Phoenix Mainnet Update

At the genesis of LightLink Phoenix our team made the decision to mint a reserve of Ether that would be available to those bridging Ether from Ethereum mainnet to LightLink. Technical details aside, the premise is that once deposited, Ether on the Ethereum mainnet would be stored in smart contracts. At the point of a user bridging Ether from Ethereum to LightLink, Ether from the pre-minted reserve would be dispersed on LightLink to the user's wallet. For more detail on the bridge architecture please see our docs.

We opted for this model, as a pre-mint such as this is a typical process at the foundation of a chain. Since this pre-mint, and in the absence of a mainnet bridge being available the Lightlink team has distributed small portions of Ether to ecosystem partners (such as Liteflow and Zonic among others) to support the deployment of smart contracts on the network.

Without proper security practices in place, such as storage in a multisig wallet, any large amount of token supply is an obvious risk to the network and its users. Even if stewarded responsibly, there is an element of trust required by users who were to bridge their funds across to LightLink.

In the spirit of transparency and to uphold the trustless pillar that forms an integral component in the foundation of a decentralised network - we have decided to change our approach. We have now updated the bridge so that it will mint Ether to the sender's wallet directly on LightLink upon deposit to the smart contracts on Ethereum Mainnet.

In order to burn the unnecessary Ether we have utilised the selfdestruct solidity function. To see the result of these transactions you can visit coin balance history and internal txs.

Alternative approaches to what has been executed included the regenesis of the chain with the omission of the premined Ether. Ultimately, our team deliberated and agreed that utilising the selfdestruct solution was the best outcome, preserving the immutable nature of the chain. We made this decision after hours of internal debate. This decision paves the way for a bright, transparent future for LightLink.