Ecosystem Update
1/21/22
General Announcements
- Incentives for testnet2 will now end at 2359 UTC on January 31st. At that time, we’ll include a block that must be included in the canonical chain for any miner that wants to claim rewards. Keep in mind that testnet2 will stay running; but the incentive program will officially end. We’re currently contemplating a third testnet, but have made no official decisions yet.
- In retrospect, we believe that this incentivized testnet was an overall success, although we acknowledge and have identified there are some areas we could have done better.
- Here’s what we thought went well:
- Over 7,500 nodes participated at different points during the incentive period, and received multiple community contributions to our codebase
- The fastest miner was generating on average 10,000 proofs per second, indicating that the incentive mechanism of PoSW is working to encourage faster, more efficient proof generation
- We identified and fixed multiple consensus bugs, causing us to move over to an entirely new difficulty adjustment algorithm (ASERT).
- We now have several mining pools running, including はるか’s (which is open-source, HPool, and others that will help distribute mining power at mainnet launch
- Here’s what could have gone better:
- Our quadratic mining reward scheme did not succeed in distributing tokens as widely as we had hoped
- There was a vast disparity between the custom PoSW miners and pool implementations used by top miners and the implementations we provided out-of-the-box, resulting in a small handful of entities dominating the network
- To address these shortcomings, we will reallocate Aleo credits that would have been spent over the next two weeks and use them to address the problems we identified:
- To address distribution, we are awarding 125 Aleo credits to every Aleo miner on the network that…
- …was not firewalled (or otherwise inaccessible to our network crawler)
- …did not already earn any Aleo credits
- …were running on on the network anytime between January 5 00:00 and January 12 23:59:59 UTC.
- We’ll release a list of those addresses so you can check for inclusion of your miner. Once we have this information it will be posted on Discord.
- Based on our learnings from testnet2, we will be running a competition for fastest/most efficient PoSW prover implementations (Aleo’s ZPrize Competition)
- 8M Aleo credits in total will be awarded to the winner/s, with additional cash prizes
- Winning implementations will be required to be open-sourced under a permissive license so that the community can benefit from them at mainnet launch, meaning a more decentralized, more secure network
- More on this to come
- Lastly, we have been keeping track of suspicious activity in the top 100 and want to reassure the community that we will make every effort to ensure that the top 100 miner rewards are FAIRLY allocated.
- The core team is glad to have identified these bugs and other challenges with the help of our open-source community. After all, the expressed purpose of this testnet was to figure out the flaws in our network so that our engineers can address them before launching mainnet this year.
Core Engineering Updates
- Merges:
- In-Progress
- Highlights
- Congrats to @HarukaMa for having the first registered mining pool! He earned 31,500 Aleo credits and, because he open-sourced his work, we decided to award him an additional 10,000. Great job @HarukaMa and thank you for all your contributions.
Community Announcements
- Aleo hosted hosted its 11th Community Call on Thursday. If you were unable to attend you can find the audio recording on YouTube here and the slide deck here.
- The Aleo Ambassadors Program will officially launch on February 1st. We’ll release a preview of the program beforehand. We appreciate everybody for being patient with this. We thought it made the most sense to begin the program after the end of the incentivized testnet.
- We will be holding a vote to determine the name of our community. The poll will be sent out on Discord next week so please make sure to stay up-to-date.
- The Aleo Community Grants Program is currently undergoing some changes to make it more accessible to a broader audience. For now, if you are interested in submitting a grant please do so by using the following link: https://www.aleo.org/grants/application.
- We’d also like to apologize if you have not received a response from our grants program manager if you submitted a proposal. We are working through our applications right now and will get back to you as soon as possible.
- The Discord has undergone a redesign over the past few weeks. Right now it is about 90% complete. Once all changes are put into effect we will inform the community and share a video outlining the new format.
- We will be hosting our first office hours session next week. Originally we were supposed to have an office hours session last week on mining pools but we decided to postpone that for the time being.
- Aleo will be hosting it’s first Office Hours session on Thursday, January 27th from 1pm to 2pm ET. The topic of the session is still TBD. We will update the community early next week. You can find the calendar event here.
- The purpose of these Office Hours is to allow for an open discussion with community members and core Aleo team members on specific topics related to the project.