Today the long awaited Phase4 of Gulden’s PoW2 roll out activated. Along with a greatly improved chain efficiency and new features the update also increased the rewards for those running witness accounts.

Compounding of Earnings 

Option to automatically add the rewards you receive for being a witness to the existing locked balance of your witness account, this added amount increases your witness account weighting as if it were there from the accounts creation.

Optimise your Account

The User Interface is providing a convenient single and simple to use method to perform split/merge for you as appropriate without having to worry about the details yourself.

The wallet software will automatically look for the best results. So if you put 1 million Gulden in a witness account for 3 years, the wallet software will automatically divide that account into 4 chunks of 250k. If after that the network weight changes a lot over time the button “optimize” will become visible in your account. By pressing this button all parts of your witness account will be merged again and a new optimal distribution will be calculated and set.

Extend your Account

Add more time and/or amount to an already locked account (restrictions apply)

Rotate

You can change your witnessing key, for example in case you given it to a service like G-dash and don’t want that anymore, or have reason to believe your witnessing device was hacked, etc.

Higher Rewards

Due to the decision to change the blockreward, witnesses will receive 30nlg reward in phase4, instead of the 20nlg one would receive in phase3. Community member Aat created a nice overview of what expected rewards will be when phase 4 starts (based on the current witness accounts statistics, which are subject to change).

Chain Optimizations 

As said, the Phase4 implemented a compleet new blockchain and finally introduced SegSig to Gulden.

Advantages of Segregated Signature – The 58% factor:

1. 58% space saving on all transactions.
2. 58% increased transaction throughput. No block size or frequency changes needed.
3. Combined with the planned project Epoch, users will be able to run Gulden nodes on the most modest hardware well into the future.
4. Overhaul to the transaction script system which allowed to implement PoW² and SegSig as clean as possible along with other benefits.

Gulden is now truly equipped for the future. It can stand heavy loads, being the industry’s leading chain on safety, robustness and energy efficiency. But as with all projects, there is always more to wish for. You can help, so meet with the us on Slack.

Thanks Malcolm, the complete dev team, our testers and our great community for this great piece of art!