Theta Mainnet 3.0 Is Finally Here! You Do Not Want To Miss This Review!
Theta Mainnet 3.0 is here as of June 30th, 2021! In less than 24 hours from launch, Theta went from 400million TFUEL staked to over 1billion TFUEL staked! Whooaaaah! We’ll dig a little deeper into the staking enhancements “Theta Edge Node v.3.0.6 Released” section and why the sudden increase since the Mainnet 3.0 launch. If you want to go deep-deep, like technical deep, feel free to read their Theta Mainnet 3.0 Whitepaper here.
Theta blockchain performed a hardfork at blockheight 10,968,061 to enable the Mainnet 3.0 upgrade. These updates are critical to incentivizing Edge Nodes and growing their numbers to 100k and beyond, making the Edge Network more useful to video platforms and other partners increasing adoption of Theta Network overall. Strengthening the network of Edge Nodes also enables additional new work types such as decentralized storage for NFTs, processing for applications operating on edge networks, and much more.
Theta Network is the leading video delivery network powered by blockchain technology. Theta allows users to simultaneously watch video content and earn token rewards for relaying video to other users who are also watching the same content. In the same vein as other sharing economy models, users opt-in to volunteering their spare bandwidth and computing resources to relay video to other users and earn token rewards for their contributions. By spending less on video delivery infrastructure, and more on rewarding their users, Theta-enabled video platforms can grow their userbase and gain market share. Users can contribute to Theta Network on any PC, mobile device, or smart TV. To learn more about Theta, read the previous article on the Theta Network by The Crypto Lifestyle.
Theta Mainnet 3.0 Introduces Two Major Protocol Innovations
1) Elite Edge Nodes will enable “Uptime Mining”, the tokenization of Internet bandwidth and availability. Users will be able to stake TFuel to an Edge Node to upgrade it to become an Elite Edge Node. Elite Edge Nodes can earn additional TFuel through their staked TFuel (remember… we are over 1 billion TFuel staked in less than 24 hours from launch!), incentivizing a larger, more robust, and more reliable Edge Network. New 4% TFuel inflation for uptime mining for Edge Nodes will be introduced in this update.
Uptime Mining
To avoid missing TFuel rewards, an elite node would need to stay online all the time, download
the latest block header, check if it is in the sampled set, sign the checkpoint block hash and
gossip out the signature immediately if selected. This provides incentive for elite node operators
to maximize the uptime of their nodes, which is beneficial to the Theta network users since this improves the availability of the network. We thus call this mechanism “Uptime Mining”, and simply keeping an elite node running and available for data relay and other tasks, the node operator would be eligible to earn the TFuel inflation rewards. With this uptime reward mechanism, the Edge Node network can quickly expand its node count and bandwidth capacity to serve the ever-increasing need from video platform partners.
Proof of Relay
For each platform payment to the network, a portion will be burned and the remainder would be split among the Elite nodes that submit a Proof-of-Relay. This portion of the TFuel reward can be viewed as the “performance bonus” based on the actual bandwidth and services contributed to platform partners. As before, video platforms can optionally reward their end-viewers and streamers with TFuel as any other DApps running on Theta. This way, all stakeholders of the video streaming ecosystem including end viewers, streamers, the platform itself and Theta elite nodes clearly benefit by participating in the ecosystemSo basically, the more you engage the more you get paid.
2) A new TFuel burning mechanism will add a cost for using Theta Edge Network, namely a “network fee” as a balancing force against new TFuel supply. For our newbies, the act of burning effectively removes tokens from the available supply, increasing its relative scarcity (in other words, this is great for token price)! Since Theta Network launched two years ago, they recognized that there is significant value accrued to video platform partners in the form of content delivery network (CDN) cost savings, increased user engagement, and revenues resulting from shifting infrastructure costs to user rewards. With Mainnet 3.0, a minimum of 25% of each TFuel payment to the Edge Network will be burned at the protocol level, effectively becoming a cost for platforms using the network. In addition to this, 100% of all gas fees for running smart contracts and transactions are burned. In the long-run as Theta’s Edge Network becomes more widely adopted, this could meaningfully reduce the supply of TFuel.
Theta Edge Node v.3.0.6 Released
The Edge Node allows you to relay video streams over the Theta Network and earn TFUEL, providing support to THETA.tv and other upcoming video platforms using the Theta Network. With the latest update, you can now also broadcast your own video streams and have them distributed over the Theta Edge Network! This allows you to stream entirely peer-to-peer without any centralized CDN involved.
To start using the Theta Edge Node, download the app for Windows or macOS. If you have an existing version of the Theta Edge Node, your software will automatically update to this newest version. This also means that for the first time, macOS users can natively relay video over the Theta Network, which should boost the number of Theta Network nodes making a more robust edge network.
Once you launch the app, you’ll see the Edge Node dashboard:
By clicking Stake TFUEL on the left side of the Edge Node screen, you’ll see your Edge Node Holder (Summary) used for depositing your TFUEL to stake.
Your Theta Wallet will allow you to stake your TFUEL to this Edge Node address. In the Stakes section of your Theta Wallet, click Deposit Stake and you’ll see a new Edge Node section you can select:
TFuel staking works similar to staking Theta tokens to a Guardian Node. Earnings will accrue back to the wallet you staked from, and staked TFuel can only be withdrawn back to the wallet you staked from. Upon withdrawal of your TFuel, there is a ~60 hour unstaking period before your staked tokens will appear back in your Theta Wallet.
While Theta blockchain will always continue evolving at the protocol level, with the core Theta blockchain features now in place, the focus of Theta development will shift toward the broader Theta ecosystem and global adoption of the network. More on these upcoming initiatives will be shared with the Theta community in Q3.
We hope you enjoyed reading this brief overview of the Theta Mainnet 3.0 launch and have a solid understanding of what the Theta Network is, and where it will go! Till the next Medium, you’re on your own! Laterrrrrrrr.
