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 #0130
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
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
- Idena AI
- De-anonymization of Idena’s founder
- Ads vulnerability bug fix (credits to Zen)
- Reward of 100k IDNA for Ad Refresher tool
- Voting for payment to Idena community helpers
Idena AI
After a few months working on Idena AI we are excited to release its beta version. Idena AI is trained with almost 30,000 flips from different epochs. Flips are collected using foundation invites. Idena AI shows the success ratio of 75% on the training data set and 68% on the validation set of flips. We continue further refining the training process to increase the success ratio and, more importantly, enhance its ability to detect easy repetitive patterns.
There is a beta version of the web app, where you can click the “Copy to clipboard” button for your flip. Then to test Idena AI you need to paste the flip into Idena AI website.
The process involves an initial image recognition phase, where image annotations are then transmitted to the Idena AI. For image annotation we used the following solution: https://huggingface.co/Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large.
Based on image annotations Idena AI computes two scores: one for the right sequence of images and another for the left sequence. Based on their absolute values and their ratio, the gauge chart illustrates the calculated index, which can be interpreted as AI resistance.
If the index falls within the red zone, the flip is easy for AI to solve. In contrast, the green zone suggests that the flip is challenging for AI or that the scores for both sequences are very close, indicating a degree of AI resistance. The orange zone signifies a middle ground, implying that the flip is neither easy nor particularly difficult for the AI.
Our primary goal is to minimize the number of flips in the red zone. Removing flips that fall to the red zone the success score of Idena AI would drop significantly. The success score of any other unknown hostile AI would also drop accordingly.
If you observe that your flip is categorized in the red zone, we recommend experimenting with different shuffling, choosing alternative images, or changing the entire storyline for the flip.
With Idena AI we aim 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.
De-anonymization of Idena’s founder
In anticipation of the release of the scientific paper discussed in the previous Chronicles, the founder of Idena, Mikhail, is planning to step out of anonymity, promising to go public soon.
Follow Mikhail on X (previously Twitter) for updates!
Ads vulnerability bug fix (credits to Zen)
Ads vulnerability bug was fixed. The bug was found by Zen. He was able to successfully run an ad without it being approved through an oracle voting.
Reward of 100k IDNA for Ad Refresher tool
As part of the retroactive funding for projects based on Idena, we have launched the Oracle vote to award Zen with a reward of 100,000 iDNA for implementing the Ad Refresher tool. The secret voting phase is finished. If you participated in this Oracle voting, please login to your account and reveal your vote before the counting period ends.
Voting for payment to Idena community helpers
As Idena is one of the most valuable stamps in the Gitcoin passport, we see an influx of new people willing to get validated and receive this stamp. Unfortunately, newcomers have trouble finding invitations as many validated people are not active in chats, or they give out their invitations right before the validation.
To facilitate this situation, the team of community helpers (Đorđe, hlolve, LL10_lorenzo, cube-g, Mickey K) suggested distributing the invites issued by the Foundation address and assisting newcomers in the follow-up process. The proposal includes payment of 700 iDNA per epoch for each member. The payment will be made from the Foundation wallet. To make the payment process transparent, the Oracle voting has been launched. If you took part in the voting, please log in to your account and send your public vote.
Q&A from IDENA dev team
Q: “Do you still want to achieve sharding with idenanetwork? Do you think there is a market for that, even in times of layer 2 scaling and etf hype, which both dont seem to require radical decentralisation?” (by Ubiubi)
We believe that both scaling and decentralization are important goals on their own. Decentralization through layer 2 solves some problems but introduces new ones.
Idena has all the foundations to achieve sharding. Asynchronous contracts (interaction between contracts may take several blocks) and the potential for the growth of individual miners. However, sharding itself is a useless exercise. We need more real use cases and DApps based on Idena contracts for sharding to become actual.
Q: “What do you think about an ad revoking system? It could be useful to have the ability to revoke an approved ad. I know the implementation for such a thing has some obstacles, but I am curious what you think of this principle.” (by Zen)
The idea makes sense. In this case, it makes sense to lock the advertiser’s deposit for the entire duration of the advertising campaign. However, the ad revoking design does have some challenges that need to be addressed and resolved. For example, malicious revocations initiated by adversary actors who bribe oracles to steal the advertiser’s deposit need to be prevented.
Q: “Did the Idena team incur any listing fees when their token was listed on Hotbit? Given the exchange’s recent closure, is there any information on potential fee recovery?” (by Athman3)
Unfortunately, Hotbit is not responding to us. That is why we do not expect the listing fee and our funds locked for market-making to be returned.
Q: “There had been an increase in reports (in Discord) of the desktop nodes dropping peers or failing to find enough peers in the hour or so preceding the start of the validations (which put participants at risk of failing the validation). It seems that this behavior is recent but now recurring. Do you know what could explain this behavior and how it could be mitigated?” (by JustinMiles)
This can be explained by the imbalance in the number of nodes with closed ports and nodes with open ports (those running on VPS). It is probable that before validation, many users activate their desktop nodes with closed ports, thus occupying available slots for nodes hosted on VPS. For a more reliable connection to nodes, it is necessary to open ports on the router and adjust the operating system settings or run nodes on VPS.
Q: “How many mining nodes do we need for two shards? How many for twenty shards? How many for thousand shards? Would every mining node mine two shards at once, so that we always have some shardmate with instant data availability for every other shard, so that no mining node needs to store the whole blockchain but still the whole blockchain is always available?” (by Ubiubi)
At the moment, the number of shards is determined by the size of the network:
We consider these to be reasonable figures, given that the network will not be dominated by super farms of people, as we observed before the introduction of sublinear staking. Regarding the described design, this aligns with the overall concept of sharding.
Q: “How do you see the relation between marketcap and networksize? How many mining nodes would you expect at 15 mio $ marketcap, how many at 150 mio $?” (by Ubiubi)
It is evident that with the growth of capitalization, mining rewards in terms of IDNA expressed in USD will increase, which, in turn, should increase competition for mining and reduce the shares of miners in the overall reward pool. However, network growth itself does not necessarily lead to an increase in capitalization. For instance, we observe an influx of users from Gitcoin (e.g. airdrop hunters) who may not necessarily be interested in staying in Idena.
Overall, it is challenging to model the relation between marketcap and networksize due to various behavior strategies. For example, speculative price growth may lead to a short-term influx of new investors but may not result in an increase in the number of miners.
Q: “If a user provides incorrect answers during short session he risks lowering his average score and losing stake protection but if a user wrongfully reports a good flip there are no penalties at all, at least not for the one who reported the flip and thus good actors sometimes get penalised. Do you think that this issue should be addressed at all and if yes do you have any ideas on how we could improve the reporting system in that regard?” (by NPC69)
Report of an individual user usually does not lead to a flip report. It is always a matter of consensus of a randomly selected committee. It is possible to fork the protocol and raise the threshold required for reporting a flip to reduce the likelihood of reporting good flips, but this can also lead to impunity for obviously bad flips.
Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no straightforward solution. For example, introducing penalties for incorrect reporting may lead users to avoid reporting flips unnecessarily, resulting in a deterioration of flip quality. Introducing penalties for inactivity (not reporting flips) may lead users to randomly spend all their reports to avoid being penalized.
One possible solution could be the use of friendly-AI to identify bad flips during validation and a significant increase in rewards for successful reporting.
Q: “I have a question from one of the members from Idena Balkan’s community: “We’re witnessing an increase in interest towards ordinals on Bitcoin and we’re aware that the market demands it. A recent example of deploying ordinals on Polkadot’s network allowed for an increase in the number of daily transactions from 10k to 5mil in mere 2 days. Is it possible to deploy ordinals on Idena’s network? We are a small ecosystem with limited resources and that would without a doubt attract a lot of attention and a lot of new users who would have to validate themselves in order to have their ordinal on Idena. Although this may only be a temporary trend, such a thing could easily provide great marketing for Idena and a great number of people would be introduced to Idena’s idea and the decentralised identity. I am certain that that would make a certain part of those very newcomers stay in Idena because of its vision.”” (by NPC69)
Ordinals is a way to issue tokens on Bitcoin. However Idena natively supports contracts through which any person can issue their own IRC-20 tokens .
Q: “Would it be possible to somehow indicate that the users are required to be logged in the app at least 10 minutes early before the validation because of the flip lottery? A lot of users are not aware of that and they fail their validation due to “late submission”.” (by NPC69)
Currently we post announcements in Telegram after each validation. Also, the @MyIdenaBot sends automatic notifications. If you have ideas on how to improve communication, feel free to suggest.
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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, I am glad to be back for another Community Chronicles after missing the last ones! I hope you’ve all been doing great in these past epochs. Also I wanted to give a huge shout-out to @npc.69 for the guidance offered to newcomers on Discord with the influx of new users we received.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into what’s been cooking in Idena.
Idena: The Ultimate Gitcoin Stamp for Anti-Sybil and Privacy Protection
As said in the previous Chronicles, Idena is a key stamp in the Gitcoin Passport product. And as expected, the use cases have expanded even further. Not only is Idena one of the major stamp on Gitcoin Passport, but it’s also one of the few that doesn’t come with a high cost or compromise your privacy.
You might have noticed an increasing number of top-notch projects looking to fight against bots and bad actors, and introducing numerous requirements for various steps. With Idena, it’s quite easy to match most of the requirements!
Some recent highlights:
Recently, Linea enabled the claim of a SBT Token for those holding a Gitcoin Passport with over 20 points.
Gitcoin Passport was required to use Avail faucet…
…or to obtain Discord Roles on zkSync server.
So what are you waiting for to get the most prestigious stamp? Only 60 identities are eligible for the rarest stamp of the Gitcoin Passport ecosystem!
The significance of anti-Sybil protection cannot be overstated, but many crypto enthusiasts also expressed concerns about KYC and other privacy-invading solutions in the Gitcoin Passports. Once again, Idena stands out as the perfect solution, not compromising anything about your identity and private data.
Slowly but surely, Idena is being recognized as a true contender for Sybil protection. And this is only the beginning… keep an eye out for airdrops, just like @UniqueHuman pointed out on Discord
Ad Refresher Tool by Zen
Community developer Zen has introduced the Ad Refresher tool to the Idena community.
This tool is designed to burn iDNA periodically, ensuring that your advertisements keeps continuous visibility.
We invite our community to actively participate in the testing phase and share your feedback to improve this tool further.
Feel free to participate in the Github (https://github.com/Zen-44/ad-refresher) or in our Community Discord!
Notable Tweets
· Is video based « proof of humanity » solutions viable or do we need more of Idena?
· A Vietnamese introduction to Idena by @xuantrungpl
· A nice mention of Idena by @CryptoKaiserP
Governance Update regarding Community Wallet and Community Proposals
The community governance initiative is momentarily on hold, while we wait for the development of the necessary smart contracts. In the meantime, funds have been sent back to the Idena Foundation wallet https://scan.idena.io/transaction/0x98fb426e1dee6bcc1da6e090d5f6fc372856faa6f05ae77ccf3cf10f7f5bfde7
Governance continues to be a highly discussed topic. Feel free to join the community Discord to engage with the community on this topic. (https://discord.gg/cpnmCVfh).
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.
