably being more actively developed than Symbol right now(?).
I am also a bit sad that I sold my XEM, I never really understood why we needed two blockchains and why we went down the road of airdropping XYM to XEM holders, I know that there were mixed opinions at the time, I guess in the end it turned out for the best as the two will (kind of) become one and act synergistically, each with their own specific functionality.
COMSA explained
I just realised I haven’t actually tweeted about COMSA in a long time! I spotted this tweet from nembear this morning and wanted to share. It links to this YouTube video which explains COMSA in English. Spread it far and wide because it’s something that is unknown outside of Japan and we need to do our best in making sure that these platforms built on Symbol start to get some international recognition. What’s good for the ecosystem is good for Symbol and NEM.
Learn about Symbol (quickly!)
OK, I know, like 90% of things that I report on, it is in Japanese. However, xembook has made an excellent simple to read guide on what you can do with Symbol and how to programmatically interact with the blockchain and use each of these functions. As I said, it’s in Japanese but it Google Translate’s well and code is code (and not written in Kanji 😂) so it is easy(ish) to understand. I highly recommend you check it out and maybe work through some of the examples yourself. I am half tempted to translate for those of you too lazy to hit the Google Translate button in your browser. We will see 😊
Thanks!
Thanks as always for reading! I am sure that I will be back again soon with another Symbol Blog update very soon. Until then goodnight!
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I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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