Announcing the KiChain Testnet Challenge Winners.

Tarek Awwad

Published in

Ki Foundation

4 min readOct 8, 2021

The KiChain Testnet Challenge is finally over… It is time to announce the big winners…

The KiChain Challenge in a nutshell

Between the 9th of August and the 12th of September, the Ki Foundation hosted a Testnet Challenge aiming to consolidate its validator community and to prepare the upcoming mainnet upgrade. We received approximately 1000 subscriptions from individuals, devs and professional validators from all around the world.

Four main milestones marked this challenge :

The decentralized launch of kichain-t-2 with 800 validators registered in the genesis file. After stabilization, the chain reached an active validator set of 650 validators.
The upgrade to kichain-t-3 which brought the IBC functionalities to the testnet. Despite the size of the validator set, the upgrade was performed in a record time and ap. 200 validators were up within 200 blocks from the chain start. The validator list size reached a peak of ap. 450 validators after stabilization.
The upgrade to kichain-t-4. This upgrade happened with a very short notice to update genesis parameters enabling IBC transfer and shortening governance deposit and voting periods.
The IBC Relayer challenge during which validators were asked to spin their own IBC relayers with existing counterpart IBC enabled blockchains and to write a tutorial on the setup process. We received over 82 valid submissions and the KiChain testnet was connected to more than 10 public testnets such as Rizon, Band, UMEE, Akash, Croeseid, Juno, …

The rewards, larger pool, more winners!

As mentioned in the announcement and the ranking system posts, the prize pool consists of a cash amount of 100 000 USD in XKI and a delegation pool of a total 1 000 000 USD equivalent in XKI. The rewards are split based on 3 main criteria: uptime, community help and specific task performance.

While this is already a huge reward pool, the engagement of many community members in helping their fellow validators, exceeded our expectation and incentivized us to throw in an additional 500 000 USD in XKI delegation. This is to award more people and motivate those who are willing to join the mainnet validator set by boosting their initial stake.

Results by category

🤖 Category 1: Uptime

The first part of the results consists of points awarded to validators with the highest uptime computed by number of signed blocks. In the table below the list of validators with their equivalent uptime and earned points are shown. For convenience only the top 50 validators in uptime are shown in this section please refer to the table at the end of this post for the full leaderboard.

🤓 Category 2 : Community

As mentioned earlier, many community members were very active on the discord chat providing help and advice to other participants. The table below reports the most active users and the points awarded to them for the community category.

👨‍🎓 Category 3 : Main task

The specific task reward is awarded to validators who submitted the higher quality contribution for the “IBC Relayer” challenge. The quality of the contributions was assessed based on the overall quality and completeness of the provided tutorial as well as the validity and verifiability of the reported transactions. The table below summarizes the points awarded to the top 50 contributions

🎉 The final leaderboard based on the sum of the earned points and their equivalent prizes is shown in the table below. Congratulations to all the winners 🎉

Bonus rewards

In the initial prize pool, 4000 USD in XKI were dedicated to specific contributions. Accordingly We’ve decided to split this pool over 2 categories:

Tooling: to reward participants who provided useful tools to the community.
Hint finding: to reward participants who discovered and reported a hidden challenge.

How to claim your reward?

Lucky winners will be shortly contacted by mail with the details on how to claim their rewards. Please mind the following:

Winners will be contacted to the mail addresses they provided in the registration form.
As mentioned in previous posts and in the registration form, winners need to complete a KYC process before they receive their rewards.
Rewards are subject to a vesting plan. Details will be communicated to winners along with KYC process details.
Delegation rewards are subject to conditions such as : mainnet max commission of 8% and minimum uptime of 98%.

The end?

While this is the end of this challenge, it is definitely not the end of the KiChain testnet. This testnet will be the play ground for future KiChain functionalities, products and incentivized challenges.

Finally we are already planning the next upgrade to kichain-t-5. This is indeed not an incentivized upgrade but it is one more step toward the much anticipated KiChain mainnet upgrade.

The KiChain team is grateful to all of participants and community members for making this challenge a successful one. Especially those whose engagement towards helping the community exceeded all expectations.

The full uptime leaderboard