Hello everyone,
Here’s a quick update around the situation with minting and our plans for the future of the ThreeFold Grid.
We first would like to thank all of our farmers for supporting the project and helping us to improve technologies including the Farmerbot. After discussions among the team, we are planning to distribute additional farming rewards from the ThreeFold Foundation treasury to certain farmers who have been using the Farmerbot.
The additional rewards will be distributed as follows (for minting cycles from November until further notice):
- For nodes that lost a month’s rewards for not waking up within 30 minutes, we will calculate the impact of deducting only the uptime since the last wake up event, rather than losing an entire month
- Payment will be made for the difference between what the farmer received from minting and the amount calculated with the reduced slashing
TFT are only minted for nodes that meet the minting criteria as checked by the minting code. Since the current rules have been approved by a DAO vote for the relevant GEP and executed correctly, no immediate changes will be made to the minting code. As we recently announced, our plan is to stop the minting of new TFT at the end of Q1 and move to distributing farming rewards entirely from the treasury via a cooperative structure (equal to or greater than what farmers receive from minting currently). This shift will provide us with an opportunity to reevaluate how we check that nodes managed by Farmerbot are sufficiently available to contribute to the Grid.
With that in mind, we’ll be proposing one or more DAO votes soon to ask the community to approve the new approach. These will include provisions that nodes must meet certain quality requirements around uptime and bandwidth in order to receive rewards. This will help maintain a stable, reliable, and high-quality grid. The new requirements will be phased in along with the cooperative based rewards.
This shift will result in a more flexible system, where farmers are reachable and have a chance to respond to issues to avoid or reduce lost rewards. This can include notifications for farmers if their nodes fail to wake up, so they can resolve any issue and boot the nodes manually if needed. Ultimately the cooperative and the guardians will be tasked with the same goal as today’s minting rules: to make sure that nodes receiving rewards are available and able to run workloads.
We’ll share more soon for the timeline for distribution of additional rewards from the treasury. Since minting will continue under the existing rules for now, we will proceed with December’s minting as soon as possible.