Amber & Flint Testnets: Our Playgrounds for Global Financial Disruption
We have built Centrifuge Chain to be the gateway for real-world assets to the blockchain multiverse. On the road to mainnet, we have launched two public testnets — Amber and Flint — to experiment with, test, and stabilize the interactions between Centrifuge’s components. These testnets are unaudited and have no economic value on-chain.
We have built Centrifuge Chain to be the gateway for real-world assets to the blockchain multiverse. On the road to mainnet, we have launched two public testnets — Amber and Flint — to experiment with, test, and stabilize the interactions between Centrifuge’s components. These testnets are unaudited and have no economic value on-chain.
So, why would I want to join these testnets today? And more importantly, what can I do with them?
Well, that depends on your interests, and we can highlight a few options here:
- Help improve the protocol and Centrifuge Chain’s functionality
- Get ready to tap into alternative financing solutions for real world assets
- Become a Validator and test your architecture for mainnet
Improve the Protocol and Centrifuge Chain Functionality
Centrifuge OS is a decentralized platform to support a new generation of applications for the financial supply chain. The stack consists of a peer-to-peer messaging protocol to store and exchange business documents in a private, secure way.
Centrifuge Chain based on Substrate is used to hold the unalterable, single source of truth of these documents. Using Centrifuge Chain and Dapps built on top, businesses can tokenize documents and use this as collateral to access financing.
In a nutshell, the Centrifuge protocol is the peer-to-peer layer that ensures document state consensus between participants in a private manner on top of Centrifuge Chain and Ethereum.
At Centrifuge, all of our code base is open source and that gives us the opportunity of getting broader feedback and contributions from an engaged community. If you are interested in the technology, bringing in new use cases or improving the usability and adoption of Centrifuge — we would love to know more! A perfect place to start is navigating through these resources.
Tap Into Alternative Financing Solutions
Tinlake is Centrifuge’s smart contract framework for bundling loans collateralized by NFTs that are minted on Centrifuge Chain. It allows investors to invest in these portfolios of loans by issuing and selling ERC20 tokens that represent a claim on value generated by the loan portfolios through interest accumulation, loan repayments and potential liquidations. You can dive into how lenders can invest in Tinlake loans in this post about the Tin and Drop tokens.
We’ve used Tinlake for a first set of transactions to finance — among others — music royalty payments and real estate with Maker. Using the Tinlake smart contracts, Lendflo is factoring SME receivables in the UK to bring transparency to borrowers and build a worldwide network of buyer-supplier relationships you can trust.
If you are interested in alternative financing solutions, and want to unlock the value of your real-world assets with DeFi — learn more about Tinlake here: https://centrifuge.io/products/tinlake
Becoming a Validator
If you are interested in running a Validator for Centrifuge Chain, the Flint and Amber testnets are a great way to get up and running. One of the main benefits of becoming a validator on Centrifuge testnets first is to get experience running your own Centrifuge Chain node and to test your infrastructure.
Once we launch the mainnet deployment we want you to be ready to be part of it! You’ll be joining a great community, and can join the discussion in the discourse community forum with our team of engineers and other Centrifuge Chain Validators. You can also check out the past Validator Community Calls to learn more.
Now let’s introduce our Centrifuge Testnets, their purpose, characteristics and useful information on how to interact with them.
Flint Testnet: Test it, break it, fix it!
Flint is the first testnet that has been running since November 2019. It is meant for breaking changes and testing integration with other parts of the Centrifuge ecosystem. It is an unstable Test Network — subject to active development where we will be experimenting with new features and runtime upgrades. Think of Flint as a way to test previews and alpha releases. We invite everyone to participate in Flint!
Characteristics
New features will be tested there as part of the Centrifuge code release cycles:
- Does not guarantee maintaining state and breaking changes will be verified here first.
- Test Flint Tokens are called FRAD (no monetary value) — can be obtained from the faucet (see below).
Release Cycle
- Same day of release for non-breaking changes
- For breaking changes that require a hard forks, we will provide a little notice period of 2 business days through the usual community channels
How to get FRAD tokens & Validate Flint
Thanks to BlockXLabs, you can get FRAD testnet tokens for Flint from their faucet. Just navigate to https://faucets.blockxlabs.com/ and create an account. Select Centrifuge and then choose Flint testnet and FRAD tokens. Finally, enter your address, and you are all set to receive tokens from the faucet!
Make sure to create an account first before using the faucet. You can find details on how to create an account for Flint and validate Flint in our developer docs.
Amber Testnet: Your Staging Environment
Amber is the release candidate and Centrifuge’s second public testnet. It is meant for audits and testing the stability of release candidates and preview changes coming to mainnet.
Amber is a stable testnet and will follow a similar release cycle to mainnet. It is running in a configuration closely resembling mainnet. Think of Amber as a way to test beta releases.
Characteristics
- Your staging environment
- Used to get familiar on being part of the validator pool
- Limited to 20 validators (Nomination enabled) for now
- POCs and integrations will be developed in this network
- Token: ARAD — Test Amber Radial Tokens (no monetary value) — can be obtained from the faucet
How to get ARAD tokens & Validate Amber
You can also use the BlockXLabs faucet to get testnet tokens for Amber! Just select Amber testnet as the network and the ARAD token.
You can find details to get set up and validate Amber here: developer.centrifuge.io
Get help and find out more
Please join the discussion in the Centrifuge discourse forum or the community slack. Ask all validator related questions under the #validator public channel.
Wanna know more? Follow Centrifuge on Twitter / Read more on Medium / Check out the Website
Further Developer Resources:
Centrifuge Chain on Github
Developer Documentation
Ask questions in the Community Slack
Join the discussion on Discourse
