Beijing
Leading public blockchain Aurora Chain (token: AOA) has released a new upgradable block feature to bring more flexibility and utility to the public chain landscape. Developers using Aurora Chain will be able to enjoy its latest feature. The upgrade can also reduce cases of hard forking.
Hard forks have been rather abundant during the industry’s short history. Take Bitcoin as an example. It now has more than six hard forks including Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Cash. Furthermore, the already forked Bitcoin Cash forked again last year after supporters of two major mining pools split, creating BCHABC and BCHSV.
Hard forks can be a good way to gain attention by sparking a Twitter war, but they can also lower the utility of bitcoins and undermine its mining capability. For more up-to-date and advanced blockchains, a hard fork could be catastrophic. Hence, the Aurora tech team came up with a solution to lower this type of risk.
Basically, the solution requires mining agents or agent candidates to vote for upgrading the blockchain within a 14-day time period. When votes for an upgrade exceed the total number of voting agents and agent candidates, the upgrade passes and a block height will be chosen for implementing the new upgrade.
An upgrade should include the URL of the version released on Github, the version code, description of the update and md5 information of the new upgrade.
When the upgrading program on the network receives the upgrading request, it will automatically retrieve the new release and proceed to verify this version. Once the verification is successful, the test network will be activated.
Users can try this new version on the test. If any problems or glitches happen before the implementation of the release, the agent that requested the upgrade can halt the upgrade. Until the halt is revoked, the upgrade will not be carried out even if the network reaches the agreed block height.
The solution has two smart contracts and an upgrade control.
- Smart contract A manages the upgrade smart contract, which is smart contract B. It can substitute the old version of the blockchain code with the new one.
- Smart contract B regulates the process of voting and retrieving an upgrade. It supervises five major parts of the solution:
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- Agents and agent node candidate votes
- Other mining agents or agent candidates participating in the voting process
- The upgrade is passed when “yes” votes exceed 2/3 of the total number of the mining agents and agent candidates
- The agent that requests the upgrade can halt the upgrading process in case of emergency
- The agent that requests the upgrade can resume the upgrading process
Upgrading control has three purposes.
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- Oversee the network, supervise the initiation, processing, and pausing/abandoning the upgrade.
- Monitor the communication between contract A and contract B.
- Optimize the concurrence of the testnet and the mainnet.
The upgradable chain marks a major step for the Aurora team. It promises to be the antidote to the scalability issues that the industry is facing. The Aurora network is faster than most public chains. “Upgradable Blockchain” further boosts versatility and utility of Aurora Chain-based decentralized apps.
About Aurora
Aurora makes a breakthrough in the blockchain world. By applying DPOS+BFT consensus mechanisms, we’ve created lightning-fast contracts to link industries such as gaming, big data, artificial intelligence and IoT. Aurora offers unique intelligent application isolation, enabling multi-chain parallel expansion and an unlimited increase of TPS with guaranteed security.
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