Volume Finance discusses Paloma in this week’s Volume AMA. Taariq Lewis @LewisTaariq, CEO of VolumeFi (
volume.finance
), is joined by VolumeFi’s Product Manager, Vera Behr @v_behr. They share recent updates on the Paloma Chain.
Taariq Lewis welcomes everyone on this week’s AMA including Vera. He thanks everyone who tuned in and proceeds to relay the topics to be discussed in the space. With that, he proceeds to introduce VolumeFi. The goal of Volume is private key security and private key management, wherein they plan to innovate around managing private keys and automating the use of private keys on-chain. The volume aims to explore how to get more use out of users’ private keys without losing them or without getting them hacked or stolen, and to enable people in the digital asset space to unlock for additional use cases and additional dimensions of private key use that will allow folks to be able to do things they couldn’t do before.
Paloma and Pigeon have recently updated to 1.0 using Cosmos SDK version 0.47.1, which is the recent version of the Cosmos SDK. Taariq then thanks Vitwit and Binary for the partnership and proceeds with the first topic of the AMA.
Taariq shares their journey with Paloma and says that transaction prioritization is something new. It means that there are now custom mempools on Paloma through the Cosmos SDK. He says that if one is not on a pre-47 or pre-46 version of Cosmos SDK, what happens is all the transactions get loaded up into mempool all at once. And so, because they’re all at once, there will be an account sequence mismatch if one tries to sign more than one transaction at the same time. Taariq then shares their experience running a liquidation bot on Terra last year and how they were trying to get out and had account sequence mismatches for every transaction they signed. They came up with a solution to fire up multiple servers and multiple nodes. Through QuickNode, they signed multiple nodes and multiple keys to sign transactions at the same time. Transaction Prioritization allows the protocol to prioritize certain transactions with a custom mempool. The mempool can be subdivided into different groups, and each of these different groups will give priority. Taariq says:
They cut the mempool into four groups and the first one is called Attestation which means if Paloma validators see messages happening on Solana, Ethereum, or Osmosis, those messages and their consensus are top of the pile. Then if someone wants to send money, that message will have to wait until the message coming to attestation is processed and into the block. The second one is Scheduling. If one schedules a job on Paloma to execute on Osmosis and on Ethereum, those messages come next after the attestation that the messages that were processed are successful. The next one is the validator set updates, which has to do with updating the validator set saying that they are the security message for the network. Then everything else comes forth. If one wants to send a message, that message will wait until Paloma is actually successful at testing scheduling jobs. With this feature and functionality, Taariq says that they want to see the Paloma protocol prioritize message relaying above all messages in the system. It is their view that if they can get that done, then Paloma becomes a unique blockchain that the validators and users find useful, which is why they’re trying to make Paloma useful for people, and this is one of the key features that they’re working on. He adds:
Taariq then proceeds to announce some major news - Paloma is no longer on Tendermint. The protocol is now on CometBFT. He says that there are really no big changes, but they will be looking for consensus changes and upgrades to make consensus faster. They like to keep upgrading and keeping track of the most recent Cosmos SDK version as well as the upgrades about to come up with the Cosmos SDK. They hope that by Paloma continuing to push the boundaries of use and demand on the Cosmos SDK and on the consensus layer, they’ll be able to see features that will make Paloma an even better nest for the users.
Taariq says that they are also moving up to IBC-go v7. Currently, Paloma prioritizes communications to the EVM and now they’re planning to start working on communications towards the Cosmos group of chains and chains running IBC. He says that it’s critical for them to make it easier to build a Paloma Pigeon and Paloma Compass that is landing on a Cosmos chain through IBC. Taariq says:
The host says that NFT is now a base module. Anyone can have an NFT that originated on Paloma, but is now substantiated on Open Sea on Ethereum and also possibly on Solana and Magic Eden. Having a base module for NFT and Paloma now allows people to do Paloma cross-chain NFT execution. Users’ NFTs can now go wherever they want them to go. He acknowledges that they don’t talk about it enough, because they’re still trying to get Paloma into production with some very basic gaps, but are very excited to bring up the NFT-type dApps as they continue to launch.
There have been some changes to the gov module for Paloma on Cosmos SDK v0.47.1, according to Taariq. Security is number one and he says being able to change proposal costs on the fly is important so that spamming can be prevented since people are spamming gov modules or gov proposals with spam proposals, and they usually do so when the proposals cost nothing to propose. With that functionality, draft proposals can now be presented, which means users can even raise the cost of submitting a proposal but leave the cost of creating draft proposals cheap or close to zero so that people can separate the noise from what is important or what is a priority. Next is minimum proposal deposits, which allow users to now set an upgrade minimum proposal policy by the governance. Another feature to limit people lowering validator commission fees to acquire stakes to hijack votes then is minimum commissions. It’s a patch, but every validator coming on the new Paloma mainnet will be required and will have a 5% minimum commission, which means one cannot charge less than 5% minimum commission on the Paloma chain. There are a lot of feature changes, updates, logging, and fixes to Pigeon as well in terms of scheduling. Also, Python SDK and JavaScript SDK are upgraded. Taariq says:
Taariq thanks the entire Paloma community and says that they recently did a testnet upgrade, which is now live and functioning. They’re currently testing bots and he says Paloma can be considered the bot chain. They have successfully sent messages, received transactions, query transactions, query state, create cosmo contracts, instantiated contracts, run contracts, deploy chains to target testnet, and deploy to target chains and run under those target chains. These are all functioning on the testnet and the releases available are also announced including a governance proposal to upgrade Paloma mainnet. On Monday at 4:00 PM Universal time, there will be a chain halt and upgrade of the mainnet validator.
Taariq also says that mainnet is coming on 1.0 and they will be deploying to Ethereum and BNB chain. Right now they’re in Polygon and BNB chain on testnet, but for mainnet, they’re expecting to deploy to Ethereum. As for the validator set updates, Taariq shares that those will be covered by the Volume team for now. He says:
Wrapping up the show, Taariq shares that after mainnet, they will be demonstrating their bots and they’ll be encouraging folks to build their own. He also says that they will be making AI smart and AI-friendly bots, and next week’s AMA will cover generative AI and generative AI bots. Taariq says there are a lot more coming up so there will be a lot to look out for. He also shares that they are the first testnet on Cosmos SDK 47 and in a few days will be the first on mainnet, which means they are the tip of the Cosmos spear.
With that, the host thanked Vera for joining him and everyone who tuned in to this week’s AMA.
Stay tuned for next week’s AMA!
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