I want to point out that the mainnet of MAP protocol is in a blockchain trilemma.
The MAP protocol team avoids answering my previous forums with “because it is testnet now.”
Recently, the mainnet of the MAP protocol launched.
But there are some serious problems.
In short, I want to say ‘MAP protocol is in a blockchain trilemma.’
I will provide a summary of the situation.
There are only 16 validators now.
There are no light clients.
16 validators ‘create’ blocks in the sequence.
Is the mainnet of MAP permissioned blockchain?
→ Then it is not truly decentralized. I remember the slogan of MAP was truly decentralized cross-chain. In my previous forum(We want to know the reason of slogan changed - #2 by admin), MAP team answered that ’ MAP Protocol was, is and will continue to be truly decentralized.’
Is the mainnet of MAP permissionless blockchain?
→ Then it has serious security problems.
There is only 16,000,000 MAP for validators (1,000,000MAP * 16). It means only 8,000,000 MAP can make the network ‘pending all day’ or only 24,000,000 MAP can ‘destroy’ the network. You can answer about ‘voting’ but users have not enough information about validators and they will act for their own profit, so voting will go balanced. No one wants to lose their own profit to voting Ankr with all users.
Epochs are too long. Fixed validators, even maximum 100, for 3 days? It is really a weak point. MAP needs more validators or shorter epochs.
100 validators? Still insecure! Only 34,000,000 MAP can make the network ‘pending all day’ or only 67,000,000 MAP(=928,754 usd) can ‘destroy’ the network.
Additionally, there is not enough explanation about voting and creating blocks in documents. The MAP team needs to explain it well to users. Many users are curious about the sequence of block creation.
Thanks for reading, I hope to get team’s honest and clear answer.
The Mainnet of MAP is a permissionless blockchain.
When rewarding MAP Validators, the activity of a validator is taken into account. The Validators and corresponding Voters which participate in the voting will share more rewards. Through this design, it incentivize Voters to vote for the Validators with higher participation.
Since MAP’s Mainnet has just been launched, the number of Validators and the amount of $MAP staked in the network is still far from ideal. The MAP team is actively reaching out to more validator service providers, and more validators will be onboarded in the near future. We also hope that users will actively participate in voting, together we will make the MAP Mainnet, the relay chain, more secure.
Generally, the epoch of a PoS network ranges from 1 to 7 days. On MAP chain, each epoch update will update the epoch information to each blockchain’s corresponding MAP light client. Considering the gas fee consumption and the update needs, 3 days is considered a more suitable time, as new updates can be done relatively quickly, also taking into consideration the update frequency of the MAP’s light clients.
The number of validators is not an absolute indicator of the decentralization of a blockchain. As reference, Polkadot chain currently has 300 validators and Cosmos chain has 175 validators. The MAP relay chain will continue to increase the number of validators in the future according to the progress of the MAP network.
I think the answer can help for avoiding non-active validators but not for malicious validators.
This is really a problem. Many users have their own ‘money’ in the network but the network is insecure yet. MAP needs to move fast to prevent attacks. Why are there no light clients yet?
For fixed 16 validators, I think 3 days are too long. Adversaries can mass the network by attacking 6 validators in 3 days. + Same 16 validators in the next epoch. This is really horrible.
They have their own solutions for small validators. Map has no solution now. Permissionless blockchains need solutions. I think light clients are serviced ASAP.