Tour de SOL has begun!

Published in

Node A-Team

3 min readFeb 5, 2020

After 6 Dry Run testnets, Solana’s long anticipated incentivized testnet, Tour de SOL (TDS) has finally begun its 24 hours On-boarding period at February 4th, 8:00am PST! The official start of the network will be February 5th, 8:00am PST, which is exactly a day from On-boarding period start.

At the time of this writing, there are total of 54 nodes up and running. To see all registered teams for TDS, please refer to this Github link!

The first round of TDS will continue for the next 4 weeks, and will focus on incentivizing 20,000SOL to participants for their attacks and issue identification.

New Tour de SOL design

Unlike the original plan, Tour de SOL will not continue for 3 stages, but will be on-going for the entire year, with each stage (no specific number of stage has been decided) on-going for approximately a month. Each stage will have different purposes and will be affected by the progress of the previous rounds, therefore, will have different ways to evaluate participants. Here are some changes that were made to TDS:

Before: 3 stages
→ Now: Number of stages is not decided, but will be on-going for the entire 2020
Software: v0.23.2
No RAMP TPS (Pushing increasing number of transactions to the network)
Will not evaluate nodes based on node performance (uptime, etc). This is because performance optimization factors are unclear at this moment
Large portion of the incentive will be given out to teams that identify issues / execute attacks that are critical to the network.

To see all the new information about Tour de SOL, please refer to the forum post by Dominic!

First Trouble? — Reused Keypairs

From the opening minute of Tour de SOL On-boarding period, multiple participants were online on Solana Discord chat, and were trying to join the network. Within the first 30minutes since the beginning, the TDS cluster stopped and had to be restarted.

To understand why this happened, one must be aware that there is a separate network within Solana which is running in parallel — SLP (Soft Launch Phase) and testnet.solana.com. Like TDS, SLP also required validators to register their keys before the network launch. It was found that some validators who were participating in both SLP and TDS used the same keypairs, which caused SLP network to look for TDS gossip network, and in result, merged into one big network.

Thank you @mvines for the quick announcement

But with the quick fix, by adding the EXPECTED_GENESIS_HASH argument to command-line, validators were able to find the correct cluster without overlapping with SLP or testnet.solana.com.

Node A-Team also started TDS with reused keypairs for SLP and TDS. We changed our TDS key in order to prevent more problems from happening due to the same reason.

Solana Telegram Alarm

To get network status in real-time, Node A-Team has created a Solana Telegram Notification. To operate validator nodes, it is important that node operators are continuously notified and aware of the network status.

The first version of this alarm was specially designed for SLP, but we decided that the same tool should be applied for Tour de SOL in effort to maintain our node active and free from errors during the entire time of the testnet.