And we are live! 🥳

Link of checkpoints — https://etherscan.io/address/0x86E4Dc95c7FBdBf52e33D563BbDB00823894C287

We are proud to announce that the first version of the Matic mainnet is now up and running 🙂 This is the culmination of more than 2.5 years of hard work by the entire team, developers, investors, advisors and of course, the entire Matic community who have supported us on our journey so far.

Matic began as a dream in our minds in 2017 — and the mainnet launch today marks our most important milestone to date. Soberingly though, this is still just the beginning.

As poet Robert Frost said a long time ago,

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

We intend to fulfill all our promises.

Getting back to the current release now.

For those who are new to the project, Matic Network is a blockchain application platform that provides developers with the ability to deploy applications with faster and cheaper transactions while still maintaining a high level of security, by utilizing a novel combination of hybrid Proof-of-Stake and Plasma-enabled sidechains.

As laid out in our previous blog regarding the phased rollout of the Matic mainnet, we are proceeding ahead with Step #1 of the rollout, which is starting the network with a restricted set of validators. Currently, we have started the network with a set of 7 Matic Foundation nodes. DApp partner nodes will be joining this set in the coming week.

As a reminder, here is what was scheduled to be released in this stage.

Step #1: DApp partner onboarding, Genesis Ceremony & mainnet Go-Live with initial validator set (only Matic Foundation nodes and nodes run by select validators invited by the Matic team will be active).

The mainnet launch will be spread over multiple steps as detailed below. This multi-step process will ensure that the mainnet deployment and validator onboarding is achieved as smoothly as possible.

More importantly, it ensures that right from day 1 that DApps are able to deploy their products successfully on Matic and that their user experience is stable and robust. That’s also one of the reasons why we are choosing to start with DApp partners as early validators.

The network will move from one stage to the next based on the goals of each stage. The intent is to ensure that early issues get addressed and resolved quickly. We do expect our network software to function well, but we believe the most pragmatic approach is to gradually rollout the network to address any unforeseen issues.

Mainnet rollout strategy

Step #1 — Mainnet with Initial Validator Set

The first step of the Matic mainnet has been launched with an initial set of validators comprising the Matic Foundation nodes.

Nodes from select validators who have been working closely with the Matic team, which include professional validators and marquee DApps, have been shortlisted and will be onboarded to the mainnet soon. The list of DApp partners which are going to be in the first cohort is already finalized.

A very important point here is that the state of the network will be persisted and maintained by the Matic Foundation in this step. This will continue until the final step.

Developers will be able to deploy their applications on Matic directly by acquiring MATIC tokens on Ethereum from an exchange of their choice.

ETH, MATIC and other ERC20 tokens can be moved to Matic from Ethereum and vice versa.

The Betav2 mainnet and Alpha-mainnets will be retired. Appropriate support will be provided to migrate state and tokens from both of these mainnets to the final v1 mainnet.

Validator slot auction and replacement will be disabled during this phase. Slashing is also disabled in this phase — this will be enabled in later stages.

Staking & Delegation

As mentioned in the phased rollout of the Matic mainnet blog post, delegation will be enabled for the public but only to Matic Foundation nodes in steps 1 & 2. Delegators will receive 100% of staking rewards on the tokens delegated to Foundation nodes. Any rewards earned by Foundation nodes will go back into the staking pool.

Once steps 1 & 2 are complete and public staking is switched on for the Validator community in step 3, the Foundation nodes will be switched off and any delegations to these nodes will have to be redelegated to Validators from the Matic Validator community as per choice of the Delegators.

An announcement regarding the delegation to Foundation nodes in this Step 1 of the Mainnet rollout will be released shortly.

Developer Tooling and Dapp Deployments

We are working with various tooling providers to enable support for the mainnet. This includes hosted full node providers, wallets, oracle providers, meta-transaction relayers, hosted block explorers, etc. and they will add support for the Matic mainnet gradually.

For the time being, the Matic Foundation will run a set of RPC/full nodes for developers like Infura, as well as a block explorer. More information on all of these will be released this coming week.

The final testnet of Counter Stake — currently CS-2008 — will be transitioned to be a testbed for developers shortly and will replace all current testnets, including Testnetv2 and Testnetv3.

The goals for this step 1, which will run for a few days, are to:

• Ensure that the mainnet is working with a restricted set of validators, with >⅔ of the stake controlled by Matic Foundation and the select set of validators
• Enable developers to deploy applications right away
• Make sure the network continues operating even if native network calls for fetching Ethereum staking contract state or other network calls fail
• Ensure any bugs/issues are addressed with smoother validator coordination
• Multiple rounds of code and security reviews with industry leading code auditors — a few rounds are already complete!
• Upgrade nodes based on any bugs reported via the Bug Bounty program

What Does This Mean for our Stakeholders?

Developers (from day 1 of mainnet — step #1)

• Deploy your DApp on a high-performance blockchain with a ~1–2 second block time, and transaction costs lower than 1/100th of that of Ethereum gas fee costs ✅
• Be assured that state will persisted across steps ✅
• Move assets from Ethereum to Matic and vice versa ✅
• Pay gas fees on behalf of users or let users pay for gas (integration in progress with partners)

Validators

• Matic Foundation nodes up and running ✅
• Select Dapp Partner Validators to run nodes initially (onboarding is in progress)
• Additional validator slots will be opened up gradually with advanced notice (step #2)
• Stake with MATIC tokens on these validator slots when opened (step #2) (Stake in this stage will be very small in amount, i.e just enough to test the reward mechanism, until step #3 is activated i.e when the staking will be on for everyone)
• Once the network is run by few external validators nodes by the end of step #2, the Matic Foundation nodes will be shut down, all delegators will need to move their staked MATIC tokens to the public validators of their choice (step #3). Once step #3 is activated, the validator slot. Any rewards earned by Foundation nodes will go back to the reward pool.
• Staking contracts contain safety functions to lock and withdraw/refund funds in case of an emergency. Currently, the Matic team controls this safety switch. In the future, the Matic community will take over it using governance DAO.

Token holders and delegators

• Delegate with the initial set of Foundation validators (to be started shortly) (step #1 & #2)
• Move delegated tokens to public validators (step #3)

The future is a little bit nearer today! “pew pew” 🙂

Connect with us

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