We are staying! Terra Classic — Our Statement
In the following, we outline our decision process as a validator to stay on the Terra Classic Blockchain.
At the end of the statement, you can find many useful links to verify the Terra Classic Blockchain, as we know that many previously used tools are not available anymore.
History
As most of you know there was a big fallback in the whole crypto industry with the Terra Blockchain failing and halting.
Since then, Terra has started a new blockchain by airdropping LUNA tokens to hurt ecosystem participants to “make things right” and as an addition to Terra Classic, which now owns the ticker/symbol LUNC. Many ecosystem participants did not like the way things have been handled by Terraform Labs, the airdrop, and the fact that Do Kwon is still involved.
News that South Korean authorities have sought Kwon’s arrest and claimed he is on the run is further eroding users’ trust. Due to these developments, a user base of Terra Classic formed an entity called Terra Rebels. Their self-proclaimed mission is to resurrect the Terra Classic blockchain, reenable staking and governance, and later try to fix the peg of the protocol’s stablecoin USTC (you can read all the details in their white paper here https://www.terrarebels.net/whitepaper).
We, as well as some other validators, first did not believe that the Rebels would succeed in resurrecting the chain, and we also had to analyze some legal aspects of the situation.
Due to these reasons, we did not know if we could further validate the chain and suggested our users redelegate to another validator who will keep validating.
Current State
For some time, there will be no way for the chain to onboard new validators until the chain reaches a particular block height (most likely around 26th October), which made us contemplate our decision and look into Terra Classic again. As we tweeted before, we would have always liked to at least see the community be able to free itself before we leave, meaning to take governance back into their hands, being able to stake, add new validators, and restore the IBC connection. Because of this, we decided to help the community and vote for their proposals while further researching the Terra Rebels and their community effort.
Furthermore, our validator (https://atomscan.com/terra/validators/terravaloper1542ek7muegmm806akl0lam5vlqlph7spflfcun) currently only has 0.01% voting power, while the first 3 combined have a voting power of 44.35%!
This voting power concentration is posing as a serious centralization risk, as only a few would be able to halt the chain theoretically. Even worse is that new validators still cannot join the network, who could have had a chance to decentralize it. So, until the end of October, stakers should delegate only to existing validators with a small share of voting power, to have any chance of decentralizing the network.
Our Decision
All of this led us to the decision to stay as a validator in the Terra Classic network, hoping we can do our part to tackle centralization in the validator set. With the announcement of our decision, we are hoping that stakers of the bigger validators will stake with a smaller validator that has a low share of voting power, to decentralize the set — especially since there are no new validators allowed yet.
Verifying Terra Classic
As some of the previously used infrastructure and analysis tools are not functioning anymore, we have collected a selection of links for our stakers to keep verifying and governing the Luna Classic blockchain and to follow the community!
White Paper: https://www.terrarebels.net/whitepaper
Roadmap: https://www.terrarebels.net/roadmap
Validators: https://atomscan.com/terra/validators
Governance: https://atomscan.com/terra/votes
Stats/Supply: https://terrav1.smartstake.io/stats
Block Explorer: https://atomscan.com/terra/blocks
GitHub: https://github.com/terra-rebels
Twitter: https://twitter.com/terrarebels
Discord: https://discord.gg/K6Yd8xhYTF
