2024 Dragon8 hard fork

Announcing the 2024 Chiliz Chain “Dragon8” hard fork

Chiliz Chain v2 was launched in May 2023, as a fork of Binance Smart Chain (BSC). This move served us well, as it opened Chiliz Chain to a whole new world of possibilities, through EVM compatibility.

A year later, we are pushing to production a major upgrade of Chiliz Chain, with a hard fork.

What is a hardfork?

A hard fork is a radical transformation of the way a blockchain works.

In effect, most major blockchains have several hard forks per year, allowing them to make significant progress in the way they work, and to introduce new features and tools into the core of its code.

Hard forks also provide security enhancements, and prepare the chain for future evolutions.

Why make a Chiliz Chain hard fork?

Chiliz Chain has been live for a full year now, and in effect it has evolved much since its launch. Doing a hard fork is necessary to keep up the pace with Ethereum and BNB development, and to keep Chiliz Chain modern and secure.

For the past few months, the Chiliz Chain development team has been meticulously assessing recent Ethereum and BSC changes to ensure that they align with the needs of our platform and community. In doing so, our team customized these upgrades to better fit our own codebase.

This methodical approach underscores a commitment to quality and stability, essential in the blockchain world: trust is not something to be played with.

When will it be applied?

The Chiliz Chain hard fork is scheduled to become effective on the following milestones:

• For Spicy Testnet:

  • Gibbs, Nano, Moran, Planck, Hertz, HertzFix, Berlin, London, Arrow Glacier, and Gray Glacier were activated at block 13614081.

  • Shanghai, Kepler, and Dragon8 were activated at timestamp 1714381800 (Monday, 29th of April 2024, at 09:10:00 GMT), at block 13614088.

• For Mainnet:

  • Mainnet Fork block for Gibbs, Nano, Moran, Planck, Hertz, HertzFix, Berlin, London, Arrow Glacier, and Gray Glacier : 13189711 (approx. 7:00am UTC 20th May 2024)

  • Mainnet Fork timestamp for Shanghai, Kepler & Dragon8): 1716300000 (14:00 pm UTC 21st May 2024)

What it brings to Chiliz Chain Developers

This Chiliz Chain hard fork brings the highly anticipated capability to utilize the latest versions of Solidity. Until now, developers were limited to using Solidity 0.8.19 for their smart contracts – a version that is now more than a year old. Now they can use the latest version, v0.8.25, thus unlocking new possibilities, such as usage of opcodes and precompiles. By staying current with Solidity’s evolution, we want to make sure that Chiliz Chain developers can leverage their knowledge and skills in the Ethereum ecosystem and its toolset.

Moreover, the hard fork introduces support for type 2 transactions, as outlined in EIP-1559. This EIP brings a transformative change in how transaction fees are managed: It not only simplifies the fee market but also significantly improves the user experience by automating gas fee calculations. Developers can now create more predictable and economically efficient applications. This is key to providing developer friendliness for Chiliz Chain participants.

What it brings to the Chiliz Chain community: new Tokenomics

The Chiliz Chain Tokenomics 2.0 introduces a new economic model for its $CHZ token.

Initially, $CHZ served as a basic transactional token but has evolved to underpin governance and operations within its ecosystem.

The updated tokenomics features a decreasing annual inflation rate starting at 8.80% and stabilizing at 1.88% after 14 years, alongside a transaction fee burning mechanism.

This aims to enhance long-term incentives for community and ecosystem engagement and aligns with strategies of leading Layer 1 protocols to ensure $CHZ's utility and longevity.

For a more detailed overview, you can visit the full tokenomics page.