Cobalt Alloy

With the Cobalt Alloy upgrade we're concluding the 2021 roadmap. Cobalt was been the first major upgrade of LTO Network since the launch of our Mainnet. It enabled it to be used as identity platform.

Cobalt Alloy adds two transaction types that improve DIDs on LTO; register transactions and data transactions.

Register Transaction

Any account on the LTO Network can be used as a DID. To resolve to a DID document, the public key of the account needs to be known. This can be done by doing a transaction on the network.

In some cases the requirement to do a transaction to register your public key isn't convenient. You may only have the public and not the private key or you want to register in bulk. For these cases we have introduced the 'register transaction' type.

These kind of transactions take an array of public keys, which are broadcast through the network. The indexer service will pick up these transaction and index the public keys.

Data Transaction

Initially, LTO Network used data transactions for anchoring. Data transactions allow an account to store metadata, which can be fetched through the node API and is made available for smart accounts.

Short after genesis, we decided to deactivate this transaction type. We had decided that it is unnecessarily complex when used for anchoring. To replace it, we introduced anchor transactions.

With Cobalt Alloy, we're reactivating data transactions. Not to be used for anchoring, but intended for configuring services of DIDs.

Network upgrade

Mainnet

The voting round is 10000 blocks. In order to pass it need through, it needs 80% or more of the votes. The voting round starts on Friday 25th of Feb at 7:00AM CET and will last approximately a week.

The vote will be for the following:

• Compatibility fix for ECDSA (secp256r1 and secp256k1)
• Register Transaction
• Data Transaction

If you're running a node, please update to v1.5.1. Here is the simple step-by-step guide:

First, add feature vote to docker-compose.yml:

– LTO_FEATURES=14

Pull the latest or v1.5 image and restart node:

docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

Testnet (completed)

The voting round on testnet is 6000 blocks. In order to pass through, it needs 66% or more of the votes.

The Cobalt Alloy upgrade will progress to the mainnet following extensive testing on testnet. At the earliest, this will happen at block 1,620,000.