After PegNet launched in 2019-2020, it was clear that the market became very excited about an open-source, oracle-based trading network of stablecoins. When PegNet first came online, it was ahead of its time. Since then, despite what has been slow development in the past few quarters, the potential of PegNet is still alive and well! 

The next phase of PegNet has the potential to be the best phase of PegNet ever with plans for new resources through the help of Accumulate, which will enable PegNet to realize its potential.

Rooted in identity and key management, Accumulate is a universal, interconnected protocol that works interoperably across Web 2 and Web 3 addresses from layer 1 blockchains, to enterprise tech stacks, to websites. 

The future with PegNet using Accumulate resources is bright. Accumulate plans to come to the market with unique capabilities, capacity, and use cases, some of which will be explained in this blog post. Furthermore, Inveniam, the parent company of one of Accumulate’s many community development organizations, DeFi Devs, intends to use PegNet due to the high conversion volume. Conversions on PegNet are similar to transactions on other networks, but conversions are minted and burned without the involvement of a counterparty. There is no buyer and seller, only interaction with the protocol, which has unlimited liquidity. This is promising given the vast resources of Inveniam. 

Please note this development roadmap is tentative and subject to change and/or be fully revised. 

This article focuses on: 

• What is PegNet?
  • Main Benefits of PegNet
    • Stablecoins
    • Cheap Transactions and Gas
    • High Volume, Low Fees
• How Accumulate Will Help PegNet Reach Its Full Potential
• Other Updates Relevant to PegNet 
• Conclusion 

What is PegNet?

Built on Factom, PegNet is an oracle-based, decentralized trading network of stablecoins pegged to over 42 digital assets. This includes traditional digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also digital assets that are pegged to commodities such as gold. Fiat price stabilization on PegNet relies on miner-submitted data that is collected from APIs and oracles.

Main Benefits of PegNet: 

• Stablecoins: PegNet has more variety in stablecoins than any other system in the world that covers stablecoins, from the USD, to EURO, to the Pound. Oracle-based systems deliver a lot more variety than a traditional stable-coin based system. 
• High Volume, Low Gas Fees, Cheap Conversions: Not only are the fees tiny, but also there is no slippage from a traditional order book as the user is doing the conversions within their own wallet and referencing the oracle prices published by miners in the next block. Additionally, in a world of high gas fees, PegNet is just a tenth of a penny. It’s not dollars upon dollars for every conversion. 

How Accumulate Will Help PegNet Reach Its Full Potential

You may be wondering, “What is Happening Now?” Currently, PegNet is in the process of handing over access to key platform features to Accumulate such as the Explorer, pTrader, and the Bridge. 

Furthermore, our developers are looking to make Accumulate very easy to understand, so this pedagogical foundation will be extended to PegNet. The main goal of this relationship between DeFi Devs and PegNet is to avoid having PegNet use its own resources to build architecture, but rather get those resources from DeFi Devs. 

Accumulate makes everything simpler so that building the PegNet infrastructure no longer has to run on a valid PegNet daemon in order to validate transactions or to validate oracle data that is being used. More information on the PegNet daemon can be found here. The simplicity is due to Accumulate’s architecture. On Accumulate, everything is organized around Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs) because identities make Accumulate scalable and efficient.

Updates 

Although this list and exact features are subject to change, several key aspects of how Accumulate will help PegNet Reach its full potential include: 

• Scratch Space 
• pWallet 
• pTrader 
• Addition of PegNet Validators 
• New Mining Token 
• Robust DEX

Scratch Space: Accumulate has created an intermediate data mechanism called Scratch Space, which records “discussions” to a transient blockchain and submits conclusions once a permanent consensus is reached. These Scratch Spaces collect data for consensus building across Accumulate allowing for multisig transactions. At this point, users typically don’t use multisig capabilities in day-to-day operations except exchanges. Accumulate aims to bring multisig capabilities to the mainstream. The Scratch Space enables on-chain communication between parties. This will allow faster block times, more security, and scalability for PegNet on the Accumulate blockchain. 

pWallet: Originally this was created as a test wallet for Apple iOS that didn’t get much development. There are currently no plans to continue developing this product. 

pTrader: A PegNet trading tool that has the potential to simplify trading through automation. pTrader can allow you to trade using helpful bots, stunning visualizations, and top-level security. pTrader includes advanced trading tools such as an integration with TradingView. This integration allowed the tens of millions of TradingView users to participate in low-fee transactions between stable assets, crypto assets, and precious metals for a fraction of a penny. 

Addition of PegNet Validators: One of the most interesting things is that Accumulate will manage multisig on-chain, meaning Accumulate can collect signatures on-chain, then promote the transaction to the main chain once the threshold is met. An idea for PegNet is to organize the network around validators who run the daemons. The validators will indicate what oracle records need to be promoted, or what conversion records need to be done. Then, those transactions will result in Accumulate-native ACME tokens. All the pAssets like pUSD, pETH, and pLTC will be usable and supported in Accumulate wallets, including PEG (and the extra token will be introduced for PegNet to work).

The data that we put onto the blockchain will be readable and understandable from the Accumulate Explorer. This makes it unnecessary to have a separate PegNet wallet, explorer, or infrastructure, and instead, it can use the Accumulate infrastructure. Dashboards and interfaces are still needed for conversions using the standard Accumulate wallets. Community developers of Accumulate are contemplating ways to accomplish this so PegNet conversions can occur using the standard Accumulate Wallets. 

New Mining Token: Another point of this is to create a new mining token that is a limited supply token and open up for/ to full conversions of the PEG token, and use PEG staking to earn the limited supply token so that there is a place to stash it and keep its value. People will be able to purchase this limited supply token as opposed to just having liquidity. There will be a reason to hold it beyond just liquidity, but the aim is to have full liquidity. 

Robust DEX: There are plans for a robust DEX that allows trading between Accumulate assets whether the assets are NFTs or tokens. The Accumulate architecture makes it simple to maintain order books because Scratch Chains prune out the blockchain while the Scratch Chains allow for a lower cost of orders between parties. Scratch Chains can maintain order books at low cost between parties and create the signatures that transfer the tokens which make for simpler posting and execution of trades. More information on this will come soon. 

Bridge: Users want to be able to move between Ethereum and PegNet. The existing contract on the Ethereum side will still work, however, Accumulate will have to rebuild the Factom side. 

Other Updates Relevant to PegNet 

As an open-source team that was ahead of its time, PegNet’s next chapter can sincerely benefit from the resources of Accumulate and its developers. It will bring scalability, bridges, and some other new features that need more resources.

Additional considerations that are relevant to PegNet’s Future include: 

• Software Developers 
• Conversion 
• Staking 
• Rollups 
• Block Settlement Time 
• Synthetic Asset or Stable Coin 

Software Developers: Accumulate’s developers can add software development resources that were missing from PegNet’s development. The main priority is to recruit top-level developers in addition to a strong core team that has been building this architecture since the Summer of 2021. PegNet plans to run as a more traditional application with Accumulate handling all of the digital identity capabilities. It’s going to be a huge improvement that we’re validating things and putting them on the chain and that will simplify the code quite a bit. It will be a ground-up rewrite done in the hands of top-level developers that are in the Accumulate community. 

Conversion: PegNet is running but it will stop running when we do the conversion because it won’t move over onto Accumulate without some TLC. There’s no reason to get into the sneaky mess of code to convert it to Accumulate when there are so many changes that need to be happening on PegNet. The intention is to make it a clean break from the past. 

Staking: Staking was pushed and implemented, and it works to an extent. Delegated staking did not get pushed. It was coded but there wasn’t a robust way to test it. It would be ideal to be pointing at confident stakers instead of having to have a massive set of highly sophisticated validators. 

Rollups: Accumulate has the data platform to complete rollups and it can run solidity smart contracts just like Ethereum 2.0. Accumulate can be Ethereum-Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible and do ETH rollups. Many developers still want to use their solidity contracts, because everybody wants something they can run existing code on and EVM compatibility is a path for Accumulate to do so. ETH 2.0 is moving to a data layer where smart contracts run on layer 2. However, they are taking a route where they are maintaining compatibility with the past. 

Accumulate has the only on-chain mechanism that acts like a DocuSign for voting, distributed decision making. We will begin to do integrations not just for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, but also stakeholders in those protocols to work together to make decisions who may otherwise go somewhere. Accumulate will integrate with these protocols but also between the protocols. This delivers a massive market advantage. 

Block Settlement Time: Accumulate’s block settlement time is 1 second. Then we refactor the block every 12 hours, so for the historical record there are about 600 blocks to have a year’s history, but in real-time, for 2 weeks there are 1 second block times. Since there’s coordination between other chains and Accumulate, the true settlement is estimated between 3 seconds and 6 seconds. More testing is needed to fully determine these numbers, and this is a massive improvement. Before this, PegNet was using the ten-minute block settlement time standard, and one day we dreamed of one-minute marks significantly improving the speed of the chain. A lot of PegNet’s existing code is based on the presumption of slower blocks, so whatever is time-based will need to be updated based on new, faster block times. 

Synthetic Asset or Stable Coin: PegNet neither has stablecoins or synthetic assets, it has something no one has considered before. PegNet is a liquidity platform that rewards people for providing liquidity on exchanges. The way they provide liquidity creates values that track targets in the real world. That’s not the way stablecoins or synthetic assets work. 

In Conclusion 

Soon after PegNet’s launch, the market made the demand clear for an oracle-based, open-source trading network. However, despite being ahead of its time, PegNet operated with very limited resources which slowed down the development and progress of the network. Now, with the resources of Accumulate’s community development team, PegNet plans to come to market with more firepower than ever before with expanded use cases and a wider range of capabilities. Please note this development roadmap is tentative and subject to change.  

Further Reading 

Ready Trader One by David A. Johnston 

100 Times The Hash Power = 100 Times The Security by David A Johnston 

PegNet is Bitcoin Among Stablecoins by Kristine Thomassen