PartnerChains Milestone 1 & 2 Overview
PartnerChains provides packaged infrastructure that makes launching and growing new blockchains easier.
Minotaur (Shared Security)
New blockchains often struggle to get started. With Minotaur, they can immediately connect to Cardano’s validator community, inheriting its decentralization and credibility from the beginning. This reduces risk and strengthens security for new networks.
Milestones Completed
1. Fair Rewards for Validators
What it is: Validators on PartnerChains can now set a custom margin on rewards, following the same model as Cardano.
Why it matters:
- Familiarity: Cardano SPOs can understand PartnerChains economics without relearning.
- Flexibility: Operators can adjust margins to reflect costs, risk, and competitiveness.
- Easier onboarding: Wallets and dashboards can reuse Cardano-style interfaces and flows.
Where it landed: Released in PartnerChains v1.7 (with additional governance and toolkit improvements).
2. Liveness Testing with Ariadne Inputs
What it is: A suite of simulations tested Ariadne (committee selection) as part of consensus. The results confirmed that block production and finalization remain live under realistic conditions.
Why it matters:
- Confidence: Demonstrates resilience against stalls or edge cases in committee selection.
- Transparency: Reports are public and open to review by engineers and operators.
- Repeatability: Documentation allows other teams to reproduce or extend the tests.
Where to read:
- Liveness test report (overview) in PartnerChains docs
- Ariadne-specific liveness report in PartnerChains docs
- Committee selection simulator in GitHub repository
Impact on the Cardano Ecosystem
- SPO-friendly economics: A familiar margin system lowers friction for operators moving from ADA pools to PartnerChains.
- Operational clarity: Published liveness results give infrastructure teams evidence to plan capacity, alerts, and reliability goals.
- Governance improvements: v1.7 introduced governance and toolkit enhancements, such as multisig governance and governed-map infrastructure.
What’s Next
For SPOs and Validators
- Review v1.7 and determine your margin policy as you would on Cardano mainnet.
- Check the published liveness reports to understand expected performance and plan observability accordingly.
For Builders and Integrators
- Use the selection simulator to test assumptions around committee weights and network parameters.
- Explore the v1.7 governance enhancements for integration into operations tooling.