Introduction to Hermes

Hermes (hermes.to) is a smart contract-based rewards distribution system developed by the IoTeX Foundation (core-dev). Over the past few months, Hermes has been greatly enhanced and is better than ever. Today we are excited to announce that Hermes 2.0 is officially live and open source!

Hermes 2.0 is a win-win for both Delegates and voters, automating daily rewards distribution for Delegates and delivering a transparent history of all reward payments for voters. In this blog, we share the features of Hermes 2.0, as well as an overview of how the technology works.

Hermes Features

Hermes is a trusted, transparent, and automated tool that is beneficial for both Delegates and voters. Hermes uses smart contracts to automate manual (and error-prone) processes for Delegates, which is also beneficial to voters as the actions/results are open and verifiable. Best of all, Hermes is 100% free! Note: Hermes Delegates have a ‘Hermes’ badge on the voting website.

For Voters

Never worry again if your Delegate paid the right amount of rewards again! All Hermes transactions (i.e., your rewards payments) are open and trackable for easy rewards monitoring and peace of mind for voters:

• Personal rewards history: enter your IoTeX address to see your full history of reward distributions from Hermes Delegates; you can also enter a Delegate’s name to see a paginated list of all of their distributions
• Rewards forwarding service: if you would like your rewards to go to a different IoTeX address than the one you used to stake/vote, you can use our service to forward rewards to another account.
• Other feature requests? We want to hear from you! Let us know on Telegram or email [email protected].

For Delegates

Using Hermes, Delegates can automatically claim, calculate, and distribute rewards (based on a Delegate’s chosen reward distribution %s) to all of their voters on a daily basis. Hermes is free for all IoTeX Delegates — register today by following the simple instructions below:

1. Set your reward percentages here
2. Set your reward address to ‘io12mgttmfa2ffn9uqvn0yn37f4nz43d248l2ga85’ here
3. Wait 24 hours — rewards will now be auto-distributed daily based on your selected reward percentages!

Hermes Technology Overview

Daily Rewards Distribution

Hermes is a daily cron job that is powered by smart contract. Every new Hermes cycle, the system first claims all applicable rewards from the blockchain. Then it checks the status of past distributions to ensure there are no missing distributions or recipients. It then calculates the next appropriate distribution by querying iotex-analytics for bookkeeping data of each Delegate. Finally, it invokes an underlying multi-send smart contract to distribute the correct amount of rewards to all voters.

Rewards Distribution History

As the entire rewards distribution process is managed by smart contract, the history of Hermes distributions is viewable by anyone. To create the distribution history, iotex-analytics reads receipts of the Hermes smart contract, recording the action hash and Delegate information. This information is joined with the ‘balance_history’ table to create a full Hermes distribution history, which is query-able by Delegate name or voter’s IoTeX address.

Rewards Forwarding Service

This service is powered by smart contract. When you register a forwarding address (i.e., new address that will receive rewards), the smart contract validates your signature and stores a record of both your original staking and new forwarding addresses. During the daily rewards distribution, the Hermes smart contract will verify whether a forwarding address is associated with each staking address by reading the forwarding service smart contract. If yes, Hermes will distribute rewards to the forwarding address. If no, Hermes will distribute rewards to the staking address.

For more details, see the Hermes Github and join the discussion on Telegram.

About IoTeX

Founded as an open source platform in 2017, IoTeX is building the Internet of Trusted Things, where all physical and virtual “things” — humans, machines, businesses, and DApps — can exchange information and value at global scale. Backed by a global team of 30+ top research scientists and engineers, IoTeX combines blockchain, secure hardware, and data services innovations to empower intelligent IoT networks and machine economies. By serving as a decentralized trust fabric for IoT, IoTeX will empower the future decentralized economy by “connecting the physical world, block by block”.

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