After months of hard work, we’re excited to announce the official release of Creditcoin 2.0! The new Creditcoin protocol, built on Substrate, has delivered significant improvements to network performance, paving the way for real-world use through the newly released Credal API.

By publicly recording credit history, Creditcoin reduces information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders, helping to secure capital financing, build credit history, and facilitate trust for millions of underserved financial customers and businesses across emerging markets.

When we initially announced our move from Sawtooth Hyperledger, we told you that this migration would allow us to fulfill our ambition of creating an enterprise-grade blockchain capable of delivering loans to millions of people. With the completion of Creditcoin 2.0’s beta, we can say with confidence, our leap of faith paid off.

Creditcoin Founder, Tae Oh:

“The release of 2.0 marks a new beginning for Creditcoin. By laying a stronger foundation capable of delivering real-world performance, Creditcoin is now ready to integrate with credit partners around the world and deliver on our vision to improve emerging market finance. Our work doesn’t stop with Creditcoin 2.0, though. Far from it. We can now focus on realizing all of our goals for the RWA ecosystem. Of which the decentralized Gateway DAO bridge is just the next major step of many more to come.”

Creditcoin 2.0 (now 2.2) has been in beta since 23/03/2022 and has already become the world’s largest PoW blockchain built on Substrate (excluding parachains). To get you up to speed with what’s going on under the hood, we’ve provided a breakdown of all the significant technical changes, as well as some of the data on network performance in beta below.

Technical Changes

⛓️ Performance

The switch to Substrate has delivered major network performance improvements. During its time in beta, Creditcoin 2.0 has maintained consistent stability with over 1,000 active mining nodes over the last few months. In particular, the update has drastically improved our mining experience, making it easier than ever to join the Network and take part in the future of RWA. If you’re interested in setting up your own node, check out our miner’s manual here.

Whilst this may not seem like the most exciting change, the previous iteration of Creditcoin had us putting out fires, wasting valuable time and resources. By having a stable foundation, Creditcoin 2.0 will allow our engineering team to focus on building the things which really matter for Creditcoin.

💱 Command Family/Loan cycle

Creditcoin 2.0 introduces several new changes and improvements to the command family structure, in other words modifying the loan cycle structure. Most importantly, the new ‘Register Deal Order’ enables more efficient integration with credit platforms by reducing the minimum number of transactions required to complete a loan cycle. Effectively making it faster and cheaper to record loan portfolios on Creditcoin than ever before.

Other minor QoL command family revisions are designed to improve ecosystem functionality. These changes are predominantly naming updates and include ‘registerTransfer’ becoming `registerFundingTransfer` or `registerRepaymentTransfer` depending on intent of the transfer, and `closeDealOrder` becoming `fundDealOrder`.

💸 Transaction Fees

The new update also introduces major changes to the transaction fee structure: dynamically variable fees and (temporarily) transaction fee burning.

Variable Fees:

Whereas formerly all transactions had a fixed cost of 0.01 CTC, equating to roughly 0.1 CTC for a full loan cycle, the new fee structure will dynamically vary according to several factors including transaction computation costs, network load and more.

Different transaction types now have different base ‘weights’ from which transaction fees are calculated. These weights are calculated according to their relative computation cost. Generally speaking, the more ‘read’ and ‘writes’ a transaction needs to perform, the more expensive it is. You can view a breakdown of Creditcoin transaction weighting here.

To understand more about how fees are calculated on substrate read this. We’ll be publishing an in-depth article detailing exactly how transaction fees on Creditcoin 2.0 are calculated in the near future.

Transaction Fee Burning (Temporary):

The prior iteration of Creditcoin used time-locked transaction fees, meaning users’ CTC fees would be returned to them after one year. At the time of writing, CTC transaction fees are burnt by the network after use. This means once CTC is used in a transaction, it is permanently removed from circulation. In effect, this will create deflationary pressure on the total circulating CTC supply. Please note that this change is temporary, and that we will be reintroducing the time-lock, or some version of it, in a future update.

Release Notes:

For a full overview of all the changes made so far, you can view our Creditcoin Change logs available below. 👇

Creditcoin V2.0 — https://docs.creditcoin.org/creditcoin-change-log/version-2.0-2022-03-23

Creditcoin V2.1 — https://docs.creditcoin.org/creditcoin-change-log/version-2.1-2022-05-02

Creditcoin V2.2 — https://docs.creditcoin.org/creditcoin-change-log/version-2.2-2022-06-02

What this means moving forward

Our next major release is the new Creditcoin Block Explorer. At launch this will have all the same features as our previous Block Explorer. However, we have significant block explorer updates on the way, set to deliver unrivaled real-time ecosystem transparency.

You’ll be able to view not only overall ecosystem metrics, but partner specific loan book breakdowns including details such as current order book deal value, historic repayment rates, total credit provided and much much more. For now you can view the Creditcoin 2.0 blockchain on Polkadot’s generic explorer available here.

Creditcoin has always been about delivering real-world value. Now that Credal is operational and the Creditcoin blockchain is functioning well, we’re excited to start on the real work — integrating various credit platforms and providers directly with Creditcoin.

Tae Oh: “We appreciate the community for your patience on this journey. Let’s continue to build the future of RWA together.”