Dec 2021
Richard Heart has been on fire this holiday season with his live streams and interviews releasing a torrent of information detailing what’s to come for PulseChain. From sacrificing, to PLS tokens, testnets, Decentralised exchanges, forks and Liquidity Pool tokens – it’s reasonable to say many who are just tuning in might be a little overwhelmed in trying to keep up. So let’s join the dots 🙂
What is PulseChain?
Paraphrasing gitlab/pulschaincom –
PulseChain is a stateful fork of Ethereum running Proof of Staked Authority consensus system with the stated goals of increased performance and significantly reduced fees. Copies of all Ethereum contracts, tokens, and user accounts at time of fork will exist in the PulseChain.
That is, exact copies of all smart contracts, ERC-20 tokens, ERC-721 NFTs, and user accounts will exist on the PulseChain network. If you’d like to go into the full story behind PulseChain and its journey so far you can see my previous article
The PulseChain Journey
The image below summarises the PulseChain journey from initial sacrifice phase through to, what I’ve termed, the “3 Epochs” to represent 3 phases once it is live. We will go through each section in some detail.
PulseChain Sacrifice (August 2021)
The sacrifice phase for PulseChain involved the option for people to send their crypto to an address as an expression of support for a cause (freedom of speech) and in return receive at some stage in the future a valueless token. “How many tokens?” is the obvious question. This followed a rate, starting at 10000:1 which became 5% worse each day after the first 5 days. You can still sacrifice now to receive PLS on launch, however at the time of writing this article you’d be over 2000x worse off than day 1 (i.e. you’d get about 5PLS for a dollar).
Testnet V1 (Late September 2021)
The launch of PulseChain Testnet was a key milestone demonstrating some first glimpses at what PulseChain would look like. Gitlab repositories were updated accordingly, users could connect with Metamask as well as view the block explorer https://scan.pulsechain.com/ and view blocks being processed every 3 seconds or so.
TestNet V2 (Early December 2021)
TestNet V2 offered more key capabilities including:
- viewing different tokens (eg HEX)
- a TPLS Faucet – an address that sends test PLS to your test MetaMask wallet
- Uniswap equivalent for swapping PRC20s (to be covered further below)
- staking PLS and voting for Validators
PulseX Sacrifice (Late December 2021)
We know what “sacrifice” means as we went over it earlier. Richard has confirmed the sacrifice process for PLSX will be almost the same as it was for PLS with some minor “improvements” in that it will have a longer initial period with a maximum rate 10000:1 as well as a slower worsening rate of exchange. It will also offer a different cause to sacrifice to – “freedom of assembly”.
But hold on, what actually is PulseX?
PulseX is to PulseChain what Uniswap is to Ethereum. That is, it’s a Decentralised Exchange (DEX) enabling you to swap one token for another without a trusted third party (i.e. using smart contracts). It is a “fork” that takes the best characteristics from existing Ethereum DEX’s and Decentralised finance Defi apps (Uniswap, Pancakeswap and YAM). Just as the UNI token accompanies Uniswap DEX, so does PLSX do the same for the PulseX DEX.
PulseX takes attributes from existing DEXs.
Interestingly, PulseX will have copies (PRC20s) of practically all token pairings that currently exist on the Ethereum DEX’s (eg Uniswap, Pancakeswap) with the added benefit that that each pairs liquidity (i.e. total number of tokens) will be sourced through the removal of those very tokens from the other copied DEX’s liquidity into PulseX.
Therefore, PulseX will be the most liquid Automated Market Maker (AMM) not only on PulseChain, but possibly in the whole crypto space in terms of variety and depth of tokens.
Ok, here’s where things get super interesting – PulseChain Go LIVE (looking like late February 2022 according to PulseX.info) – and you can refer to my previous article that goes through the Minimum Viable Product in terms of what functionality and capability will be available.
Viewing Richard’s streams and tweets over the last few days has painted the picture, for me anyway, of a Big Bang. That is, we are about to witness the birth of a new chain and with it live through 3 epochs of its existence – sounds dramatic hey? 🙂
1st Epoch: PulseX (decentralised exchange) Duration: 1-2days?
With PulseChain live the first phase is to arm PulseX with maximum liquidity as explained above. This will be carried out by an Automated Market Maker fixer bot. As PLS is the ETH equivalent on this chain but with a much higher token supply (10000:1) the bot will mint enough PLS to correct the ratios. According to PulseChain.com this means about 2.5% of supply will be minted. Importantly any ETH holders on Ethereum will only receive 1, yes 1 PLS for each ETH – so they will be massively diluted and will need to exchange post go live to receive equivalent value/number of PLS of they wish to pursue a competitive DEX. With PulseX in place and the chain live we enter the next epoch – Walled Garden.
2nd Epoch: Walled Garden (a closed ecosystem) Duration: 1-2 Days?
This phase will see the capability and functionality outlined in TestNetV2 (with the PLS faucet the obvious exception) become available for all who hold PLS, PLSX or any PRC20 tokens. They will have the ability to do the following within a closed ecosystem:
- Transact
- Trade
- Stake
- Deposit tokens to Liquidity Pools
- Yield farm
That is, there will be no available connection (Bridge) to the Ethereum network.
This is where price discovery will begin and HEX could likely play a significant role in that it will have a fully functional front end. Hexicans will gravitate to low fees enabling much more flexibility when it comes to staking strategies, for instance.
Some pairs on PulseX to expect are: PLS:HEX, PLS:PLSX, HEX:PLSX along with many other PRC20 combinations. (Note: (I believe the PRC20 tickers keep their Ethereum naming convention and later any tokens transferred from the Ethereum chain have the prefix “e” eg eSHIB).
Liquidity Pools and Yield Generation
Perhaps the most popular initial use-case on PulseChain is for users to generate yield accumulated through fees for providing liquidity. That is, you deposit a pair of PRC20 tokens into PulseX providing liquidity and receive a percentage of the fee charged every time someone swaps one token for another. Richard has also confirmed the added bonus of a new token (not named as yet) to be granted to liquidity providers on top of the received percentage of fees. This new token can be deposited to a yield farm as well as become the reward token for potential future pairs governed by PLSX holders who may vote through a DAO.
Fees
For each trade on PulseX a 0.29% fee is paid. The table below provides a summary:
| Fee % | Description |
| 0.2204% | for Liquidity Providers with the addition of the bonus LP token (which users can deposit to a yield farm) |
| 0.0609% | PLSX buyback & burn (deflationary so potential for upward price pressure over time), |
| 0.0087% | “to an address you have no expectation of” (Richards tweet 24.12.21) |
| 0.29% | Total Fee Per Token Swap |
It must be stated, a great incentive for users is the simple fact they receive half of their liquidity – the PRC20 copies of ERC20 tokens – for free once PulseChain is live. So they are half way to generating the fees above if the decide to bridge over their ERC20s – which brings us to the final epoch – a New Order.
3rd Epoch: New Order (a new beginning) Duration: Unlimited
The final phase sees the bridge from Ethereum become active, meaning all the functionality described above is available along with the ability to wrap ERC20 tokens and send them to and from PulseChain. As per PulseChain.com (noting the naming convention may not be finalised) the Bridge operates as follows:
- ETH on PulseChain: You can send ETH to the PulseBridge contract on ETH which locks it and issues pETH (pulseETH) on PulseChain at a 1:1 ratio.
- PLS on Ethereum: You can send PLS to the ETHBridge contract on PulseChain which locks it and issues ePLS (ethPulse) on the Ethereum network 1:1.
So users will be able fund other side of their liquidity pair and enter that into the PulseX Liquidity pool to earn fees, the LP token and yield farm.
Concerns
As with any project launch there are always possibilities for bugs – and while the chances are quite small given the underlying code is extremely similar to Ethereum, one should not completely ignore this risk when considering transacting on it. That said, if Richard Heart’s HEX token is anything to go by then the risk is probably a lot lower than competing chains. I covered some other concerns in my previous article on PulseChain if you would like to look further.
Conclusion
Needless to say, if all of the above functions with minimal issues to build a thriving ecosystem, then it will only be a matter of time before many other projects make the switch from Ethereum to PulseChain unlocking limitless possibilities. PulseChain can certainly be the new beginning so many communities in the crypto space have been looking for.
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