Postmortem of Aplikigo testnet- Regen Network

Regen Network concluded its final four-week incentivized testnet, the last testnet before mainnet launch, on March 8, 2021. The three phases of this testnet were utilized for testing Cosmos Hub’s latest release — Stargate, IBC, CosmWasm and Regen Ledger custom modules.

The Aplikigo testnet launched on Feb 8, 2021 and was met with much interest from the validator community. Consequently and with much consideration, the open validator slots increased from 100 to 125 available slots.

TL;DR

• 3 Phases
• 2 Software upgrades, CosmWasm contracts deployment, IBC and Groups module testing
• Rewards: 1800+ points possible per participant with a total of 500,000 Regen tokens available for winners.
• Schedule: Feb 8 — Mar 8

Genesis Phase aka Phase-1

Phase-1 began with bringing the network up on Feb 8, 2021 at 1500 UTC. Our fully decentralized launch with every validator holding the same stake, including the lead validators went live in less than 3 minutes after the genesis, and 84 out of 125 validators participated in signing the very first block.

Celebrating Stargate was the first task designed to honor the momentous achievement of the Cosmos Stargate release. To celebrate this release, each validator expressed their happiness by sending and delegating tokens to other validators. A large number of members joined our newly-created Regen Network Discord server which facilitated the streamlining of dev & validator communication. More than 13 blog posts were published by the community, explaining Regen Network, the vision & the roadmap, and 10 blog posts were selected for rewards based on the timing and content.

Following the Stargate celebration task, validators performed network tests that successfully put the network under heavy load. A few validators were able to push more than 3400 transactions per block and 7400 messages per transaction! This phase showed the readiness of the Regen validator community as the majority of the validator nodes were able to withstand this “spam attack” and extreme network stress.

Gir Upgrade:

To perform our first software upgrade at block height 138650 an upgrade proposal was launched on Feb 15, 2021. Our validator community was able to form a majority consensus with everyone voting YES on this proposal and, similarly to the launch of our testnet, this network upgrade was completed in less than 2 minutes. The upgrade also gave our validator community the opportunity to test their cosmovisor setup which many successfully used when upgrading their nodes.

Phase-2: Internet of Regeneration

This phase was focused on testing the Inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol. The proposal to enable IBC transfers went live on Feb 22, 2021 and after the proposal passed consensus with 100% yes votes, every validator tested IBC transfers in-out the regen-devnet. Something to mention is that a few validators successfully set up custom chains in order to test IBC functionality on newly formed blockchains. Another proposal to upgrade the network to a newer version of Regen Ledger followed this test and included Regen specific modules such as the groups, data, and credit modules. This proposal went live on Feb 26, 2021 and the network was upgraded a few days later on March 1, 2021.

Phase-3: Regen Times

This phase focused extensively on testing CosmWasm smart contracts and the Regen groups module. Validators were asked to deploy a simple CW20 smart contract and interact with it using the command-line interface. Validators were also given the ability to extend existing functionality of the available CosmWasm smart contracts. This task was highly educational for everyone and encouraged validators to learn some coding along with launching smart contracts, which is typically not an activity for validator operators.

Groups are similar to on-chain multi-sigs. They serve the purpose of multisig and come with a greater UX and flexibility over standard multisig accounts. The groups module is the most important feature of Regen Ledger and this phase allowed all the validators to become familiar with the groups module, understand different terminology and the commands available within it. Unsurprisingly, due to the ease of use and their positive experience using the groups module, many validators noted that they would replace their standard multisig accounts with groups accounts as soon as it is available on our mainnet.

Conclusion

Aplikigo testnet was a total success and we are well on our way to mainnet. Users and interested parties can find the testnet leaderboard at https://regen.vitwit.com which includes the results of Aplikigo and previous testnets. We are overjoyed to announce that all of our lead validators have generously given up their testnet rewards to the community as a token of appreciation. With the success of this last testnet and with mainnet just around the corner we are looking forward to seeing this amazing validator community performing their duties on mainnet. As mentioned, mainnet launch is just around the corner and scheduled to launch on April 15, 2021. Many thanks to the validator community for their vigilance and dedication to the success of our public blockchain.

For more up-to-date information about Regen Network, please join our discord server at https://discord.gg/dbfr7wy.