First Koinos System Upgrade!
Today, Koinos achieved a major milestone. The first governance proposal was applied to upgrade the VHP contract. In case this is the first you're hearing about it, here's some quick facts:
- There was a bug in the VHP contract that would allow someone to mint new tokens by sending them to their own address
- No one took advantage of the exploit on mainnet
- The bug was fixed in a closed-source governance proposal by The Koinos Group
- The proposal was successfully passed and applied today
- Following this, the source code and nature of the bug were revealed
This was a fantastic example of how high quality this community is. The developer who found the bug, Roamin, didn't take advantage of the exploit and showed excellent discretion by talking to The Koinos Group. The Koinos Group was able to leverage the trust they've built with the community to get enough support for the proposal to pass even though it was closed source.
The actual upgrade process was dead simple. On any other blockchain infrastructure, this would have been a fairly arduous process with a lot of human coordination. On Koinos, all they had to do was upload a new smart contract, call the governance contract to submit the proposal, and then wait. To vote for the proposal, block producers only needed to update a configuration file on their nodes.
This would have been a hard fork that required miners to upgrade and restart their software on other chains. Koinos was able to handle it without a moment of downtime.
Bugs are never a good thing, but this one was handled extremely well. Koinos was designed to handle upgrades. People aren't perfect, so our systems shouldn't assume we are.
-Luke
P.S. Governance is usually fraught with drama, but this was really boring. I kept forgetting when the proposal would be applied because there was literally nothing I had to do.