Since launch on December 3, 2019 The Hexican economy has paid tens of millions of dollars of Ethereum gas fees to proof-of-work ETH miners. A recent security upgrade to the Ethereum network suddenly made hex and many other smart contracts 160% more expensive to execute - for reasons only an advanced blockchain engineer, which I am not, would have meaningful opinions on. This is bullish for the price of hex in the same way that halvenings are bullish for the price of bitcoin. However, this drastically hinders users with balances under $1000 to utilize hex as a high growth savings product. To solve this problem of consumer financial smart contract users being priced out of using the blockchain, Richard Heart is launching Pulse Chain, a fork of the Ethereum network optimized for financial contracts.
Forks of blockchains happen when people want to enable new features or modify parameters to the original chain. Since the software that enables public blockchains such as bitcoin and ethereum is open source, anyone can copy it and do whatever they want with it. These battle tested networks serve as a strong foundation to experiment with new types of blockchain parameters and monetary policy.
Typically, a fork results in every holder of the original coin to get a comparable amount of the new fork coin. This is sometimes described as an "airdrop" or "free claim" and may require the user to publish a signature to the blockchain to mint the coins into their wallet. Some examples of previous forks are:
Pulse Chain is launching as a fork of the Ethereum network on a proof-of-stake chain. This means that you can use your same Ethereum wallet as your Pulse Chain wallet by simply updating one setting in the Metamask app, similar to how you can use Metamask for both Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.
"PULSE is to Pulse Chain as ETH is to Ethereum"
Pulse Chain is in early stages of development - no one knows when it will be live. Active planning discussion happens in public at t.me/pulsechaincom. You should have no expectations that any strict timeline is met and you should have no expectations that the people writing the code will listen to your input.
From information gathered in the Pulse Chain chat group, The supply of PULSE will be issued in two ways - a Free Claim for ETH Holders and through a "Multichain Sacrifice Contract."
ETH holders will get free Pulse simply for holding ETH in their own wallet on the snapshot date. This is to ensure that people who want to interact with the network will have enough PULSE to pay transaction fees. If it was anything like the Bitcoin Free Claim freemium during the hex launch, this will represent less than 5% of the supply.
The Multichain Sacrifice Contract will be a month long smart contract auction to reserve rights to the ability to mint a certain number of the initial PULSE supply. The Sacrifice Contract will accept a variety of coins: BTC, ETH, USDC, UNI, HEX, LINK, DOGE,ADA, BCH, and others. This list is not final.
The user experience for using the Sacrifice Contract will probably be similar to the hex launch contract.