Questnet Weekly Update: April 23

April leaderboard (it’s almost over…), May challenges, and more

Hi All —

First off congrats on an excessively speedy upgrade last week — 45 minutes to redeploy the network is pretty damn good! Thank you and congrats to all who helped drive this.

As the month comes to an end, we have a number of major updates to share — both in terms of the leaderboard for the April competition and what May will look like…

A few key notes below.

April Challenge Leaderboard

After 23 days of competition and 1 upgrade we’re beginning to see a few people breaking away (or at least not 30 people tied for first…). Top 10 leaderboard below and a full ranking here. Go Chad, Dhruv, nodeasy, and oceanabcde!

There are still 7 days to solidify your victory — or edge out someone else!

May/early June Availability Challenge — Starts May 11

We are going to run another availability challenge in May. We’re changing a few things up on the network related to how voting power works (see below) and therefore will also be adjusting the formula for availability. With that in mind a few dates to note down:

• April 30: April Challenge Ends
• Week of May 4: We deploy a change to the way validator voting power works in the network
• May 7: We plan to share the new availability formula
• May 11: May competition starts
• June 5: Competition ends

What are we changing on the network? Flat vs. stake-weighted voting

Up until now we’ve been using “flat” voting power within the consensus committee, where +⅔ of validators must sign a given block to proceed. We were interested in testing this out to better understand the implications it may have for decentralization, latency, etc.

In May, we’re going to test out something a little different — stake-weighted voting. In this scheme, instead of requiring +⅔ of all validators to sign a block, we will require signatures by validators representing +⅔ of the total stake of the committee to sign a block. We’re interested to see how this will affect performance and upgrade speed!

Network stability testing and other attacks

As the network and new features we enable prove to be stable, we’re eager to have you all continue to stress test the network. In addition to top rewards for attacks, we’re also going to offer rewards to a few teams for attempting to disrupt network stability. If this is interesting to you, please message me on Slack for a bit more info.