“What we have delivered before are the sole guarantees of what we will provide in the future.”
Tamer Dagli, SINOVATE Founder, November 2020
Masternodes originated with the cryptocurrency DASH around 2014. Their invention was born of the need for trustless coin mixing. These special nodes stake an amount of coin to provide the privacy services for its users, and the collateralized nodes were born.
Decentralized governance and voting was also created, and masternode operators are able to cast votes on decisions regarding the future direction of the coin.
Additional utility was soon developed for masternodes. Since they are trustless and bound by protocol rules, masternodes can process transactions with zero confirmations.
It is worth remembering that all these events predate Ethereum and form an important part in the history of decentralized governance. And while the smart contract behemoth has steered a course for many coders who write dapps, others continue to explore the possibilities of masternodes.
SINOVATE (SIN) is doing just that and its recent Aurora update lays testament to its progress.
“SINOVATE is delighted to confirm that the highly anticipated AURORA Mainnet and Deterministic Infinity Node (DIN) 1.0 integration will go live at block height 550.000, marking the successful transition from the Dash legacy masternode code currently implemented by infinity nodes to the first of its kind, superior Deterministic Infinity Nodes DIN codebase.“
SINOVATE Blog, October 2020
So what is SIN doing differently, why are they called “infinity nodes”,and what comes next for this crypto curio? COO Tamer Dagli spent some time with me to answer questions.
Q: The recent Aurora update is a transition from the Dash legacy masternode code. How significant is this for SINOVATE?
TD: After Aurora mainnet release that includes the DIN code, we will release in Q1/Q2 2021 a hybrid PoS4 consensus with PoW and afterwards, the first iteration of IDS solution at the end of 2021. Beyond 2021, we will deliver other iterations of IDS, the InfiniteChain, and a real decentralized oracle, dOracle (a first because no other oracle is decentralized at the moment)
“a new code built from scratch and superior to masternode code”
Infinity Nodes
To stymie inflation and incentivize operational uptime, users who want to run an Infinity node must first burn significant amounts of SIN. In exchange these operators are then paid regularly from staking rewards for a period not exceeding 12 months, at which point the infinity node is no longer rewarded.
There are three tiers of infinity node requiring different burn amounts and offering different rewards accordingly. These tiers won’t be detailed in this article (readers are encouraged to learn more here) but sufficed to say that they all offer healthy rewards as long as too many infinity nodes don’t attempt to share rewards.
Since the nodes count varies day-to-day with some shutting down after their 12-month cycle and new nodes spinning up, there are variables to be considered when starting a node of your won.
Spending just a few minutes looking through the SINOVATE explorer reveals how some node operators are able to substantially increase their SIN holdings over the course of a year. Pictured and linked below is an Infinity node which cost a burn of 100,000 SIN, but which was rewarded 122,070 SIN.
Here is different node which burned 1,000,000 SIN and then received 1,412,112.
Great rewards but is the maximum node count and network growth stifled by the rewards available?
Q: Staking rewards for Infinity nodes after a Proof-of-Burn are only profitable under a certain number of nodes. If too many nodes are running they wont recoup their initial burn. How will the network be incentivized to grow beyond this threshold so that the node count will align with the node name.
TD: The market decides on the number of nodes. Infinity nodes are already in the next round of 12 months, and the first 12 months early nodes received 50–60% annually, and the late nodes received 25–35% annually. This year will also be around 20–30% annually for any kind of nodes. It will never be unprofitable. Since burning and 12 months limited time is involved in the process, nobody will try to create nodes to get a loss and every day there are expired nodes whose 12-month maturity date has arrived.
The “market decides on the number of nodes” translates to infinity node operators voting on proposed changes. SINOVATE does this within its Revolving Sovereignty Votes system.
“Revolving Sovereignty Votes (R.S.V.) enhanced e-governance designed to put power in the hands of users with yearly revolving votes.”
Q. What makes an Infinity Node deterministic (DIN)?
Legacy masternodes use the “votes’ ‘ system to see: who are the next candidates for the reward — each “Vote” 1 network communication. Candidate A needs six votes to have a reward. Infinity Node does not use the voting system. Candidate A is calculated by our new reward algorithm (least network communication).
LockReward is a Schnorr MuSig signature, signed by at least N nodes in the top M node ( N < M). This signature is saved on the blockchain.
Masternode, when user sync block from 0, they do “blindly” accept the masternode payment (can not verify the payment is correct or not)
Infinity Node LockReward is on-chain, everyone can verify that the payment is correct <=== 100% trustless system.
The algorithm of Dash can be broken if someone controls many nodes in the network and can vote for himself. The new deterministic infinity node algorithm can not be broken; it is calculated based on height.
Lock reward is in ring form, first in, first out. 100% fair, “luck” does not exist anymore. If the DIN algorithm says that: Node A will receive the reward at N+k (N current height, k is a consensus), the process of MuSig will begin from block N to build Schnorr MuSig, When a signature is created, node A will send a Burn_And_Data tx, to save this MuSig on-chain
Q. Why call them “Infinity” nodes?
TD: The name was chosen because there will be an infinite number of nodes in time gradually and infinite possibilities of the nodes itself like cloud storage and dOracle.
Q. Which team members are responsible for SIN’s innovations?
Infinity Nodes burn idea, and the nodes were initially my idea. Xuantan Nguyen (Xtdevcoin) is the master SINOVATOR, and he comes up with the innovative ideas with our Lead Developer Giacomo Milligam aka Giak3003, Deterministic Infinity Nodes DIN is xtdev’s idea, and his code, proof of burn, IDS, RSV are his and PoS4(we will have hybrid consensus next year PoW and PoS4 together) is being developed and innovated by Giacomo Milligan (Giaki3003)
Another variable to consider when deciding whether or not to start a node are the extra revenue streams from new services that SINOVATE will be offering moving forward
Despite the generous rewrites available to node operators, SINOVATE strives for a deflationary economic model. Checking the burn address in the explorer shows us over one billion coins burned, with a circulating supply of around 690 million.
Incorruptible Data Storage (IDS)
With team expertise in cloud and data storage, SINOVATE will be adding encrypted data storage services to Infinity nodes. File hashes are stored on-chain for verification while the data itself is encrypted on the peer-to-peer server.
“Data is stored and encrypted using the public key of the data owner. For future retrieval, the transaction ID and proof of authenticity (private key) are necessary to access the Infinity Nodes data.”
Additional rewards will be granted to IDS providers, a reward which will correlate to the amount of storage the operator is making available. Users wishing to store files on IDS will also have to make a one-time payment based on the amount of data they wish to store, and the amount of time they wish to store it for.
But hodl on, how does that 12-month cycle affect my data?
Q: How does IDS handle data redundancy when individual Infinity Nodes are operated in 12 month cycles?
TD: The data is distributed to many nodes, and IDS will determine which nodes statistically have a better performance like uptime when the node was started etc. Once a node’s life reaches ten months, the data will be transferred automatically to a newer healthy node that has a long life with 100% uptime.
Lead SINOVATE developer Xuantan Nguyen (xtdevcoin) elaborates “the goal of SIN network is dCloud and data is saved on node. DIN allow us to save data on a “small” number of nodes, but the redundancy of data is 100% guarantee. This is the main difference with masternode in term of data store.”
“The redundancy of data is 100% guaranteed”
Xuantan Nguyen, SINOVATE developer
Speaking of his team Tamer explains, “I met Xtdev just after we launched. His vision and skills about data mining, decentralization and cloud made me very interested, and with the addition of our lead developer Giaki, we prepared our long term roadmap beginning from rebranding to SINOVATE, infinity nodes to IDS dCloud and all our upcoming innovations. Now we have an ambitious team of close to 40 people.”
“Now we have an ambitious team of close to 40 people.”
For the last seven years Xuantan Nguyen has been a SAS architect at Safran, an international technology group operating in the aviation (propulsion, equipment and interiors), defense and space markets
dOracle
A Cointelegraph article from late 2019 citing Tamer’s comments on Bitcoin derivatives reveals a deeper connection between SINOVATE and DeFi.
Q: In a note to Cointelegraph you commented: “The global market for derivatives is enormous, estimates put it over $500 trillion, and the current crypto market is tiny in comparison.” What moves is SINOVATE planning in the DeFi arena?
TD: We are planning on bringing a decentralized oracle bridge in the future for ETH/EOS/LINK, so the projects that have other blockchains will be able to be used in DeFi of ETH/EOS/LINK and for many other things. It will bring interoperability. We prefer to bring out the tools for other projects for DeFi or any other need. With our dOracle tool, SIN will be able to be used on any DeFi platform.
“With our dOracle tool, SIN will be able to be used on any DeFi platform.”
Not only dOracle, but the DeFi strategy plays out with a sidechain asset tokenization dubbed Infinitechain, and currently in development.
Tamer Dagli is bombastic, passionate and creative. While not a developer his ideas have influenced the SINOVATE project and his energies fuel the innovative project. He has been interviewed on Turkish television, been cited by news publications and has befriended media influencers, like Baris Ertul, who now support the project.
“Baris Ertul is a famous Turkish sports journalist and the director of Saran holdings sports media. He is also an advisor, supporter and an investor of SINOVATE.“
While much driving force for SINOVATE stems from Turkey, a hugely populous country long since into the crypto scene, the project with over 40 team members is now a global effort. Dagli recalls his reasons for starting SINOVATE.
“Decentralized fair launched projects always took my attention, but I also got disappointed by many failed projects that I mined and invested until the beginning of 2018 when the bear market started. I decided to gather a team from bitcointalk dev friends who had good reputations and good coding skills. We wanted to create a no pre-mine fairly launched, GPU mineable proof-of-work project with its own custom PoW algorithm to be fully decentralized, transparent and honest.”
And Beyond?
We haven’t discussed all of what SIN offers (like private messaging) but we have got to grips with the majority, namely the deflationary tokenomics, DIN, IDS, POB and dOracle.
The SINOVATE team is substantial in both size and quality, they have a defined roadmap and are able to remunerate at least some of their efforts by collecting a small portion of mining rewards.
SINOVATE won both a Hackernoon Noonie for Most Exciting Data Protocol and been granted a Binance V Label award.
Q. Were you surprised SINOVATE beat IPFS to be awarded Most Exciting Data Protocol in the 2020 HackerNoon Noonies?
TD: It was surprising because of the $200 million ICO of IPFS and FILECOIN, their visibility and PR visibility but also showed how strong our community is.
Q. How did SINOVATE earn the Binance V Label?
TD: Binance gives V label to active projects, we applied for it and they accepted us.
The market capitalization of SIN is exceptionally small at under 1 million USD.
Despite all these achievements and despite all this energy, any crypto veteran knows all too well that success is not guaranteed. With such a low market capitalization this could be crunch time for SINOVATE and they have to take advantage of the bull market and grow.
Will they?
Q. Will SINOVATE be relevant, or even exist, in another couple years?
TD: SINOVATE will be one of the biggest players of decentralized cloud in couple of years. it will exist and it will be very famous. Infinity nodes, infinite chain and infinite blockchain. SINOVATE blockchain will never stop.
Have i told you the decreasing supply every year from the fees? We do have an infinite supply but we also have a decreasing supply. Until IDS will be active we predicted our max supply to be always less than 800 million SIN but i am sure in 5 years our supply will be less than 500 million SIN. Our max supply is our circulating supply. Infinite supply but a decreasing one
Tamer Dagli co-founded a popular restaurant in Ankara over 35 years ago (which I hope to visit one day). He knows how to keep a business running. During our extensive discussion spanning days he on two occasions excused himself to put his son to sleep. Dagli has made sacrifices. All of those people who are preoccupied with crypto have.
I will end this review by asking the SINOVATE project lead that simple but meaningful question, and by wishing them luck on their mission beyond masternodes.
Q. What personal sacrifices have you made for crypto?
TD: I sacrificed my money, family time and quality time for crypto, but especially for SINOVATE. I’m happy, I finally found the the best thing to work on in my life.
Q. Do you have any final comments, thoughts, or messages for our readers and your community?
Keep following SINOVATE and the crypto world will see and use the many free, open-source innovations we will bring to the crypto space.
No ICO, no pre-mine, no outside funding and we have 1500 commits on our SIN core, already released two custom PoW algorithms, 1 Infinity Node 0.1, DIN 1.0 (Deterministic Infinity Nodes) and we will release PoS4 consensus algorithm, dOracle, IDS dCloud, Infinite Chain and many more innovations in time.
Time is our only competitor. Developers who are enthusiastic about making a difference in the open-source blockchain world are more than welcome to join our strong dev powerhouse. We do have the funds for it.
What we have delivered before are the sole guarantee of what we will provide in the future
“I sacrificed my money, family time and quality time for crypto, but especially for Sinovate. I’m happy, I finally found the the best thing to work on in my life. “
