Battle of Nodes Prize Pool spl/it
Prize pool increased to $60.000
- Rewards for issue discovery, testnet operation and community support
- Vulnerabilities — $20.000
- Top 7 accounts — $4.850
- Leaderboard — $32.500 for +800 nodes
- Community — $2.500 for 7 champions
Hello Elrond Validators!
As we near the end of the third round of Phase 1 — Build of Battle of Nodes, we have all the needed info for calculating the prize pool distribution. But before we go into the figures, I would like to take a moment and thank you for your engagement with our event!
Our previous testnet had 180 validators, so our guesstimates regarding the number of nodes we’d see in battle were optimistically hovering around 300. Little did we know that 310 people from 43 countries would register +850 nodes to do compete in Battle of Nodes!
This level of attention truly humbles us and also makes us feel even more responsible to deliver the first truly scalable sharded Proof of Stake Layer 1 solution capable of sustained +10k TPS.
In the non-blockchain financial world, a company’s worth is measured by its market value, which reflects revenue, adoption and strategy, among others. The crypto world is different in a way that projects are valued mostly by their perceived potential, which is often first erroneously derived out of the amount of raised capital.
At Elrond, we carefully planned the delivery of our ambitious vision for a 1.000-fold improvement over existing blockchains, assessed the related costs & potential risks and decided to raise $5.15mn. By stretching a dollar into three, we managed to create a product with record breaking speeds of 65.000 TPS in a test environment, stay ahead of any competition in bringing the first truly sharded PoS blockchain live, and gather a community of almost 20.000 supporters together.
Despite market conditions we’re still ROI positive and with plenty of runway, but that does not take our focus away from the road ahead for one second. As such, deciding on an amount for the prize pool has proven to be a difficult decision. We tried to make sure we’re an attractive honeypot for blockchain’s shrewdest digital magicians, a lucrative resources investment for potential mainnet operators and a grateful host for our community champions, while at the same time remaining frugal about our expenses.
And we have succeeded. Our $50.000 prize pool may not seem much when compared with bounties ran by other “bigger” projects, but the level of committed amount is only second to one other project, as shown in this Messari report (paywall).
After seeing the excitement and amount of people that have joined the event, we decided to increase the prize pool to $60.000, as a sign of respect for the amount of attention and resources you guys decided to dedicate for helping and challenging us.
Further splitting this prize pool was again an exercise in getting the balance just right. While we want to make sure all active node operators cover their incurred costs & get substantial prizes for excellent performance, our core goal is to reward those who help us find issues with our product, while also caring for the helpful wise elders of our community.
We therefore came to the following spl/it:
Vulnerabilities — $20.000
One third of the pool will go to those of you who find issues with our blockchain. You can claim them by either submitting an issue to our Github or by performing an attack (and proving that it was you!) on our network in Round 3 — Assault (November 06–20).
The choice of tactics remains with you:
- claiming via Github means you lock in your prize by being the first that submits the issue, and we are grateful you don’t bring our chain to a grinding halt, which can take a bit to restore
- waiting for the right time and performing an attack means you get bragging rights, potentially gain advantages for your nodes and have a lot of fun, but run the risk that someone else claims prize money by logging the vulnerability into GitHub first
Top 7 on the Leaderboard — $4.850
The highest scoring node of the top 7 participants will be granted a special prize. This category is a mix of responsible node operation and gaming our system to earn more rewards. We can’t reasonably expect that the top 1% nodes on the leaderboard will get there 100% fairly. We of course encourage you to do what’s needed, so we may learn from you.
Remember: only one Top 7 prize per participant. So even if you have 6 of the highest scoring nodes on the leaderboard, you will only get 1 prize (1st — $1.250) and 5 rewards for the remaining nodes. 2nd prize then goes to the account with the highest scoring node after the first, and so on.
Overall Leaderboard standings — $32.650
Battle of Nodes scoring keeps track of uptime, number of earned rewards, proposed blocks, missions and client version. The philosophy and formulas can be found here. Nodes with 0% uptime through rounds 1 & 2 were already removed. The lowest scoring 100 nodes will share $1.230. 50% uptime throughout the event is needed for a node to be eligible for rewards.
Community — $2.500
At Elrond we’re pouring our souls into creating the world’s fastest Layer 1 protocol and as such we want to make sure that, once it matures, it moves into the care of competent hands that will uphold our spirit and values further. We trust the best of us will rise to help others even in the heat of battle, so we set aside a significant portion of the prize pool to award 7 distinguished contributors.
Swag & non-fungible tokens will be awarded as well, please stay tuned for more details on that.
Thank you again for your continued support! We trust our event is both a source of learning for becoming a productive member of the new distributed economy as well as a source of fun and a place to bond with like minded individuals.
We’re very happy when you engage with us by asking questions, providing feedback and interacting with other community members. At Elrond you will always be welcome and have any question, no matter how trivial you might think it is, answered seriously and in full. So please stay tuned to our channels and follow the action, the Battle of Nodes is heating up!
See you on the battle #fiedl !
About Elrond
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team.
For more information, please visit us:
