Deprecating Altair Chain

Altair Governance
1

Short Summary

This proposal discusses the deprecation of the Altair Chain, Centrifuge’s canary network on Kusama, in light of Centrifuge’s strategic migration to Ethereum and other EVM-based chains

High level objective

The objective of this proposal is to streamline Centrifuge’s operations by phasing out the Altair Chain, allowing the protocol to focus resources on growing protocol adoption, TVL and revenue for Centrifuge V3.

Background

Altair served as Centrifuge’s canary network on the Kusama ecosystem, enabling experimentation with exploratory features before their deployment on the Centrifuge Chain. Historically, Altair played a role in testing and refining features.

However, recent strategic shifts, including Centrifuge’s migration to the Ethereum
Mainnet (CP149) and the development of Centrifuge V3 as a multi-chain, EVM-based protocol (CP141), have reduced the need for a separate canary network. Maintaining Altair requires significant costs for maintaining infrastructure and developer resources for upgrades, such as runtime upgrades and compatibility with Kusama|Polkadot’s Substrate framework, which is no longer aligned with Centrifuge’s roadmap. Additionally, there is limited developer capacity to support ongoing Altair upgrades. Due to these factors, there is no use-case for maintaining the chain.

Description of Activity

This proposal seeks community feedback on deprecating the Altair Chain, which would effectively cease its operation and maintenance.

A 14-day period of public discussion will be initiated to determine the potential future of the Altair Network. During this time:

  1. Parties interested in assuming responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and development of Altair Chain and in defining a renewed purpose for the network are invited to submit a proposal.
  2. If no formal ownership or proposals are presented within the 14-day window, the process to deprecate the Altair Network will commence.

The deprecation would involve:

  • Community Communication: Informing Altair users, Exchanges, Collators, and AIR token holders about the deprecation timeline.
  • The k/factory team will work on a runtime upgrade for the Altair chain, which will formally shut it down.

Assuming this passes, we would initiate communication immediately and formally shut it down in Q3-Q4 of this year.

Change or improvement

  • Deprecating Altair Chain
3 Likes
2

It makes sense to deprecate the Altair chain for the reasons shared. I’ll personally be surprised if anyone / any party wants to take over managing it.

However, I have deep concerns about what becomes of the AIR token. There are many people / groups who have invested into the token for a variety of reasons.

What do you foresee becoming of the AIR token @jeroen?

I’ll share this RFC which I posted months ago about the topic.

If the Altair chain is set to be deprecated, it is only fair we come up with a reasonable plan for AIR token holders to migrate their tokens to EVM as CFG with a respectable exchange rate.

3 Likes
3

Thanks for the comment! This should be a separate discussion. I would propose you take the RFC you had started and submit this as a formal governance post to Centrifuge governance, to make a decision.

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4

Honestly, I don’t feel comfortable doing this. At least not without some assistance.

  1. I’ve never submitted a proposal.
  2. Any proposal submitted should be well thought out (especially this one that involves an exchange ratio) so that it has a good chance of being both fair and passing.

Is this something you would be interested in working together on @jeroen?

For that matter, anyone else interested?

5

Good day @TheMarcus :waving_hand:
The GCG (Governance and Coordination Group) is here to guide you through the Centrifuge Governance Process and direct you to the appropriate proposal type.

The process itself is extremely clear. Even if you don’t have a governance background, you can use the ready-made template and fill in the requested information.

Side note:
If your proposal is technical and requires immediate onchain modifications (like minting or changing supply), the RFC stage should be followed by onchain voting after 14 days. If it’s not technical, then after the RFC stage, it proceeds to off-chain snapshot voting instead.

You can run a temperature check at any time on an Opensquare snapshot to see if your proposal has sufficient support.

Since you are suggesting a significant change to Centrifuge’s tokenomics, I highly recommend that you ensure that CFG token holders support it.

If you have any other questions regarding CFG Governance process, feel free to DM me anytime. I’m available on the Forum, Telegram, and Slack.

2 Likes
6

Hello,

the proposal makes sense given the migration of Centrifuge to EVM and abandoning its own chain. However, from the Altair collator perspective, there is 100,000 AIR bond required for all collators to be in place in order to keep the chain alive. The problem is that AIR token will face delisting and price drop once the decommission of the chain is publicly announced - and if collators will become one of the last AIR holders (as collators leaving the chain can be one of the last transactions), we can very well end up in a situation where we hold 100k AIR forever as there will be nowhere to sell.

This seems a bit unfair given the fact that we have supported Altair and Centrifuge the whole time so there might be two solutions as I see it

  1. Give collators a chance to leave chain sooner (maybe even once the proposal is passed) and let it run solely by the team who still has 3 collators (enough to maintain liveness)
  2. We can stay until the very end but it would be nice to get some sort of reimbursement (maybe in the form of CFG or USDC) for the service provided

I wonder what the team thinks? Thanks for considering my thoughts :slight_smile:

2 Likes
7

I like your thoughts, @pmensik. Thanks for sharing.

My thinking is option 2 makes the most sense, simply because going with option 1 means it will be a race by collators to dump their AIR on the few remaining markets causing a deep decline in the price of AIR. Those who dump early will get out “ahead” while those who lag will suffer greatly. Not a great thing for a unified community who has worked together to secure the Altair chain.

Interestingly, I see we are now down from 10 to 9 community run collators as Lucky Friday (CC: @LuckyFridayMark) has ceased their Altair operations and presumably sold their bonded AIR tokens already. So in a way the race to the bottom has already begun, sadly. :roll_eyes:

I’m working with Grok right now to create a new RFC for an AIR to CFG Token Swap. One that is fair and equitable and hopefully something that can be agreed upon by all and passed with a formal proposal.

Stay tuned!

3 Likes
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A new RFC for an AIR to CFG token swap has been created. You may view it and comment here:

1 Like
9

I think it’s reasonable for collators to go with option 2 start unbonding sooner.

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@jeroen - So you mean option 1 per @pmensik’s comment?

Do you suggest we begin unbonding now?

1 Like
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I miswrote, meant option 1 yes.

2 Likes
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Good day there!

The Collators’ rewards should be claimed manually. This is a reminder of how to claim them:"

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  1. Go to Centrifuge chain → Extrinsics : Polkadot/Substrate Portal
  2. Select “Blockrewards.”
  3. Choose “ClaimRewards.”
  4. Select the account that was used for submitting the Collator Key. Please note that only whitelisted wallet addresses are eligible for claiming rewards.
  5. Sign the transaction.

If everything is done correctly, you will receive your rewards. You can refer to the example screenshot for assistance.

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I see another collator has abandoned ship. :frowning:

Polkadotters is no longer with us. A true race to the bottom.

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In my point of view team made quite clear that Altair collators should abandon the ship so we unfortunately did.

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Yes, eventually. But in an orderly fashion. :confused: