The Decentralized Anonymous Payment System (DAPS) project is a privacy blockchain focusing on security, scalability and privacy with the help with its unique DAPS protocol. Recently, the development team released a detailed progress update on their journey towards a mainnet release. Stick around and find out exactly what the future holds for this new project.
The New Staking Engine
In the time that is leading up to the mainnet, the development team were very busy testing and refining a new staking engine. This new feature should give participants in the network a more level playing field. With staking (PoSV3) coins in a wallet are locked in an utxo making the amount inside that unspent transaction as the staking amount. Thus, the system can calculate the weighting of that utxo in the network. When a reward is won by that unspent transaction, the reward is given out to the wallet and the utxo itself goes in the “back of the line” to wait for its turn. The cycles it takes for the reward to be confirmed is roughly 100 in order for long range attacks and nothing at stake attacks to be prevented.
The reason this new staking engine is being implemented is to give all users the same playing field and maintain fairness. If a user doesn’t have any utxo that is above the minimum set by the network, which is 400,000 coins in DAPS, then without proper coin control, they won’t be able to participate in staking. With this new system in place, there will be an automatic breakup of the users’ balance into multiple utxos that are all above the minimum for staking. This way, people can stake with their whole balance and users with, for example, 2 million in balance, can compete with the users that have 100 million in their balance.
Network Versions and Forks
During the mainnet development process, the network went through a number of major updates and forks that brought great upgrades with them. Let’s go over them in quick succession.
V1.0.0
In this initial large update, the team added to the network what they thought at the time to be the ultimate staking solution resembling a DPoS mechanism on steroids. The issue there was that there was no way to take into account having several thousand active nodes in the network. The network difficulty became very low and forks started appearing immediately. Although initially the forks were small and were quickly abandoned, with time and increase of the staking wallets, the problem grew out of proportion. This also caused havoc with the masternodes.
V1.0.1
With this new network version, the developers tried to rework the staking process and stop the forking. This update addressed some changes that were requested by TxBit and Stex in regard to data from RPC calls in the daemon. They needed to be able to identify which transaction was a deposit or withdrawal quickly. With the attempt to fix the chain as well, this so-called by the team “Runaway Chain” was working at 6 times the planned speed.
V1.0.2 and V1.0.3
Version 1.0.2 mainly with changes to the way wallets handle the transactions and balance issues caused by all the forks. A majority of them were taken care of and stabilized the wallets a bit, but the network was still running rampant. Due to that, the team started work on a new major release, which had to be the solution to all the issues the project has experienced up to that moment.
Not long after, V1.0.3 comes along, which is the largest update DAPS has had ever. During the preparation of this upgrade, the devs noticed that some forks were making malicious attempts, which was due to the “off the rails” staking engine they developed. With the new version, the staking engine was replaced with a contemporary one. While still retaining its ability to automatically split the balance into utxo’s on behalf of the user, it then combined them into a single utxo. This means that the network went towards a more standard staking model, returning the network difficulty to its normal levels. The chain went back to normal and the forks were a thing of the past.
As an addition, checkpoint blocks were added to the network in order for users syncing their wallets regularly to avoid ending up on an abandoned or malicious fork. More fixes allowed Stex and TxBit to open their doors again including better management of orphaned transactions and improved decoy selection. A soft fork was planned at a future block in order to completely clean the influence of older wallets that are polluting the chain with their older staking rules. This will require a mandatory wallet update.
Final Thoughts and The Future of DAPS
As you can see, the development team behind DAPS has been very busy fixing their runaway chain, which was made possible due to the monster of a mechanism they have created. For the future, work on a module of Bitmart will continue. This is because, unlike other exchanges, it features very solid security system. Bitmart doesn’t trust “hot” nodes as the holders of private keys, as the security can be compromised. This poses a challenge on DAPS, to have the node still operate normally and accept incoming transactions without having the private key on it. The team have stated that within a few days, they will have a working module that they will provide to Bitmart for extensive testing.