ALICE — Muon’s Test Network
Muon’s First Public Network with Thousands of Successfully Added Nodes
After much anticipation and speculation, Muon team’s efforts culminated in the launch of Muon’s first public network. Muon’s Testnet, aka ALICE, was successfully launched on January 19, 2023 and has been running since.
In the blockchain environment, it is common practice to run a testnet prior to a project’s launch of its mainnet. However, Muon has designed a plan to run three public networks: ALICE, the Testnet; Pion, the Canary network; and the Mainnet. All Muon features and technology should first be tested on ALICE and Pion before they are actually incorporated into the Mainnet.
ALICE vs. Pioneer
ALICE is the test platform of the Muon project that is designed to allow developers and users to experiment with new features and capabilities of the project without risk to real funds; that is, the Testnet token is only for experimental purposes and has no real value. Thus, through running ALICE, malfunctions and bugs can be found and fixed without the risk of a hack.
The Pioneer Network, however, is an actual network with the tradable $PION token. Until the launch of Muon will be in essence THE mainnet, holding all the economic value until the Muon network is live.
A Technical Feat Accomplished
In a matter of hours from ALICE’s launch, over two hundred nodes were successfully added and running on the Testnet. It has been nearly a month since launch, and the number of nodes running on ALICE has reached the phenomenal number of over 2000 unique live nodes with valid IPs (excluding bots and IPs that have run more than one node); the number is still rising. This has made ALICE the largest network of nodes in the blockchain environment to this day.
ALICE also caused a dramatic growth in our community and their activity, with an overall rise of 31% in members and 84% in engagement on socials.
It is also worth mentioning that as of today (February 21st) third-party protocols can start running their apps on ALICE to study closely and check how well they operate, and remove any potential bugs.
Reward Plan
ALICE node operators must be anxious to know the details of how they will be rewarded. Read on to find out.
As mentioned in a previous article, ALICE node operators will get a “node-drop” in the Pioneer Network; that is, the reward for running a node on ALICE will be the amount of locked $PION needed to run a single node on the Pioneer Network.
Nodes are generally run on servers and have valid IPs; running a node locally -that is, on a PC/laptop- is not a common practice. The main reason is that personal computers are prone to much downtime while a VPS is supposed to be up nearly all the time (at least 99% of the period). Our dev team’s analysis indicates the majority of ALICE nodes are run on servers and have valid IPs. However, a small percentage are still being run locally without a valid IP. These are disregarded as ALICE nodes and their status on the dashboard for joining ALICE is OFF.
However, to show our appreciation for the efforts of all node operators and their attachment to Muon, we have decided to give a certain proportion of the full reward to anyone who has registered a node so far — including those without valid IPs — provided that they prove their uniqueness on our Uniqueness Verification system. Nonetheless, in order to remain eligible for the main reward, nodes without valid IPs should be transferred to servers by Feb 27th.
The following table illustrates the details of our rewarding mechanism:
The table demonstrates that to get the full reward; one needs to have added a node with a valid IP by Feb 27th. This node has to run on ALICE for at least 60 days by the time Pioneer Network launches and be active for at least 90% of that period.
In simple words, these percentages are additive. Users get 20% for running an ALICE node until the 27th of February, no matter how their liveness or uptime has been. And they get another 80% for running a node for 60 more days with a valid IP and 90% uptime, which results in a total of 100%.
It should be noted that nodes that meet all the requirements but run on ALICE for less than 60 days before the launch of the Pioneer Network will only get a portion of the reward in proportion to the period they have been up on ALICE.
When the Pioneer Network launches, those with the full reward and $MUON presale participants are prioritized to run nodes. Afterwards, ALICE Node operators who have not earned the full reward can still buy $PION to join Pioneer.
Don’t Miss the Opportunity
So the great news is the window of opportunity is still open for those who have not run nodes on ALICE; there is still time to join ALICE and get the node-drop reward.
To learn how to add a node, see here.
Pion is the Muon ecosystem’s Canary and first mainnet. It is a chain-independent and stateless DON (Decentralized Oracle Network) that enables dApps to make their off-chain components decentralized. By incorporating Pion (by Muon), the manner in which decentralized applications store, process, and access data will be fundamentally transformed.
Run a Pion node.
Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Website | Medium | GitBook | Developer’s Guide
