The Peercoin Foundation today announced that the highly-anticipated hard fork of Peercoin is on track for 12:00:00 UTC, Monday, November 1, 2021 in a major technical upgrade that paves the way for a number of innovations to the Peercoin network.
Peercoin, the first green cryptocurrency and original inventor of proof-of-stake consensus, will build upon its v0.10 codebase through the release of v0.11 (codename Tardigrade) with a major change to the Peercoin network through the removal of the transaction timestamp. The hard fork was previously announced October 3, 2021.
The transaction timestamp was originally implemented in Peercoin by founder Sunny King. Its purpose was to allow for an easier way to handle coin age in the client. It is a unique part of Peercoin’s protocol which does not exist in Bitcoin. However, its inclusion back in 2012 consequently rendered Peercoin incompatible with a large number of tools, services, and infrastructure primarily developed for Bitcoin. Integrating Peercoin with these tools and services had required additional time and effort to be spent on complex workarounds to support the timestamp feature.
The removal of the transaction timestamp from the protocol will effectively eliminate Peercoin’s incompatibility issues. Once the protocol switches to v0.11, it will become much easier for developers to integrate with existing infrastructure such as Rosetta, Lightning Network, Atomic Swaps, DeFi, DEXes, and much more. This change will open up Peercoin to a number of new opportunities for future developments and integrations.
The global community of Peercoin developers is enthusiastically sharing its plans for some of the first integrations that the network will see following the v0.11 hard fork.
Coinbase initially developed Rosetta as the middleware used to integrate blockchains into its platform securely and seamlessly. Unified Rosetta interface makes it easier to ensure compatibility with exchanges that use Rosetta, and can dramatically speed up the time it takes exchanges to integrate with new blockchains. Overall, having such a tool ported to Peercoin will make integration of Peercoin in various services far easier.
Another important development will be the porting of LND (Lightning Network Daemon) to Peercoin. LND is by far the most popular software used with the Lightning Network.
Recently, Peercoin was reviewed by blockchain analyst group Quantum Economics which made the following conclusion: “In a world that is increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of Bitcoin, Peercoin offers an energy-efficient, sustainable store of value. Further, Peercoin’s Team is exploring ideas to improve Peercoin itself and integrate the coin with DeFi and decentralized exchange infrastructures. In addition, unlike some digital currencies, Peercoin has not been deemed a security, and it is legal in all global jurisdictions.” (Source: https://medium.com/quantum-economics/peercoin-8b80e360b6f3)
