Arkadiko’s Great Migration

Hello Arkadians,

The Stacks blockchain will be hard-forking to an upgraded version in April called the ‘Nakamoto’ release. The two biggest changes for end-users will be: 1) increased performance and throughput with shorter blocktimes (5s) and 2) sBTC: a trustless, non-custodial Bitcoin-pegged asset.

At Arkadiko we are very excited for this release as it solves many problems that Stacks is facing today. We are looking forward to adopt sBTC as a collateral type once it has proven itself in production.

The new blocktimes for Stacks after Nakamoto do require us to update the Arkadiko codebase to be in sync with the new reality. No longer does “BlockHeight’ refer to the Bitcoin block height and we will have to reflect this change in the smart contract code.

Arkadiko is operated as a decentralized organization with no executive authority. All changes to the smart contract code-base, which holds all the assets and value, need to pass through the governance process. This means that there is an initial proposal with room for discussion and feedback before we transition to a formal, on-chain governance vote where DIKO and stDIKO owners decide if they want to approve the proposal. Only if a majority of holders decide the change is beneficial to the protocol, then the smart contract change is adopted.

This blog post serves to document this upgrade process. Because of the complexity of the code-base, several deployment steps are involved in the migration process. Please find our working sheet, which shows which steps to be taken here: Arkadiko Migration Work Sheet .

Don’t be alarmed, as an end-user and community member, you don’t have to do anything. We thought it would be in the best interest of everyone if we provide the ability for everyone to follow along in full transparency. After all, we do need a governance vote each time a contract upgrade is required.
In total, we will need three governance votes and you can help us with that by voting once these become available on-chain.

Most likely, you will not notice any change from the migration process. There will be a slight window in time where staking and unstaking will not be possible as we will be switching out the contracts for fresh ones. We made it so that staking rewards are not lost and will be adjusted once the new contract is live, but bear in mind that for one day, staking functionality will not be available. The exact date of this staking ‘freeze’ will be posted in Discord.

For those of you who are eager to learn more and dive a bit deeper, please review the Github pull-request dedicated to this migration.

Questions and discussion surrounding this migration can be found in our Discord in the aip-18-nakamoto-migration channel.