Battle of Nodes: Songs of Valor
The Elrond incentivized testnet event was conceived to bring some real world data into our thinking process. It’s easy to get lost in tunnel vision when you have a laser focus on solving some of blockchain’s hardest problems.
It was also meant to increase the confidence of node runners to the point where they are equipped to operate the Elrond backbone. After all, blockchain’s infinite promise of opportunity is the proverbial celestial heavens, and it needs to rest on strong and trustworthy shoulders.
To emulate real life conditions in the cutthroat blockchain space, an adversarial environment by definition, we conceived an event with combat theme, where node operators are enemies fighting each other for the top rewards. We named it “Battle of Nodes”, denoting attacks, competitive behavior, and even missions aimed at testing the trust in one another and potentially generating drama.
But something else happened.
Instead of node operators taking on the hero mentality, ready to best everyone else in a free-for-all deathmatch, they bonded together. Battle still happened, but it was against the complexity of blockchain, the imperfections of our protocol, documentation and tools, against the obstacles that Elrond needs to overcome to stand tall. Node operators helped one another to get over technical difficulties and increase knowledge, so that everyone who wanted to succeed could move forward.
The Elrond protocol gained a lot of bug reports, the code got a lot of improvements, the tools got to the next level of excellence. But Elrond altogether gained something far more important — a strong validator team glued together by passion for a vision we share. We are happy to be able to reward them for this collective team behavior.
Read on for the winners, awards and a few stories.
The Grand Winners
The overall winners of the event accumulated the most rewards and everyone’s respect by displaying a combination of technical prowess, community sense and willingness to help us improve. We are a better project thanks to you — congratulations and well earned!
Check out the full list here (link)
Community Awards
The term generally used for the people giving strength to a crypto project is community. But at Elrond we acknowledge them as leaders. Elrond is not the leader, we are the builder. The leaders are those who grasp our vision and potential before anyone else does, rally around us, help us, and most importantly, repeatedly and stubbornly fight for our future to unfold.
Here’s a video (link) on the topic — yes, we’re the funny guy doing what seems like a wacky dance at first. And our leaders are the first few people rallying around the funny guy. Then everyone follows the leaders and is doing the wacky dance. What started off as something completely different, becomes the norm, thanks to the leaders. Thanks to you.
Leaderboard awards
We ranked our nodes by using a scoring mechanism that rewarded uptime, performance and a few carefully crafted missions. We encouraged operators to keep their nodes up and running at top speed with the latest version for as long as possible. We gradually challenged participants with missions that had them look at how Elrond works, what’s under the hood of a node and even how to solve the byzantine generals problem without blockchain.
The emerging winners displayed a combination of all the skills required to power through our requirements and challenges, and were handsomely rewarded. Congratulations node runners!
Check out the full list here (link).
Vulnerabilities awards
One of our core goals was to make our testnet a honeypot for shrewd hackers to find issues with our blockchain and even exploit them. We got what we wanted, and more. 3 clever attacks were beautifully executed and a lot of issues, bugs and suggestions were submitted to our GitHub.
Elrond got to where it is today thanks to a great effort, open discussions, and constructive feedback that extended far beyond the core team, to global community of resourceful individuals. Your submissions were truly helpful, we thank you for these gifts.
Hats off to DrDelphi, Seb, MikeHibbert and Sorin, who submitted the most critical issues and performed the most interesting attacks so far.
You can view the full list of GitHub items which were rewarded here (link).
Elrond Team Awards
While the Elrond team & affiliates were not allowed to partake in the rewards pool, that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a good competition. So we got our little side gig going. We entered our own nodes in the competition, ran our own VPSs and hardware, did missions the best we could, and even ranked our efforts on a separate Leaderboard view. Some of us even tried influencing the game master, but no amount of pocket lint, old arcade tickets or expired gift vouchers could move that insensitive robot.
Still, we did pretty good! Check us out in the internal board (link) and see how we did overall (link).
A few shout outs to Nodes Team members
There is a saying in Romanian which roughly translates to “The man blesses his surroundings”. It means that wherever a man goes, everything around him gets transformed in tune with his spirit, nature and good will. Elrond wouldn’t be Elrond without Alwin around. Mithril is spotless, tough, fair and precious. It’s only fitting that you should have it. Congratulations, well deserved and thank you for everything.
Elrond takes pride in having some of the best developers in the space. They are knowledgeable, hardworking, selfless and resourceful. Not all of them are employed by Elrond. Mihai naturally latched onto Elrond and is providing invaluable support and help, both to the team and to the community. It’s no surprise that he is a recipient of our Mithril awards and the overall Battle of Nodes winner. Congratulations DrDelphi and thank you.
Being a validator on the Elrond network means more than running a node. It means being curious about how it works, how it can be improved and being genuinely happy to teach others about all of that. Sorin’s “Master of Nodes” title was earned over time, as was this Gold Award. Thank you Sorin.
Changing the world is no easy task, especially with a grand vision that is the sum of very different parts, all of which need to be crafted, understood and communicated perfectly. The Elrond language, semantics and grammar are special and we’re crafting it as we build. Victor speaks it naturally and teaches it to others. We are lucky and grateful to have you. Thank you, Victor.
If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets. But things are not always easy and blockchain is notoriously hard. So when you set a noble but hard goal of bringing blockchain to everyone, the uphill battle will be hard. Mysticboy’s comprehensive tutorials, Micabytes’ right paced detailed videos, Jose, Benand Frank patiently guiding those in need to overcome their issues with clear details, timely responses and patient clarifications — these are some of our secret weapons that will make Elrond win. We are so grateful guys, well earned awards!
Reddy, micky, Alex P, Kristie, Randy, Tarantulo, Seb — you embody the core values of Elrond at your every interaction with a dedication that is humbling. Thank you all for everything!
There is a time in life for everything and there are some things in life which are timeless. While there’s not enough evidence to point in either direction so far, our feeling is that blockchain should be timeless and perpetual and ubiquitous. Our Mia & George are representatives of two sides of the age spectrum, who are proof that the right time for the best things in life is right now. Thank you, guys!
There is a very strong community from Russia in Battle of Nodes. They are competent and agile operators whose performance is undeniable when looking at the leaderboard, even if language can be a barrier sometimes. We were lucky to have ag, the improbable ambassador of our Russian friends, who took it upon himself to bring us feedback and take our inputs back to his friends. It’s no surprise that they chose to reward him for it and help boost his node to crown him as Leaderboard winner. Спасибо!
Lowering the barriers for blockchain is not an easy goal. How do you know if you are achieving it? Simple: you get a native English speaker with regular computer skills, a bit of curiosity and who doesn’t shy away from work, and have him migrate his nodes from Windows to Linux and still be on top of the Leaderboard for some time. Ken, we named a critical component of our testnet in the office after you.
Dan, Koen, SageKnight, MikeHibbert, Alexander S, Jaymotionx, ICOPC, Kevin, @aa, Long Hynh, Adrian, Nazar, Soph and so many others — you spent precious time & energy to help others, keep us in check, give us feedback, engage with everyone and generally make our Validators channel a more lively and fun place to be in.
If your name is not here, that’s just because we want to keep this at reading length. But we acknowledge your contributions and thank you for it. And if you happened to have been at the receiving end for support and guidance, know that those that gave it to you were in your position not too long ago. We’re just getting started, you are still early. Welcome!
A special shout out to the professional staking infrastructure operators
“River logging” is moving sawn tree logs from the forest via the river to the sawmills. These logs often bundle up and get stuck at some narrower passing. So specialized river logging engineers are called in to look at the logs and decide which single log needs to be moved to unblock all the others. These logs are called “deciding logs”.
Much like river logging, blockchain often gets stuck because of fat blocks loaded with transactions that regular nodes are simply not equipped to process in time, leading to stalls, delays and crashes. Many thanks to our professional staking infrastructure operating friends for operating the deciding nodes that helped our blockchain stay smooth.
Although our scoring may have missed to showing your enterprise grade equipment, and our missions may have seemed trivial to blockchain experts such as yourselves. Still, your fairness, sportsmanship, restraint and constant feedback have helped us improve things a lot.
Thank you 01node, Easy2Stake, Stake Capital, stakefish, SyncNode, Ubik Capital, Wolfedge Capital!
And we’re just getting started
Battle of Nodes continues with its Shadowshards expansion. We’re 877 nodes strong, peaked at 6.000 TPS, had almost a full day of constant 2.000 TPS, have been seriously nuked and recovered without any intervention, have autoupdaters that keep the nodes in shape all the times, and so much more. But most importantly, we have a strong group of core people who love Elrond, and this group is growing. Growing fast with each passing day.
Come join us!
- Join https://t.me/ElrondValidators & https://t.me/BattleOfNodes
- Perform KYC (link)
- Install up to 6 nodes — tutorial (link)
- Fill in this form (link)
- Read the terms, conditions & FAQ
