Edgeware, the Roundabout Way of Restoring Parity’s Frozen ETH

For years now Parity has been trying to restore some 500,000 eth accidentally frozen in a smart contract in 2017 due to a multi-sig vulnerability.

That eth will remain where it is, but a new blockchain is to begin the launching process this summer with the design suggesting all such frozen eth will effectively be restored on that new blockchain.

Edgeware is a smart contracts platform currently on testnet that looks very much like a copy clone of ethereum, with some differences in regards to on-chain governance.

You can easily move an EVM smart contract to Edge, with the blockchain launched as a parachain on Polkadot.

The interesting aspect here is the minting process. This is a Proof of Stake (PoS) chain, so there won’t be any mining. There won’t be an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) either. Instead, eth will kind of transform to edge with the project planning to allow dots to claim edge too.

The way that works is somewhat simple. You lock your eth in your own smart contract. “Each user will have their own lockdrop contract – unlike other launches where a single massive smart contract runs the distribution,” Thom Ivy, an Edgeware representative, says.

Now when the genesis block is launched, “individuals will be able to individually validate the total amount of Ethereum locked or signaled by looking for both the Locked and the Signaled Events and calculating the corresponding calculating balances on Edgeware,” says the whitepaper.

They plan to distribute 90% of the initial 5 billion minted edge tokens through this lockdrop. Commonwealth Labs, which develops and governs the project, is to get 4.5%, or circa 250 million edge. Parity Technologies is to get 3.0%, “with an additional portion of tokens reserved for initial open-source contributors, community participants, and test-net users 2.5%.”

Then close to 1 billion edge tokens will be minted every year for stakers, with this sum not changing except that token-holders can vote to increase it or decrease it.

The longer you lock the eth, the more edge you get. According to the lockdrop contract, you get 91 edge presumably per eth if you lock for three months. 182 edge for six months.

This looks at the Locked parameter in the smart contract, so the frozen Parity multi-sig would qualify based on the current design as far as we can see.

They would get at least 91 million edge tokens for the 500,000 eth under the six months time-line, but there’s a higher reward if you lock for one year with the precise amount not easily visible in the lockdrop contract.

That’s presumably because you can time six months by two, so about 200 million edge tokens. That would presumably be in addition to the 3% reserved, so we’re looking at close to 10% of the entire supply.

In addition, they’re also planning to allow dots to claim edge, in which case Parity may gain a considerable percentage of the entire supply.

Initial inflation is extremely high at 20% a year, so with staking, any such Parity percentage would increase.

That would be relevant in regards to governance, which here is on-chain. Considering the significant probable percentage of voting “rights” that Parity is likely to have, they might be able to have a decisive say where it matters.

The lockdrop design is interesting because it requires proactive action by eth holders. Instead of a straight airdrop, you have to first lock the eth for at least three months. Afterwords you get the eth back and you get edge.

“We’re partnered with Web3 and Parity to bring this unique distribution to fruition,” Ivy says. Asked if he is funded by Parity grants, he says:

“I’m not sure what if any percentage of our development is funded with grants, but we’ve taken traditional investment and venture capital I believe.

I’ll make a note to our co-founders that we should be more transparent about that in an upcoming blog post.”

Google didn’t quickly show who the VCs are, with it unclear how much they getting considering Commonwealth Labs is reserving “only” 4.5%.

Nor is it clear why users or dapp devs would prefer this very new chain which currently has little if any infrastructure.

The design however appears to be effectively an eth chain-split, but instead of getting tokens as of right, you have to claim them.

There’s some differences, but there’s no invention at the smart contracts scale as was debuted by eth in 2015.

There’s claimed additional capacity, but just how much and with what trade-off remains to be seen in practice.

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