Elrond’s Battle of Nodes: A Look Back
A look at Stake Capital’s experience participating in Elrond’s pre-Mainnet incentivized testnet
What’s Elrond?
Elrond is a highly scalable, fast and secure blockchain platform for distributed applications, enterprise use cases and the new internet economy. Using a unique Adaptive State Sharding approach, Elrond delivers massive scalability — resulting in as much as a 1000x improvement in throughput compared to previous blockchain iterations.
Elrond also proposes a new consensus approach called Secure Proof of Stake which is fast, and ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms. Finally, to further bolster the developer experience, Elrond integrated a WASM VM engine, created a useful abstraction layer, and supports multiple smart contract languages, enabling testing and deployment in minutes.
Background
Stake Capital is one of the leading service providers of the emerging digital economy. Our services include financial instruments and services on top of the leading DeFi and proof-of-stake networks.
We (Stake Capital) met the Elrond team in Osaka, Japan roughly 10 months ago at Devcon 5. Immediately hitting it off, we developed a keen interest in the Elrond project. Since then we have been meticulously following the project and providing feedback as the network is built out.
What is the Battle of Nodes?
Having been keenly following the project, it was only natural that when Battle of Nodes was announced — an incentivized pre-Mainnet testnet of the entire Elrond architecture — we immediately jumped on board.
The Battle of Nodes was an adversarial testnet environment where test node operators were rewarded for securing the network and even more so for trying to attack it. In this testnet phase, participants were invited to discover the process of node operations, earn rewards, and put the network through a trial by fire, enabling it to emerge stronger.
As an operator on the Battle of Nodes network, Stake Capital ran 10 unique validator nodes on the network — which ranked among the top 10% of participants out of more than 1500 operating nodes. In addition to running our infrastructure throughout the duration of the competition, Stake Capital also actively engaged with the team to provide feedback and insights from the node operations perspective.
Our Experience
Battle of Nodes overall proved to be a highly productive and robust testing ground for Elrond. At the performance peak of the testnet, a remarkable rate of 263k TPS was achieved, showing just how much real-world usage the Elrond architecture can withstand out in the wild.
Minimum involvement requirements from Battle of Nodes participants was extremely minimal. A node could be run on any machine with roughly 2CPU & 4GB RAM, however since we were operating 10 nodes for the competition, we opted to run all of them together on the same, significantly larger, machine. A highly straightforward out-of-the-box script was provided by the team for community members to easily setup and run validating nodes. This script handled deployment — even enabling concurrent deployment and management of any number of nodes on the same machine — and maintenance tasks, such as auto-upgrading when new node software was released.
While providing node operators with this fully-featured script made node operations extremely easy and accessible to all (even less-technical folks), on the flip-side it meant that node operators did not have to focus much on the competition and could be fairly “hands off” with the Elrond operations.
However, due to the scale of the testnet (some 1500 nodes participating) without auto-updating nodes, it would’ve been significantly more difficult for the Elrond team to rapid-fire test project software changes. The emphasis of the Battle of Nodes was more on thoroughly testing the software, rather than specifically educating node operators.
To their credit, the team did issue and reward a series of specifically targeted “missions” throughout the Battle of Nodes, that while slightly contrived, did actively encourage users to experiment with and learn the mechanics of the Elrond network.
All things considered, Battle of Nodes provided an invaluable opportunity to harden the Elrond software. On the other hand, the level of understanding, experience, and education node operators took away from the event was really dependent on their own respective levels of engagement with the node software, missions, and community channels.
Rewards were distributed in a fairly egalitarian manner, with all 286 participants receiving at least some rewards for their contributions. A complete breakdown of the Battle of Nodes rewards can be viewed here.
What’s Happening now?
Since July 20 when the Battle of Nodes ended, we (Stake Capital) have been participating in the private Zero to One testnet launches, continually relaunching the network on a day-to-day basis in a final preparation for the Mainnet launch. For this testnet node operators have disabled their auto-updating scripts, focusing on repeatedly practicing Mainnet-like conditions.
Elrond’s Mainnet will launch on Thursday, July 30 — springing from the penultimate Zero to One testnet launch. We are eager to help successfully bring the Elrond mainnet to fruition, however we are also committed to the Elrond project going forward as we believe in the long-term impact & potential of the project.
Also read Lucian Mincu’s comprehensive recap of the Battle of Nodes from the perspective of the team themselves.
