Why The Terra Ecosystem Delayed A Major Mainnet Upgrade For Late September

After a 130% rally over the past month, Terra (LUNA) is one of the best-performing assets in the crypto market. At the time of writing, LUNA trades at $31.95, a little over a year ago it was barely breaking out above $1.

The massive price appreciation is driven by a growth in the LUNA ecosystem and an increase in demand for its stablecoin UST. In order to support this growth, Terraform Labs (TFL) has been planning to introduce an update.

Called Columbus 5, its mainnet deployment has been delayed for 3 weeks, according to an official post. The update will take place at the height of block 4,724,000, on September 30, 03:30 UTC.

The team behind Terra claimed that they want to “implement some extra precautionary measures” to roll out the update. They added:

(…) the Columbus-5 mainnet upgrade is massive. Behind the scenes, numerous moving parts require attentive and thorough examination from multiple perspectives + reviews between TFL, eco partners, the community, and projects dependent on Terra applications.

In addition, they provided 3 main reasons that led them to delay the update. First, the network will have a new version of Mantle, their framework to write indexes or Extract-Transform-Loan (ETL) logic.

This new version of Mantle will be more scalable and will be able to support “significantly” more traffic. It will be introduced with Colombus 5. Terraform Labs claimed:

Mantle plays a critical role in mediating application network traffic on Terra, ensuring the compatibility of the new version between Col-4 and Col-5 is paramount, requiring additional testing to verify the new design changes.

The second reason for the delay is due to Terra’s partners and third-party projects. The team behind the ecosystem wants these projects to have more time and “breathing room” to migrate to Columbus 5.

This includes projects like Mirror, Anchor, TerraSwap, Shuttle. Before the update, the developers behind these applications must be familiar with the updated mainnet.

Terra Will Update To Support Massive Growth

As Terraform Labs said, the LUNA ecosystem’s total value locked (TVL) stands at $7.3 billion with “tens of thousands” of new stakeholders, and builders coming into the platform. Thus, why they have decided to grant their community and developers more time to prepare:

The original timeline produced a hurried window for some projects to properly prep for Col-5. Giving projects more time to acquaint themselves with the Col-5 testing environment and migration plans for major apps ensures a smoother runway for projects launching post-Col-5.

In that sense, the team made a commitment to provide more documentation and educational material for the community to “use the update properly”. In this documentation, they will address some of the community and third-party project’s concerns on Col-5.

The official migration guides for Mirror and Anchor will be released on September 13th, meaning web apps, contracts, and bots will be functional and operational on Bombay for users by this time. TerraSwap has already been migrated.

In the coming weeks, Terraform Labs will give more information on the “sequence of events” leading to the mainnet. Thus, they will make it a priority to “guarantee” a “smooth” Col-5 launch.