From Platform-based Token to the Public Chain, Will CoinEx Embrace a Paradigm Shift?
The platform-based tokens shine in 2019, but such prosperity does not cover the disadvantage of their single use. How to find new application scenarios in addition to repurchase and destruction, and transaction fee deduction? The answer given by Binance is to expand the ecosystem of the public chain and develop the platform token into a public-chain token in a broader sense like ETH.
Not long ago, CoinEx announced its plan to launch a public chain. The CET will not just be a token listed on the platform, but also the basic token in the ecosystem of public chains. Unlike the Binance Chain whose partners serve as its nodes, CoinEx Chain chooses nodes according to the votes of ordinary users. Obviously, this is another paradigm shift for the platform-based tokens to expand the application scenarios.
CoinEx Chain is a public chain created by CoinEx’s professional blockchain underlying R&D team for DEX. Different from other DEXs, CoinEx uses three public chains: DEX public chain, Smart public chain and Privacy public chain, three of which parallel each other. They focus on transactions, smart contracts, and privacy respectively, and interoperate through “IBC protocols”.
How to get involved in CoinEx Chain’s ecosystem? A detailed interpretation of the CoinEx DEX’s public-chain node recruitment is provided below.
How to participate in the CET nodes election?
CoinEx’s nodes election rules are simple: Any holder who stakes at least 5 million CET on the chain is qualified, and the first 42 spots in the rankings will automatically be valid validators entitled to the right to generate a block and share proceeds. It should be noted that the process of electing a node is continuous and each block will be ranked.
Responsibilities of validators include preventing double signing and DDos attacks, being online all the time, upgrading nodes and configuration, building the private key storage architecture, and participating in community governance. Besides, there are server hardware requirements for running a node as below:
After the mainnet is online (expected in early November), the CET withdrawn from CoinEx can be staked on the chain. Once completed, the staking can be canceled at any time, but it takes 21 days for the CET to return to the account.
Private investors holding less than 5 million CET will be entitled to the voting power in the election of validators and receive bonus as rewards.
How are the returns on being a CET validator?
With a study on CoinEx’s node return model, you may find returns on validators mainly come from two parts, respectively, the block reward and transaction fee.
The transaction fee includes the gas fee in the usual sense and the function fee. Relevant gas fees will be charged for any transaction initiated on the chain, and the corresponding function fee will be charged for special operations on the DEX chain. For example, equivalent to a DEX broker, a node will charge users for such operations as order matching, token issuing, trading pairs creating, automated market making with Bancor and address alias setting.
In terms of block rewards, the CoinEx Foundation will provide a total of 315 million CET for five consecutive years. To be specific, it will send out about 105 million CET in the first year and 10 CET for block rewards. Similar to the bitcoin design, block rewards will gradually decrease over time, yet at various levels of frequency. Every year 2 CET will be deducted from the reward for each block.
The basic data of CoinEx is shown in the figure below. According to this condition, the estimated annual income of transaction fee for CoinEx’s validators comes at around 38 million CET, and, if calculated at 50% for the staking rate of the whole network, the annualized rate of return for CoinEx’s validators is 10%.
That is to say, in a case of successful re-election of CoinEx’s validators, the basic token-standard return rate will be around 10% for the first year. This figure will be higher due to the relatively small total stakes in the beginning.
How to calculate the actual income of the year?
Here we’ve summarized a calculation formula where numbers can be quickly inserted for your reference. Suppose the total stakes on a node are a, p% of which is the CET staked by the node itself and q% of which is CET entrusted to be staked by retail traders, the total stakes of the whole network are b, the actual returns distributed by the whole network are c, and the commission ratio of the node is k, then the actual income of the validator for the year is ac(p%+kq%)/b.
For example. Suppose the total stakes at a node are 10 million CET, including 8 million CET staked by the node itself and 2 million CET staked by ordinary CET holders and the commission ratio of the node is 10%. Calculated with the total stakes of the whole network being 1 billion CET and the actual returns distributed being 150 million CET, the actual income of the validator for the year is 1.23 million CET. In such conditions, the annualized rate of return for CET is around 15.3%.
So we can see that the actual income of the CoinEx’s validators can be divided into two parts in terms of asset ownership: incomes from CET staked by the node itself and commissions from CET staked by ordinary holders.
In other words, if a validator can keep the CET public chain in safety, contribute to the development of CoinEx’s ecosystem, and help it gain more attention and favor from ordinary users, it can receive an annualized income that is higher than the basic staking income. Retail users may stake their CET on more professional and responsible nodes, as well as sharing the dividends of the node and the CET public chain.
In the nodes election, the Matthew effect has always been a topic of criticism. So will ordinary token holders drive the centralization of validators according to CoinEx’s rules? The answer is no. Yet just as in the case with all other PoS models, inevitable is moderate centralization, or in other words, the trade-off between decentralization and centralization. That is because, at least mathematically, the annual income from CET staked by retail traders on different validators relies on k, which is the commission ratio of the node, with a and q% of retail traders holding the same amount of CET remaining the same. That is to say, in terms of economic efficiency alone, the income of the retail trader’ votes for different nodes does not depend on the scale, but on the proportion of transaction fee and more implicit reasons such as the security and reliability (or reputation) of a node.
There are many other public chains adopting the “Supernodes” election, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of CoinEx?
There are many public chains adopting such “Supernodes” election mechanism, among which EOS and IOST are best known. So what are the similarities and differences in the nodes election between CoinEx and its counterparts?
From the perspective of the nodes election, IOST needs 2.1 million votes (one vote for one token). According to the price of 0.0044 US dollars when this document is published, it costs at least USD 9,300, a really low threshold. Blocks.io shows that EOS now requires about 290 million votes (30 votes for one token) for the top 21 supernodes. According to EOS REX’s data, if a consortium without a user base wants to get a block-generating right by renting tokens, it will cost around USD 2.55 million a year, approximately RMB 18 million. By contrast, the threshold for a CoinEx Chain’s node is only 5 million CET, a moderate cost of USD 100,000 approximately estimated at USD 0.02.
In terms of hardware, according to the hardware configuration mentioned above, it costs USD 1,000 per year. The estimated operating cost of AWS for t3.xlarge is USD 1,458 per year, and one master with a backup costs only USD 2,916 a year. (The specific data will change slightly in practice.) Take the recommended server for running a node when EOS officially announced its node election. It uses Amazon AWS EC2 host x1.32x Large, with 128-core processor, 2TB memory, 2x1920GB SSD storage space and 25Gb network bandwidth. The operating cost of such a server, with one master and one backup, is: 13.338*24*2 = USD 640 a day. (The bandwidth cost allocated to the day is negligible.) It is thus obvious that CoinEx costs less, avoiding the waste arising from servers such as EOS and thus eliminating the intangible cost.
From the number of nodes, CoinEx Chain has 42 validators, EOS has 21 block-generating nodes per round, and IOST has 63. CoinEx Chain stays in the middle of the decentralization-and-efficiency trade-offs. In addition, the estimated hardware cost of the CET node election is USD 1,000 a year, which is relatively low.
Overall, CoinEx Chain’s nodes election is designed in a reasonable way, which is destined to be a milestone for CoinEx. Once “trade-driven mining” at CoinEx and it has even gone through “repurchase and destruction”. Now it targets the DEX public chain, which is deemed as a paradigm shift that lifts CET out of the pattern of being platform-based tokens. Let’s look forward to its future development.
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