Making History: Launching the Nodle Parachain

4 min readMar 16, 2022

On Thursday, March 10, 2022, the Nodle Network was able to secure a parachain slot on the Polkadot relay chain thanks to the incredible support of our community, which locked the equivalent of $42 million for the next 96 weeks. Then, the very next day, the Nodle Parachain successfully booted and created its first blocks.

Until now, the Nodle Solo-Chain (referred to as Nodle Chain) had always been at the core of the Nodle Network. One of the first Substrate chains to launch into production after being created almost 2 years ago, it became the backbone of our incentivization system. Now that our Parachain has launched, maintaining the Solo-Chain is no longer necessary, so we will migrate its state, along with all users’ balances, to the Parachain and then let it disappear. Once this process is complete, the Parachain will be fully launched and the Nodle Network will have transitioned completely to its new form.

Step 1: Compute Rewards

In order to fully execute the transition in one operation, we will first prepare one of its most significant dependencies: reward allocations. Indeed, supporters of the Nodle Crowdloan are expecting a certain amount of Nodle Cash as compensation for the opportunity cost of supporting us. Doing this will involve sourcing contributions and referral data from three sources, namely our liquidity providers Parallel and BiFrost, as well as Polkadot itself. Once this is done, we will compute how much each supporter will be gifted and prepare a script accordingly.

Step 2: Migrate the State

Once the rewards requirements are clear and all the scripts are ready, we can start to migrate the state of the Solo-Chain to the Parachain. To do this, we will have to voluntarily stop the Solo-Chain in order to prevent its state from changing, which will be doable thanks to current validators still being controlled by Nodle. At that time, we will stop the validators from accepting new transactions or producing new blocks. We will then copy the state of the Solo-Chain and inject it within the Parachain. This means every users’ balance and allocations will be copied to and fully usable on the Parachain.

We will also have to temporarily suspend some services within the Nodle infrastructure before restarting them on the Parachain. For instance, reward allocations could be delayed slightly on the day of the migration.

Step 3: Allocate Rewards

Once the Parachain is fully operational, we will be able to allocate the Nodle Cash tokens and the NodleX decentralization NFT to all the participants of the crowdloan. This process, which we anticipate will take around 1 to 2 months, will be relatively straightforward, with contributors seeing a corresponding transfer of Nodle Cash to their account with a vesting schedule attached to it.

Consequences

The migration itself should have minimal negative effects thanks to what should be a very limited and controlled downtime. Most importantly, everybody’s balance and coins will be perfectly safe and usable on the Parachain, as the Solo-Chain being stopped after the migration won’t create any conflicts.

The one downside to this migration will be the transaction history for each early user will not be kept, as the Parachain is essentially a new blockchain with its own genesis block and history. This means that once all the steps have been completed, you will no longer be able to see and explore past transactions from before the Parachain launch.

Conclusion

Acquiring this Parachain slot for the next 96 weeks is the conclusion of around 2 years of work for our team and we are beyond excited about it. However, it represents only another milestone for us. Once the launch and migration are fully complete we look forward to delivering more items on our roadmap such as a Ledger Hardware Wallet integration, a new web wallet, and even more decentralization for the network.

About Nodle

Nodle is a decentralized wireless network that provides secure and low-cost connectivity, as well as data liquidity, to connect billions of devices worldwide. The Nodle network is powered by millions of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones that earn Nodle Cash (NODL). Nodle’s powerful stack allows multiple uses including connecting and securing physical assets, tracking lost or valuable items, capturing sensor data, and authenticating security certificates. Nodle provides insights for consumer electronics manufacturers, enterprises, smart cities, the finance industry and more. Since its creation in 2017, Nodle has become one of the world’s largest wireless networks by number of base stations. Join #TheCitizenNetwork by downloading the Nodle Cash app for iOS or Android.

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