Launching Ripe Radness. Play to win!

May 10 marks the launch of Ripe Radness, an exciting competition on Sepolia testnet that simulates real-life market dynamics and rewards Ripe community members who manage assets most effectively.

The competition is a fun way for the community to further stress test the components of the Ripe protocol on the way to Mainnet!

TL;DR:

• Start: Wednesday, May 10.
• Duration: “Season 1” will be 2-4 weeks; more “seasons” will follow.
• How to win: Stake the most testnet Ripe tokens.
• Prizes: Special Discord role + a surprise perk with real economic value (TBA) for the top 10 high scorers.
• Live Leaderboard: Track your real-time position on a live leaderboard.
• How to Play: Join anytime here. Participate in the conversation here. You must be a verified member of the Ripe Discord server. Once you join the game, a fixed amount of tokens will be minted and distributed to you.
• Invite your friends and flex your mad degen skills!

More game details below!

The Ripe Journey So Far

For those new to the Ripe scene, here’s an intro. Our goal since first launching the Ripe Beta program has been to learn, iterate and improve through as much participation and feedback from our community as possible. We’ve always considered this to be a critical requirement to ultimately build a protocol that unleashes incredible economic opportunities around the world.

And we must say that the feedback from our community has been beyond our wildest expectations. We had a heap of great user suggestions that were essential in making improvements. We are incredibly grateful to our beta community for their feedback and support so far.

Our Testnet Beta has followed 3 phases:

• Phase 1, Local Private Testnet: To open beta access to the protocol as soon as possible, we released Ripe on a mainnet fork running locally. This was a great way to test and learn how the protocol operates in all its components, including its many external dependencies. However, this also presented a number of limitations: we were forced to limit user batches and had to deal with performance issues due to concurrent usage (i.e. running an entire blockchain on a single M1 Mac Mini!).
• Phase 2 — Private Testnet on goerli: Moving to goerli allowed us to resolve those issues. We were able to remove the waitlist and run smoothly on a real blockchain. This was an incredible milestone– seeing the Ripe protocol really ‘alive’, moving and operating with real-life blockchain transactions for the first time. However, we soon encountered a major issue that was beyond our control: gas became too expensive (at times higher than Mainnet!), and free faucets were rapidly giving out less Goerli ETH.
• Phase 3 — Sepolia Testnet: To overcome the limitations of goerli, we have now launched Ripe on Sepolia. This will allow us to push the Ripe protocol even further with virtually no limitations and enable us to stress-test all components ahead of the Mainnet launch.

Enter Ripe Radness

Sepolia’s flexibility means we get to exercise all of the protocol’s muscles in different ways. We think the best way to do this is to play games. Enter Ripe Radness.

The goal of the competition is simple: earn as many Ripe tokens as possible and stake them. It’s not as straightforward as it sounds–there are a number of different strategies you can use. The game will simulate market dynamics, with Earn Opportunities adjusting daily (randomly between 5–15%). Volatile assets will also be tracking real-live ETH/BTC volatility. What this means is, to win, you will need to adopt different strategies and actively respond to maximize your positions within Ripe. For example, you can:

• Efficiently move assets between different earn opportunities as APYs change
• Swap assets in a timely way to allocate them in more efficient ways.
• Borrow to leverage your position while avoiding risks of liquidation
• Purchase bonds at the best rate possible
• Stake to maximize rewards
• Actively participate and support the liquidation system

Of course, these are just some ideas we’ve come up with. However, the beauty of an open competition is that everyone is free to surprise us and come up with new/better strategies. The magic of DeFi is its intrinsic drive for experimentation, and we’re sure a lot of people will try things we never even imagined. Some strategies will fail miserably and others will win big. But that won’t be an issue. You can ‘restart’ anytime by using a fresh wallet or try again in the following “season.”

Seasons

Ripe Radness is not meant to be a single, one-off competition but multiple competitions — or seasons — until we launch on Mainnet. When a season ends, everything resets, and a new season starts. Each season will have different conditions and potentially different goals as the protocol evolves and new features are added. Seasons may include:

• Liquidation season: To stress test the protocol’s multiple liquidation lines of defense we might have extremely turbulent “market dynamics”, which will trigger many liquidations.
• Governance season: To exercise Ripe’s governance system and simulate situations where governance needs to respond rapidly to protocol needs (eg. security updates, financial parameter changes, etc.)
• Bug bounty season: Reward players who find the most (or most serious) bugs.

We haven’t finalized the objectives of future seasons yet, and we’d love to hear ideas from our community. The ultimate goal is to have fun and reward community engagement as we stress-test the protocol as much as possible ahead of mainnet launch.

So who is ready for the challenge? If you are:

Join now here.

Participate in the conversation here; share & discuss all things Ripe Radness, from winning strategies to crazy gambles to miserable failures!

Invite your friends. Everyone is welcome. Invite and crush your degen friends!

To learn more, you can also watch the recording of our last “Banana Call” (community meeting) below. Good luck! 🚀🍋