Attention all developers, infrastructure partners, builders, and testers! The Palm Foundation is gearing up for a significant milestone. The Palm Network is set to transition to a proof of stake (POS) mechanism as a Polygon Edge network on October 2nd at block 14223600, and subsequently migrate into a zkEVM L2 using the Polygon CDK stack, currently planned for early 2024.

Key Highlights of the PoS Migration

For a deeper dive, check out the following articles:

• Palm Foundation Chooses Polygon Technology for zkL2 Upgrade: Empowering Creators & Sports
• Palm Network Scales Up for Enhanced Operations and Broader Use Cases

Technical Overview:

In short, the transition will involve shifting from the Hyperledger Besu RPC client to Polygon Edge. This change mandates a network hard fork. The primary goal during the initial transition to POS is to provide an uninterrupted experience for end-users. However, network infrastructure partners and web3 applications might need to adapt to the evolved network configuration.

Key Updates

Notably, the Edge client has undergone an upgrade on top of v1.1 by our partners at Gateway.fm:

• Enhanced support to replay existing blocks from Palm’s original 2021 genesis block, maintaining full history and state of the existing network.
• Ensuring most JSON-RPC methods remain backward-compatible with Besu, permitting continuity during the hard fork. Note: Developers should take note of some JSON-RPC differences that remain — for instance, Edge doesn’t support TRACE RPC methods, so the equivalent DEBUG methods should be adopted instead.

Developer Resources Update:

Our developer documentation has been updated to guide you through the transition to Polygon Edge. We’ve commenced partner testing, which is slated to continue through mid-October. This testing window allows our partners who operate their own nodes to make the necessary tweaks to ensure they effectively serve their users ahead of migration of Palm Mainnet.

Documentation Topics

Topics covered in our documentation include:

• Transition Runbook: Key events and their timeline
• Testing Measures: Guarantee continued operation of your application
• JSON-RPC API Changes: Overview of updated API methods
• Validators: Initiating as a validator on the PoS network
• Self-Hosted Nodes: Modifications for self-hosted RPC API nodes
• Developer Updates: Necessary changes and testing prerequisites

Join the Testing Phase:

Stability and continuity of the Palm network hinge on community-driven testing. If you operate your own Besu nodes we have provided instructions on how to set up the special version of Polygon Edge that’s been adopted for the Palm network, or you can use our public RPCs for testing. If you already use third-party RPC providers like Infura or Blast, they have updated their RPCs for testing against the migrated Palm Testnet.

Once the updated Palm Testnet has been in operation for a week or so with no observed issues, we’ll start the Palm Mainnet transition process, and we’ll provide further updates.

We encourage questions, feedback, and active participation as it propels our mission forward. For immediate assistance or queries, please reach out to us on Telegram.