🚧Road to mainnet — part 5: challenges & milestones of Cudos’ testnet, Project Artemis fire💥
We are thrilled to enter the second week of Collins, the final phase of our incentivised testnet, Project Artemis. Since September, our teams have been working closely with validators and developers to prepare for our mainnet, due to launch in the coming weeks. With the mainnet launch, our network will transition from Ethereum to the native Cudos blockchain.
This blog is part of our ongoing Road to mainnet series. In case you missed it, you can read them below:
🚧Road to mainnet — part 1: What are the benefits for our blockchain?💥
🚧 Road to mainnet — part 2: utility of tokens in the Cudos blockchain 💥
🚧 Road to mainnet — part 4: prepare for the Cudos native blockchain launch💥
The goal of the ongoing phase 4 is to test the mainnet launch with the validators, who will be part of our actual mainnet launch, and to fix any remaining bugs and potential security issues.
Collins is divided into three stages. First, since last week, our product and development teams have been busy internally testing the mainnet launch. Second, this week we will instruct a number of our core validators to test the procedures alongside our teams. Third, in the final stage, we will start a full-blown dress rehearsal, where all of the validators intending to be a part of our mainnet launch will participate in the tests.
An email will be sent out to the validators this week and it is mandatory to respond to it to be a part of the dress rehearsal. Failing to respond will result in the validator not being part of the genesis of the mainnet.
Clocking in milestones along the way
Each phase of Project Artemis was a milestone as it allowed us to test the network under as much stress as possible, ensuring robustness and security before our mainnet launch.
Phase 1 (Apollo) saw us opening the testnet for the first time, allowing the public to open native wallets and claim some testnet CUDOS to start exploring transactions. Phase 2 (Buzz) saw the introduction of NFTs and a wider array of possible activities on the network (Delegation, Governance, etc.). In phase 3 (Armstrong), we saw increased transaction activity and smart contract experimentation, and the ongoing phase 4 (Collins) is running a full dress rehearsal of the deployment process with our validators.
Challenges of the public testnet
Throughout September and the following months, we have been engaging with the developers and validators to conduct thorough testing of our blockchain. Among the many challenges that are part of migrating from testnet to mainnet, Ethan Illingworth, our Blockchain Product Manager, listed three:
Solid documentation: Improving our documentation for a wider audience, incorporating inbound FAQs to make things easier to understand for a first-time user, particularly on the validator signup journey.
Monitoring: Project Artemis is valuable as we open the network to the public for experimentation and stress-testing, but we needed a way to monitor and investigate traffic or unusual occurrences. Hence, we built some internal tooling to be on top of this.
Communication: We strengthened our community communication with validators and developers through dedicated channels for certain users/topics in Discord to ensure we can keep up with support inquiries. Our dev relations team is plugged into this process and available to assist anyone using the testnet and the upcoming mainnet.
Key issues resolved during the testnet phase
Our community has been eagerly waiting for the mainnet launch and keenly following each development. The public testnet is the ideal window for us to resolve fundamental issues.
During the past three phases, we fixed critical issues on the protocol layer and our various UIs. One key technical patch was an amendment to our gravity bridge implementation, which uncovered security concerns from a technical audit. “We patched these holes by simplifying the orchestrator consensus and the queuing mechanisms. This means the bridge is now secure for funds transfer and runs with a permissioned orchestrator pool from genesis. We hope to open this up again over time so that the bridge can be fully permissionless and decentralised,” explained Ethan Illingworth.
The Cosmos SDK was updated during our testnet phases, adding NFT functionality support, among other improvements. Following this, we introduced an update to our network, adding NFT module capabilities. “We needed to go through a hard fork required by this SDK version update, which meant that we had to migrate from the old testnet to a new one. This hard fork required intensive coordination between us and testnet validators. As a result, the old network was frozen, and the new one kickstarted with all the relevant data migrated via the genesis file. Later on, we had an additional hard fork to introduce gravity bridge update, extended NFT functionalities, and updates on the IBC module,” shared Adnan Efendić, our Blockchain Product Owner.
Onwards and upwards
Launching a mainnet isn’t an easy task, and we continue to march towards our goal. While running the three phases of our public testnet, we have tested the functionalities needed to make the network robust. And we will be re-testing these as part of our current phase, Collins.
Project Artemis has been key to discovering and fixing many bugs and potential security lapses along the way. Equipped with competent and knowledgeable devs and network experts team, not compromising on our network’s stability and security is a must for us.
Project Artemis wouldn’t be complete without the continuous support from our validators and developers community. So, as part of phase 4, we’d like to invite you to complete these bonus tasks! After completing the tasks, validators and developers can submit their rewards claim using this form.
If you are a CUDOS token holder, stake on our platform to help secure the network and earn juicy rewards in return.
About Cudos
Cudos is powering the metaverse bringing together DeFi, NFTs, and gaming experiences to realise the vision of a decentralised Web 3.0, enabling all users to benefit from the growth of the network. We’re an interoperable, open platform launchpad that will provide the infrastructure required to meet the 1000x higher computing needs to create fully immersive, gamified digital realities. Cudos is a Layer 1 blockchain and Layer 2 community-governed compute network designed to ensure decentralised, permissionless access to high-performance computing at scale. Our native utility token CUDOS is the lifeblood of our network and offers an attractive annual yield and liquidity for stakers and holders.
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Originally published at https://www.cudos.org.
