Dominia: Upgrading the Spatial Web

On the sixth anniversary of launching the first IXO Blockchain test-net on December 8th, back in 2018, we are excited to announce a transformative upgrade to the IXO Protocol blockchain that powers the Impact Hub public network.

This development positions IXO as a leader in providing Spatial Web digital public goods infrastructure, designed to create real-world impacts on a massive scale.

Let's explore why this upgrade matters.

🦋 Faster, Safer, Better

This upgrade moves the core software from Cosmos SDK v0.45 to v0.50-lsm, introducing a range of improvements that boost performance, security, and developer tools. With ABCI 2.0 integration, optimistic execution, and new tools, the network is now faster, smarter, and easier to build upon. It creates the foundation for expanding the network's capabilities to meet the demands of the impact economy, as we scale to millions of users.

For instance, in Zambia, we are preparing to scale-up modern energy cooking solutions to reach 1 million households over the next 3-5 years, financed through Article 6 Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) generated through the Emerging Platform that runs on the Impact Hub network and implements the market-leading decentralised digital measurement, reporting, and verification D-MRV protocols that have been developed by IXO World. This effort will require millions of transactions each month—from processing fuel purchase and delivery claims to managing decentralised networks of cooking devices and tokenised inventories of renewable biomass fuel, with provenance of the production inputs. This upgrade will make these high-value, large-volume transactions possible.

🤩 User Experience that Wows

Smart Accounts are transforming the user experience and enhancing security. This module introduces flexible multi-factor authentication, 1-click transactions, and biometric security, making the onboarding process easy and interactions secure. Imagine logging into a Spatial Web application using Face ID—that’s the kind of simplicity we’ve built. We're setting a new standard for seamless access and secure participation in decentralised applications, making the IXO ecosystem more accessible.

Picture a youth agent in a rural area providing numeracy education to village children. With Smart Accounts, they use biometric verification to access their wallet, register their digital credentials, make claims about their contributions, and receive payments—all without needing to understand anything about Web 3. This helps reduce barriers, empowering people in real-world impact programs who need it most.

🌍 Next-Level Global Coordination

The Wasm-Hooks upgrade enables seamless Smart Contract interactions between the Impact Hub network and other blockchain networks. Tokens and data now move easily between chains, supporting automated cross-chain verification. Whether verifying claims across different blockchain networks, or automating fund transfers, this enhanced interoperability prepares us to offer the services of the Impact Hub network to a global market, enabling cross-chain collaboration like never before.

Imagine a global conservation initiative working to protect rainforests across multiple countries and blockchain ecosystems. With enhanced Interblockchain Communication, participants can achieve greater coordination and scale—verifying and aggregating impact credits while self-governing without borders slowing them down.

⏰ Clocking Change

The Epochs module brings deterministic time-based coordination to the network. By introducing on-chain timers that execute regularly, this module facilitates automations such as periodic reward distributions and triggers for outcome-based financing. It powers the new Impact Reward Mechanism, which distributes IXO tokens from network inflation to staked accounts that retire impact credits, such as CARBON Credits, incentivising Real-World Impacts to be generated through the network.

For example, a local energy cooperative can now automatically execute periodic settlements of credits for peer-to-peer green energy exchanges within a micro-grid. This minimises administrative costs and provides strong incentives for local energy production and consumption.

🌱 Sustainable Tokenomics

The introduction of a customised minting module for the network enables us to implement the IXO Token Design 2.0 to drive sustainable economic growth of the Internet of Impacts economy. Inspired by Bitcoin's halving model, this changes the network inflation mechanism to reduce the rate of new IXO tokens supply over time. It also splits the distribution of inflation between Security Staking Rewards and Impact Rewards.

The Impact Rewards mechanism is a novel innovation to drive the objective function of the network, which is to generate verifiable Impacts in Real-world domains. This works by rewarding users who retire eligible Impact Credits. The Impact Reward Ratio (IRR) defines how many IXO tokens a staked account holder will receive for each retired Impact Credit, while the Impact Reward Stake (IRS) specifies the number of IXO tokens that need to be staked to qualify.

This mechanism effectively incentivises use of the network to produce, procure, and retire eligible classes of Impact Credits, such as CARBON Credits. By removing intermediaries and increasing capital efficiency, the network can offer subsidies for sustainable activities, using the network inflation to fuel economic growth that is underpinned by the Real Economy, which should produce compounding returns to the stakeholders in the network.

The Impacts Reward Function, combined with Liquid Staking, enables innovations such as Perpetual Carbon Offsets.

♻️ Perpetual Offsets

The new Liquid Staking module allows IXO tokens to be used more dynamically, providing liquidity while maintaining security. Beyond securing the network, this upgrade introduces perpetual carbon offsets linked to staking—turning staking into a direct contribution to climate impact mitigation. Moreover, the Transfer Credits feature allows impact credits to move into a Transferred State, aligning with Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, paving the way for meaningful, cross-border impact.

In Zambia, as we transition households to modern energy cooking, Perpetual Carbon Offsets will help finance, generate, and retire carbon credits in a way that makes offsetting accessible, more feasible and attractive to a much broader market.

💲Get Paid to Play

Sophisticated payment automation is now integrated into the Claims Module, enabling the growth of an agentic economy through Oracle Payment mechanisms. From conditional payments to escrow mechanisms, these features support smarter, outcome-based financing, to help build a thriving ecosystem of trusted autonomous agents.

The Oracle Payments feature adds results-based payments for Oracle Services, including fee-for-service autonomous AI agents. It provides a fee distribution mechanism that allocates a portion of Oracle fees to the Market Relayer that connects services to users and to the network DAO operated by the Impacts Venture Cooperative. This streamlines the payment process, making it more scalable and transparent, which is essential for creating a new generation of verifiable, agent-based services within the Spatial Web.

These are very significant developments that will establish the Impact Hub network as a foundational infrastructure for Spatial Web services and applications. This supports growth and sustainability in the agentic economy, which should generate significant cash flows whilst ensuring that value is distributed fairly and efficiently across the ecosystem, empowering agents and participants alike.

For the nationwide mitigation activity in Zambia that will transition 1 million households to modern energy cooking, this could be a game-changer, as AI-enabled Oracle services will support the implementation by handling customer support, optimising inventory management, and coordinating delivery agents. Emission reduction claims are verified automatically, using an Oracle service that implements D-MRV powered by Causal-AI, to autonomously issue Impact Credits. This automation can streamline every aspect of this massive scaling effort, making it achievable within the next 2-3 years, demonstrating the potential to leverage intelligent services and automations to manage complex, large-scale impact programs.

💥 Chain Reactions

This upgrade positions IXO as the backbone of a new era of digital public goods—providing a Spatial Web infrastructure to coordinate, finance, verify, govern, and gather intelligence for real-world impacts within any domain.

Stay tuned for more updates and get involved as we shape the future of the IXO Protocol blockchain and the Spatial Web networks this is powering, starting with the Impact Hub and with more networks launching early next year. This is a pivotal moment in which we can use these technologies to achieve tipping-points in our responses to global sustainability challenges, making access to resources more equitable, and mitigating climate impacts.

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