The smartBCH mainnet will be hard forked to apply the XHedge upgrade

After the XHedge hard fork was applied to the Amber testnet on 14 Feb 2022, it has been working smoothly for seven weeks. Now we are going to apply the XHedge hard fork to smartBCH's mainnet at the height of 4106000 (next Wednesday, 20 Apr 2022).

The name "XHedge" of this hard fork comes from its most important feature: BCH holders can elect validators through the XHedge smart contract. During the last six weeks, we found some weaknesses in this smart contract and refined it. Now the mainnet will use the latest v0.4.4 XHedge contract, deployed at the address of 0x11e34Ee274929d607E06C5e49bB0dc26Ca920BF2.

After the XHedge hard fork, The voting power from miners (PoW) and the voting power from BCH holders (PoS) will both be 50%. For PoS voting, BCH holders can stake BCH into the XHedge smart contract to mint a pair of Lever NFT and Hedge NFT. The Lever NFT is used to elect validators for smartBCH and its voting power is proportional to the accumulated coin-days. And Hedge NFT can be used to endorse the value of stable coins. We hope in the future one or more DeFi projects can finally bring us stable coins with Hedge NFTs are the deposit reserve.

Another important feature is that validators can use an optimized scheme to adjust the minimum gas price together, and the adjustable range will be larger than the current version. Now on the smartBCH network, any validator can adjust the minimum gas price, and when the validators' options are different, there will be a chaos of meaningless rising and falling.

Users will also find the VRF verifying capability and the new mempool design useful. SEP109 adds a precompile smart contract to verify VRF (verifiable random function) hash results, in a gas-efficient way. The new mempool will allow accounts to send new transactions into successive blocks, while the current version only accepts transactions from the same user in every other block.

There are also many new customized RPC endpoints, speed optimizations, and robustness enhancements. Besides, third-party libraries will be statically (instead of dynamically) linked to smartBCH's full-node client with v0.4.4.

After smartBCH's XHedge hard-fork, we'll focus on developing the SHA-gate feature, which enables a secure and decentralized bridge between BCH mainchain and smartBCH sidechain. It will take us several months and the SHA-gate hard fork will happen in 2022Q3, hopefully.

The XHedge hard fork opens the door for more validators on smartBCH. We welcome all players in the BCH ecosystem to run a validator of smartBCH and are ready to provide technical support.