From Canary to Mainnet: cACU to ACU Conversion
Since the inception of Acurast, it was clear to the main contributor team that the only way a decentralized network can thrive and deliver on its promise is with a strong community. As the Acurast community is growing and able to provide unprecedented amounts of compute for a decentralized compute network, it’s important to not forget all the early community members who participated in the network from early on.
“Thus we see that the diffusion of innovations is a social process, even more than a technical matter.” – Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers
As per the law of diffusion, groundbreaking innovations such as Acurast are only able to reach a state of mass adoption if early adopters can act as a bridge between innovators and the majority.
That’s the reason why from the start, Acurast’s main contribution team decided to launch a fully operational Acurast Canary network back in September 13th, 2023, instead of building in the secret. With the launch of Canary a simple mechanic that would reward early adopters was introduced: the cACU Bootstrapping Campaign where a fixed amount of 250 cACU per active phone over a duration of a month was distributed in rewards. This simple incentive allowed the canary network to grow to an unexpected size of over 131,750 onboarded phones spread across the world.
Next Stop: Mainnet
As Acurast is getting ready to cross the chasm on its way to mass adoption, the next big milestone is the Acurast Mainnet launch. In the past couple of weeks some major milestones, relevant for that launch were communicated and launched on Acurast Canary, such as:
Benchmark based rewards, sunsetting the Bootstrapping Campaign moving to a fairer system where the hardware is benchmarked with a unified score, distributing rewards based on that score, also on mainnet.
Staked compute, further securing the reliability of the offered decentralized compute.
However, one long-awaited and very important mechanic was not communicated yet: How will users be able to convert their Acurast Canary cACU to Acurast Mainnet ACU?
While the question is simple, the definition of the conversion mechanism was quite challenging. The launch of the mainnet is a pivotal moment for this technology on its path to mass adoption, getting the definition of incentives wrong, including this specific conversion mechanism, can lead to a slowdown in its adoption.
Like in the classic prisoner’s dilemma, when participants act unfairly or pursue short-term advantage, the system breaks down and everyone ends up worse off. Our simulations showed this dynamic repeatedly, with unbalanced decisions leading to collective losses. To address this, the main contributor team developed a simple conversion mechanism that aligns incentives and ensures all participants benefit together.
Acurast Canary cACU to Acurast Mainnet ACU conversion
The conversion rate is decided by you; we are excited to announce that the default is a 1:1 conversion from cACU to ACU, effectively giving early adopters a big upside and head start for the coming Acurast Mainnet launch, as it should be.
Acurast’s mission is long-term and the protocol should reward those that align with it, thus the reward are dependent on the future commitment of the user. The default commitment is a lock of 48 conversion cycles, which is measured in blocks, translating roughly to 3.7 calendar years.
Users can decide to commit for shorter amount of time, with 3 cycles being the shortest possible commitment. In that case, the conversion is adapted linearly, weighted by the commitment time. This means if people commit for 24 cycles, translating to half of the maximum commitment, 50% of the tokens will be released to the user after the locking period has expired, while the other 50% will flow back to the Community Treasury.
The conversion is enabled on Acurast Canary and will be active for 90 days after the conversion mechanism has been released. After this date, cACU will no longer be convertible with this mechanic.
How it works
The conversion can be performed by every cACU holder once on the Acurast Hub, also cACU tokens already participating in Staked Compute on Acurast Canary can be converted.
Through the conversion, the cACU tokens will be burned on Acurast Canary and assigned on Acurast Mainnet as ACU.
On Acurast Mainnet the conversion lock can be set once.
During the lock, the tokens will not be transferrable.
However they will be able to be used for Staked Compute for both commitments and delegations and hence also participation in on-chain Governance.
The allocation required for the conversion will come from the “Community Activation” portion of the genesis block. The activation of the Conversion mechanism will be available soon.