Avalon's 6th hardfork codenamed "Space Odyssey", has received the required majority approval from Avalon leaders, and has been scheduled to execute on mainnet block #17,150,000. This is by far the most significant network upgrade on Avalon, as it introduces many highly requested features to the blockchain layer of DTube.

If you are running an Avalon node (leader or observer), make sure to update your node before block #17,150,000, which should be in approximately 11 days, on the 11th July 2022.

Avalon DAO

The main spotlight of the hardfork, which will give great responsibilities to Avalon leaders and stakeholders, as they will now solely decide the direction of the network. It enables anyone to propose new ideas to be funded by the community and suggest changes to blockchain parameters. It also forms the DAO membership consisting of active leaders and additional members specified in config.daoMembers array (currently empty) where members review proposals at certain stages and controls the @dtube master account.

The DAO is available to use from the block explorer: https://avalonblocks.com

There are two sections in the Avalon DAO:

Governance

The area to create proposals. There are two types of proposals, which are fund requests and chain updates. For more information on how each of them works, please review the proposal creation forms for fund requests and chain updates.

Once the hardfork block hits (provided there are no issues with hardfork execution), anyone may submit proposals to the DAO on the block explorer here.

New Proposal Fees

The proposal creation fee for fund requests consists of a flat fee of 300 DTUBE. On top of it, there is an additional fee of 1/1000th of the requested funding amount. For example if you request a funding of 50000 DTUBE, you would need to pay 300 + 50 = 350 DTUBE in order to submit a funding request proposal. Chain parameters update proposals have a flat fee of 300 DTUBE.

Fee are refunded to the proposal creator upon successful completion/execution of the proposal, or burned if the proposal does not complete successfully.

MasterDAO

DAO members may queue an operation (of whitelisted types) to be executed by the master account's behalf. Each MasterDAO operation must be approved by at least 2/3 of all members in the DAO.

The MasterDAO may only fund up to 50% of the requested amount in fund request proposals.

As @dtube will be used as the MasterDAO controller account, the leader node will be disabled upon hardfork execution and the ENABLE_NODE operation will be disallowed for the account going forward. @heimindanger is now running a node under his personal account.

Other changes

Account Creation with Bandwidth

Previously when accounts with preloaded resources were introduced in HF4, a newly created account will have included VP and lifetime account bandwidth growth based on the burn amount. However, the new account still starts with zero bandwidth which is not a good onboarding experience as waiting is required for bandwidth to grow.

This hardfork adds a new transaction type NEW_ACCOUNT_WITH_BW allows the account creator to create accounts with starting bandwidth supplied by the account creator. This should make onboarding even easier as the newly created account with preloaded bandwidth can be used immediately without having to wait for bandwidth to recharge at base bandwidth growth rates.

Playlists

Avalon playlists will enable the possibility of introducing the highly requested features on DTube such as video playlists and HLS video livestreams on IPFS/Skynet. Playlists consists of an ordered list of strings (usually content identifiers or IPFS hashes/Skylinks) with a JSON metadata for each playlist. Due to technical limitations, a maximum of 1,000 items may exist in one playlist at a time.

This work makes playlists possible on the Avalon blockchain, however no work has been done on the user-interface level. If you feel like implementing it, it might be a good idea for a first contribution and funding proposal in the DAO...

Comment Edit

A long standing issue is that editing video metadata or comments will require at least 1 VP using the COMMENT operation which does not go towards any vote. A new transaction type COMMENT_EDIT (type 28) have been introduced as a more resource efficient method of editing the JSON metadata of contents as less bandwidth (and no VP) is required to acheive the same action.

The DTube frontend will take advantage of this new transaction type once the hardfork executes.

Burning of Unclaimed Airdrops

As of HF4, the network has been executing periodic burns of unclaimed airdrops held in @dtube.airdrop account. As this Avalon account is now nulled, all balances held in that account will be cleared to reflect the current token circulating supply correctly.

This account remains nulled, which means anyone can use it to burn DTUBE coins by simply transfering to @dtube.airdrop.

Unset Signature Threshold

HF4 introduced multisig accounts on Avalon, however an operation was missing to unset signature thresholds for specific operations. The transaction type UNSET_SIG_THRESHOLD (type 23) has been added to complete the implementation of Avalon multisig accounts.

Once a signature threshold for a transaction type have been unset, the required threshold falls back to the specified default value (or 1 if unspecified).

Account Auths

Instead of adding a custom key, an account auth can be added to allow another account to sign transactions on one's behalf by its custom key ID. This can be very useful for allowing someone else (can also be a service such as scheduled publishers) to access your account with certain permissions (and weight) without passing around a fixed public key to add.

Just like custom keys, up to 25 account auths may exist in an account at a time and may be revoked at anytime.

For more technical details of the hardfork, please see the releases notes on Github.

Need help?

For support from the team and the community, please comment on this post or go to our:

• DTube
• Discord
• Twitter
• Telegram