Preliminary

This proposal is being submitted by the CertiK Foundation to upgrade the CertiK Chain to Stargate, a set of upgrades bringing much improved blockchain performance, faster state sync, full-featured light clients, and most notably the ability to interconnect with other Cosmos SDK chains using Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC). If passed, this proposal would commit the CertiK Chain to halting shentu-1 at height 4313500, exporting and migrating the chain state, and finally starting shentu-2 based on binary CertiK [v2.0.0](https://github.com/certikfoundation/shentu/releases/tag/v2.0.0) (commit hash: 73aef0cf202c6107b4fc3fcfe803a83196d327d4).

Context

On 2020.1024.1024 a revolutionary vision took light after years of extensive research and development. A journey to deliver a product suite unlike anything before finally had the foundation for its pathway. On that day the CertiK Chain was successfully launched thanks to the resilient effort by everyone in the CertiK community. Collectively we made a heavy mark in history to be remembered as a groundbreaking turning point for blockchain security, and looked back upon as a fleeting ambition.

Today as a growing number of traditional sectors are being exposed to cryptosphere, the blockchain industry is finally ripe for opportunistic views from defining new financial standpoints. From DeFi, NFTs, and even social/environmental impact platforms, this industry will continue to grow reliant on web3 and the security aspects of what they entail. In support of the web3 vision, the idea of shentu-2 was conceived.

shentu-2, based on the Stargate release of the Cosmos SDK, delivers a plethora of improvements and features:

Improvements

Chain Size Reduction

The current chain size of shentu-1 has well exceeded 100GB, posing serious concerns about disk space and bandwidth for many node operators and service providers. During test runs of the genesis migration in shentu-2 we have been able to see on average a 90% reduction in chain size.

Protobuf Migration

Coming in the Stargate release Protobuf is replacing Amino to deliver a revolutionary upgrade in state encoding/decoding, transaction throughput (10x-100x) and gas costs. Most importantly, Protobuf brings much improved reliability, composability and general UX for clients across the stack.

Faster State Sync

One of the biggest gripes the node operators have had with shentu-1 is notably the slow sync speed when synchronizing a new node. The initial catchup from scratch typically takes days, sometimes weeks, imposing a heavy burden on newcomers looking to join the network, or nodes that need to be replaced or migrated. With the new State Sync feature introduced in Stargate, new nodes can be up and running in just a few minutes.

Features

InterBlockchain Communication (IBC)

One of the existing features this upgrade brings is compatibility with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. In short, through direct linking of two independent Tendermint-based chains IBC enables the connected chains to securely and trustlessly exchange data and token value. Moreover, leveraging IBC CTK tokens can be traded on IBC-enabled AMMs (e.g. Osmosis, Gravity Dex) with other IBC-enabled assets. It is our strong belief that being IBC compatible is going to bring further attention and community development to the CertiK Chain, as well as enabling integrations of the invaluable innovations the Cosmos ecosystem has to offer.

Full eWasm Support

Following our work in shentu-1 ****on adding eWASM support in the CirtiK Virtual Machine (CVM), we are proud to announce that with this upgrade full eWASM support is now available in the CVM. This is an important step in our journey to establishing smart contract and blockchain security as runtime values in VM execution while being compatible with various different blockchain semantics.

Automatic Chain Upgrades