Hi there,
A major update has been merged to the master branch of the Steem Smart Contracts (SSC) tool and I wanted to introduce these changes to you today.
1) Block Production
The Block Production in SSC is a bit different from other blockchains as the tool doesn't generate blocks itself and there is no Blocks Per Minute (BPM) notion either. Why? Simply because the SSC blockchain is orchestrated by the Steem blockchain directly, meaning that to interact with the SSC blockchain you need to interact with the Steem blockchain first. The SSC tool is like a Steem interpreter and it will only interpret transactions that are related to SSC.
Steem Block X:
| Transaction A | non SSC related |
| Transaction B | SSC related |
| Transaction C | non SSC related |
| Transaction D | non SSC related |
| Transaction E | SSC related |
will generate a SSC Block Y:
| Steem Block Reference | Steem Block X |
| Transaction B | SSC related |
| Transaction E | SSC related |
2) Block Producers
You may have heard about this notion before, Block Producers (BPs) are entities that manage the block production of a blockchain. There are now BPs in SSC as well and they are working similarly to the Steem blockchain witnesses. Basically there are BPs elected by the users (more about that after), the top 21 BPs gets rewarded with SSC tokens every time they produce a block.
3) The SSC token
The SSC token is now part of the system, this token will allow the SSC tool to reward the Block Producers but not only (more about that later). The SSC token is an inflationary token that works very similarly to the Steem token:
- initial inflation rate of 9.5%
- annual inflation of 0.5%
- inflation rate decreases by 0.01% every 201,600 Steem blocks (around a week) until inflation rate reaches 1%
- 50% of the block production rewards is rewarded to the top 21 Block Producers
- 50% of the block production rewards is allocated to the proposal system
- 250,000,000 SSC tokens have been minted and issued to @steemsc (some will be sold, some airdropped, etc...)
The SSC token will also be used for the "fees system" that will be implemented soon, this system will enforce fees:
- transaction fees: smart contract owners will have to stake SSC tokens in order to let the users interact with their smart contracts
- storage fees: smart contract owners will have to stake SSC tokens in order to let their smart contracts use the "RAM storage" of the network
The fees collected by this system will probably be burnt. (but I'll make a separate post to talk about that once it's ready)
4) Block Producers votes
A Block Producer (BP), in order to receive rewards will have to be part of the top 21 BPs elected. The users can vote up to 30 BPs but in order to do that they will have to get SSC tokens and stake them, the more they stake, the more their vote is powerful. (once staked, the tokens can be un staked only after a week). This is very similar to Steem but it's way more simplified.
Votes are very important as they are the only way that the system check if a BP is eligible to receive rewards or not, there is nothing in the system that checks how the BP is behaving. The responsibility for the users will be to vote for "good" BPs! (tools can be created to help the users to interpret the BPs behaviors though)
5) The proposal system
Similarly to other blockchains, the SSC tool has its own proposal system, as of now, it is just tokens that get allocated to the 'null' account but later on the system will allow to distribute funds to help on boarding new projects to the SSC blockchain and tokens could be burnt as well if needed.
Conclusion:
This is a major step for this tool, I'm open to discuss the token settings as well as the distribution and also I'm hoping to see feedbacks/questions from the community as I want this tool to be our tool :)
More about how to get SSC tokens, how to register your node and how to vote for the block producers soon! (for those who are impatient, you can already figure all this out in the source code of the tool https://github.com/harpagon210/steemsmartcontracts)