Introducing Pangaea — an uncharted territory within the Harmony universe

Pangaea is the name given to Earth’s first and best-known supercontinent, long before tectonic plates did all their shuffling around to create the planet we live on today. You could say that Pangaea is the ultimate example of a ‘borderless’ environment and evidence that we were all ONE in the beginning.

We are launching Pangaea — an experimental game for thousands of people to interact with the Harmony network, test the limitations of our technology and have lots of fun while earning rewards. Pangaea is created purely for experimental purposes. It will have its own currency for playing and bookkeeping.

The goals of Pangaea:

• Test Harmony’s upcoming core protocol milestones and updates such as staking smart contracts and resharding, on a network of all external nodes
• Set-up and onboard a vast number of nodes, ready to jump into the mainnet, through collective knowledge building and competitions
• Identify and award community members who help secure Harmony network and are willing to go the extra mile by taking on leadership roles in our validator community

Who can participate?

EveryONE — the more the merrier! To create a fully secure, permissionless, and sharded blockchain we need lots and lots of nodes. If you’ve previously thought running a node was too technical or expensive, this is a great opportunity to give it a go.

There are several paths to participate:

Player:

If you want to get your hands dirty and play with the network, this is the way to go! Become a node, learn on the go, secure Pangaea and get the chance to become a node in Mainnet with its stake sponsored by Harmony.

In addition, you will win prizes for maintaining superior network performance during the game.

Technical requirements:

• Minimum of 2 cores, 8G RAM, 50G hard drive
• AWS m5a.large or equivalent from other cloud provider

Go ahead and claim your spot in Pangaea here.

Mayor:

A big part of this experiment is unlocking ideas and resources lying untapped within our community. So we’re giving you full autonomy to do just that! Here are some ways to become a Mayor of Pangaea and start earning rewards:

• Create and share content
• Support newbie players
• Spread the word on social media
• Join the core Pangaea team at Harmony
• Or anything else you can think of — surprise us with your ingenuity and leadership skills!

Join our Discord channel #pangaea to start sharing ideas.

Watch for upcoming news and challenges on our twitter.

Gambler:

For the more competitive parts of Pangaea Phase III, we are designing a ‘betting game’ for $ONE holders to participate in. Lock your tokens on Binance DEX, place your bet and win more $ONE tokens.

More details of the betting game will be announced in further blog posts.

The 3 phases of Pangaea

Each phase of Pangaea serves a different purpose. Our goal is to create a natural transition from setting up your node to achieving stability, and then to start competing in various challenges to strengthen the Pangaea network.

Phase I (Aug 15th — 23rd) ~10 days

The launch phase. The main purpose is to get 800+ nodes to successfully join Pangaea. We understand that ‘running a blockchain node’ does not come naturally to everyone; so our team will help you with the set up, answer your questions, and bug you with ‘surprise quizzes’ to make sure you are learning! Beware, you will be able to transfer and stake your rewards in the next phases.

Goals:

• Setup your node and join the network
• Check your balances, block rewards and redeem your daily tokens from the faucet
• Monitor the stability of your node

Phase II (Aug 23rd — Sep 3rd) ~2 weeks

In this phase, the nodes will work together to maximize performance and complete missions, such as sending transactions and using staking smart contracts.

Goals:

• Stake earned rewards from Phase I
• Complete “missions” (e.g., sending tokens transactions to other players)
• Compete on key performance metrics such as uptime, block rewards and latency

Phase III (Sep 3rd — 25th) ~3 weeks

This is where things will get messy, and more entertaining for the seasoned hacker. We want to test the limits of security and stability of our network by incentivizing evil behavior. This may come in various forms: a) you can win prizes for breaking things and b) you may find yourself with ‘super powers’ randomly given by Harmony, and asked to use them in an adversarial way.

Goals:

• Organize individual or group attacks
• Identify and submit security bugs

Game rewards

We want to make sure that everyone is rewarded for the work they put into Pangaea. This means covering the basic costs of operating a node as well as additional incentives for those who go above and beyond. The rewards structure is as follows.

Phase I-II rewards:

• Up to $50 for covering the costs of running a node on Pangaea, for anyone who successfully joins Pangaea
• Rewards of $50–$100 as a portion of the block rewards earned in Pangaea
• Leaderboard prizes of $200–$2,000 for top performers on uptime, block rewards and latency
• Chance to win a sponsored node on Harmony Mainnet (Harmony will sponsor your staking slot via delegation for a predetermined time period)

Phase III rewards:

Our goal is to incentivize adversarial behavior as much as possible. In this phase, there will be lucrative rewards for participants who successfully break Pangaea and submit security vulnerabilities. More details coming soon.

Please note:

• All rewards will be distributed in $ONE tokens after KYC/AML.
• Rewards for mayors and gamblers will be detailed in the following post.

Get involved now!

Hurry up and reserve your seat here. You will hear from us shortly after signing up. In the meantime, join the conversation on our Discord channel #pangaea, brush up on the basics of setting up a node, and follow Harmony on twitter.