Idena Chronicles
- German edition by Ubiubi
- Greek edition by TomThisIsIt
- Hungarian edition by IllusionMayhem
- Italian edition by Kazeru Wakabayashi
- Persian edition by Kasra D
- Romanian edition by Zen
- Russian edition by IDENA World
- Serbian edition by NPC69
Network metrics
Epoch #0125
Active miners — total number of actively mining identities running their own mining nodes or delegated into mining pools.
Mining nodes — total number of full mining nodes run by individual identities or pool owners who activated online status.
Newcomers — number of addresses that validated for the first time
Success ratio — share of users attended the validation and successfully validated
Active wallets — unique wallets that made transactions during the last epoch
Competitors
Network stats
Last validation stats
- Nodes on VPS — users running their nodes on VPS
- Built-in nodes — users of the Idena Desktop App with build-in node
- Shared nodes (web) — Web App users renting shared nodes via marketplace
- Unknown shared nodes (web ) — Web App users who connect to shared nodes that are not listed in the Idena shared nodes marketplace
To have a smooth and reliable validation ceremony experience, we recommend using VPS or built-in nodes if you have fast Internet connection and good router, or the nodes listed in the node marketplace in the official Idena Web App in other cases.
Markets
Idena Core Team Update
- ETH DevCon in Istanbul
- Gitcoin Grants Round 19
- Idena AI proof-of-concept
ETH DevCon in Istanbul
We attended ETH DevConnect in Istanbul from November 13–19 to engage in peer-to-peer discussions with influencers and reviewers of the paper we are writing. Moreover, we had a chance to meet some dedicated Idena community members in person for the first time. Big thanks to you guys for always supporting us, giving feedback, and being positive! We’re excited about more chances to hang out with the community and work together on making Idena even better. Thanks again for being a crucial part of our journey!
Gitcoin Grants Round 19
Idena took part in Gitcoin Grants Round 19 within the ‘Web3 Open Source Software’ category. A total of 3,245 unique voters collectively made a contribution exceeding $4,000. We are sincerely grateful for the generous support and engagement from each contributor.
Idena AI proof-of-concept
We are currently working on the Idena AI proof-of-concept, aiming to provide a tool for users for making AI-resistant flips. This is so called “friendly AI” that will help Idena participants to filter out flips that are too easy to solve for automated tools. Usually, these flips follow certain patterns, like having a thumbs-up at the end or winning a competition. Some people make up these patterns and use them repeatedly during validation, which could make the network less secure.
Ideally, each flip should tell a unique story or include collages and hand drawings to make it harder for AI to solve. However, for newcomers it’s tough to know if their flip is resistant to AI or not. That’s where a “friendly” AI could step in.
In simple terms, here’s how we see the framework:
1. Participants use AI to create flips and validate their resistance to AI.
2. These flips are used in the validation process. During the long session participants use AI to challenge some of the flips and report them if they are non AI-resistant.
3. As a result of validation a training dataset of new flips is feeded to the friendly AI (some of the non-reported flips). AI learns from new sets of flips to catch new patterns providing better tools for participants on the next iteration.
This cycle is to make the network more secure over time by enhancing the AI resistance of flips. Friendly AI helps participants to make AI-resistant flips and filter easy flips making it harder to solve flips for hostile AI even if the latter is more powerful. Hopefully over time the framework will be able to provide a multimodal benchmark test for human intelligence including image recognition and common sense logic.
As of today, we are developing a standalone tool that runs an image recognition process for a flip, sends the image annotations to a pre-trained AI, and provides the results in the form of a score indicator. The score determines the potential AI-resistance of the flip. If the indicator is in the red zone, it suggests that the flip is likely easy to solve, while the green zone indicates that the AI cannot solve it or solves it with a low confidence level.
We have tested various patterns commonly used in validations. Some patterns are easily solved by the current AI. For instance, the pattern ‘thumbs up at the end’ is well recognized in most cases
“Receiving a package/box/gift” pattern
Additionally, the current AI can solve typical flips such as building/construction, performances on stage with applause at the end, injuries with hospital/ambulance scenes, theft with the conclusion in jail, and more. However, there is still room for improvement, as some obvious patterns may go unnoticed by the AI.
To keep up with the latest patterns, a continuous learning process for the AI is required, ensuring it adapts to new flips over time.
Q&A from IDENA dev team
Q: “Considering the uncertainty around the future of BUSD, do you have plans to launch another iDNA liquidity pool paired with an alternative USD-pegged coin?” (by Justin Miles)
Actually, we did not create the existing liquidity pool on the BSC network. Liquidity in the WIDNA/BUSD pool is organic, just like in the WIDNA/USDT pool. We hope that liquidity providers will solve this issue by converting BUSD, for example, into USDT.
Q: “Have you ever considered a collaboration with Qortal? Both Idena and Qortal are *uniquely interesting* projects and below the radar, and I think that they could benefit from one another.” (by NPC69)
We welcome collaborations with any legitimate projects and look forward to understanding the ways in which our collaboration can contribute positively to the success and growth of each respective project. Feel free to share your insights and ideas as we strive to build a partnership that is not only fruitful but also enhances the overall value of our endeavors.
Q: “I am excited about your R&D in the realm of AI flip testing, please, can you tell us more about the current state and challenges?” (by Ubiubi)
Thank you for your interest. We will gladly answer your questions.
Q: “1. Are there plans to integrate the flip tester AI directly with the Idena node and is it even possible to decentralise it, looking at computation requirements and high gpu load of known open aources LLMs?” (by Ubiubi)
The Idena AI cannot be integrated into the node due to increased hardware requirements. However, it can be linked with the client as an external AI tool to address two tasks: 1) creating higher-quality flips and 2) validating (reporting) flips for validation.
We do not see the need for decentralizing AI in terms of making AI a subject for consensus and including it into the node. AI is more of a tool to assist participants, similar to Google Images or generative AI when creating flips.
Decentralization is ensured by the protocol itself. Different users may use different versions of AI to test flips and make decisions regarding their reporting.
Q: “2. Does the current design of the flip tester AI involve translating images into text to leverage a language model for scoring the probability of each flip side being the correct one?” (by Ubiubi)
Image annotation is certainly a necessary step in solving flips; however, at the moment, language models are geared towards a broader spectrum of tasks than flip solving. More specialized and lightweight AI models can be used for solving flips.
Q: “3. Can you provide insights into whether the image recognition aspect as well as the probable LLM aspect of the flip tester AI currently utilizes a centralized platform?” (by Ubiubi)
We do not plan to use any centralized platforms for creating annotations or solving flips. Instead, open-source tools for image annotations can be utilized, which anyone could run on their VPS.
Q: “4. How do you envision decentralizing the AI’s learning and decision-making process to maintain the trustless nature essential to blockchain technology?” (by Ubiubi)
Currently we do not see the possibility of making AI decentralized, however AI can be used in a distributed manner, similar to a shared nodes marketplace in Idena, where any participant can provide access to their AI instance for a fee. Participants will have an incentive to use these AIs to create more AI-resistant flips themselves and avoid being reported during validation.
Q: “5. Given the complexity of AI development, is the current Idena team equipped to handle the project in-house, or is there also collaboration with external AI experts or consultants?” (by Ubiubi)
We have consulted with AI experts, and they neither recommend handling the task in-house or in collaboration with a specific AI team. Instead, they suggest organizing a framework in the form of a challenge where different teams can compete to achieve higher results, earning prizes for their accomplishments.
Q: “6. In terms of continuous training, what mechanisms are you considering to ensure the AI evolves with the network without centralized oversight?” (by Ubiubi)
To stimulate the development of AI, we think of the following framework that would encourage competition among AI experts and teams:
1. Maintaining the leaderboard of competing AI models. Backtesting existing models while the difficulty of flips grows.
2. Allocating a cascade of rewards for achieving higher scores.
3. Providing actual datasets of flips collected from actual validations both for training and challenging new AI models.
4. Running the challenge based on the openness and accessibility principles so anyone could access the existing AI models, run them on their own hardware and verify results.
Q: “7. Will the AI receive training feedback from flip session results, which would require people to publish flips with an already into the node integrated AI? Or is there central oversight only?” (by Ubiubi)
Yes, AI should be feeded with new training datasets of flips as their difficulty grows. The increase in flip difficulty should be facilitated by participants using AI tools when creating and reporting flips. From a technical perspective, flips can be collected either centrally through the activation of invitations of the “god” node or in a distributed manner, where a portion of random flips is permanently revealed by participants for the entire network.
Q: “8. What are the biggest challenges currently? How can the Community help you?” (by Ubiubi)
For now, we see two directions in which the Idena community can make meaningful contributions:
1. Encouraging content creation about Idena that would help newcomers start their Idena journey and become miners with their own nodes. By providing engaging content, the Community can facilitate a smoother onboarding process for those exploring the Idena ecosystem.
If anyone from the community is willing to host a content creation competition, we are happy to provide a prize pool for participants and announce this competition in our official channels.
2. Developing decentralized applications (DApps) that could lead to real use cases, including financial applications (e.g. DEX, stablecoins). On our part, we are ready to support developers through challenges with prizes or by allocating IDNA coins specifically for projects that have demonstrated their relevance.
Q: “9. Is the team exploring the possibility of using the extensive flip data to develop a decentralised chatbot that could interact with users? Could it be a USP to build something like that incentivized by IDNA tokens for prompts and decentralized computation?” (by Ubiubi)
Interesting idea, we haven’t thought about it yet :)
Q: “What are the plans for reaching more people through X, and other social networks? The activity is very low at the moment.” (by Support And Resistance)
Our past experience on launching social media activities showed that any prize-driven competitions attract bots and click farms. Otherwise, activities which do not promise prizes are not quite effective. Idena official X account is primarily used to update our followers on news, validation events, protocol changes. Also we repost relevant content shared by our community members.
Anyway, if you want to propose and host any social media initiatives related to Idena, we will be happy to support it.
Q: “Is it possible to integrate some sort of open “Portal” for connecting people who want invitation with the ones who are issuing them? The problem is that newbies who are coming to the network have major issues in getting someone to reply when asking, when asking between epochs when the activity in chat channels is very low or non existent. Many of those people leave dissapointed when they dont get a reply for few days. The current invitation system is practically unintentionally pushing new people away. Creating a portal in app itself will solve that issue, people will be able to contact the issuers directly, see their true stake, do the flip test directly within the client instead of providing flip certificate link(which can be copied from someone else from chat), and by using the portal the newbies will prove they have the synced node up and running, and much more. Everything will be anonymous of course, only identity addresses, lists of invite issuers sorted by stake size and identity age and so on… This will make a lot of things easier for both sides.” (by Support And Resistance)
If anyone from the community is interested in developing such an ‘invitation portal,’ we would be delighted to support them and integrate it with the Idena app.
Q: “Are there any plans for improving Idena Desktop app, in terms of adding more editing options when making flips, making an explanation for the nonsense 4th flip extremely visible so the newbies don’t wrongly report flips anymore, and lastly, adding an auto-renewal option in the Ads section (this would greatly help people forgeting to renew their ads between validations when there is low user activity overall)?” (by Support And Resistance)
- Idena desktop app already has the basic features for making a flip. For more advanced features, users can utilize some third-party image editors (Photoshop, Paint etc) and upload the result to the flip editor.
- As for the nonsense image, we don’t have statistical evidence that newbies report flips with nonsense images due to a lack of understanding. Most newbies undergo training validation as part of onboarding process, which includes the “good” flips with nonsense images that should not be reported. Therefore, newcomers should be acquainted with this concept.
- We agree that an auto-renewal option for ads is a nice-to-have feature. However, it should be implemented not as part of the Idena client but as a standalone utility running 24x7 to monitor competitors’ rates and burning a specific amount of tokens per campaign to outcompete other advertisers.
For anyone who makes such a tool open source, we are ready to offer a reward of 100,000 IDNA and initiate an oracle voting. Based on the outcome of the voting, this reward will be sent to the winner.
—
If you have more questions post it in the comments below. We will pick the most interesting questions to answer them in the next Chronicles.
Community
Global community channels
Community updates
Edited by Syd
Hey Idenians!
My apologies, I got ill with a high fever and couldn’t get around to putting together the community part of the Chronicles. But no worries, I’ll be back next Chronicles!
In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy the year-end festivities! I am wishing you merry Christmas and a Happy new year in advance. And get ready because 2024 is going to be the year of decentralized identity!
Cheers
Syd
Top active users
Community Discord leaderboard:
Telegram — Global community leaderboard:
Telegram — Idena Balkan leaderboard:
Telegram — Idena Italia leaderboard:
Telegram — Idena France leaderboard:
If you want to feature your telegram community leaderboard in the Idena Chronicles, please add ComBot to your telegram group and add @AndrewIdena to the list of group admins to give the Idena core team access to your group stats.
Idena website translations
Idena Web app translations
We invite you to join the idena translation community and contribute to the translation of the Idena website to your language!
If you want to take part in translation verification and funding, please contact Syd or Rioda to join the translation management workgroup.
