Stake Wars, held from July to September 2022, is NEAR protocol’s program to select Chunk-Only Producers. Chunk-Only Producer is a validator that creates ‘chunks’ within one ‘shard,’ NEAR currently has a goal of onboarding 200–400 Chunk-Only Producers.
*You can find details about NEAR’s sharding mechanism at Nightshade.
As explained in the previous article, verse2 believes NEAR is the next-generation Layer 1 that will lead the blockchain ecosystem with excellent scalability and interoperability. Accordingly, verse2 participated in Stake Wars III to further contribute to the growth of the NEAR ecosystem.
In Stake Wars III, various challenges are given to evaluate the Validator team’s development and node operation capabilities. Based on the results, the top 145 validators are qualified as Chunk-Only Producers. In addition, 5M $NEAR will be preferentially delegated to Chunk-Only Producers. Through this, validators who still need to secure more $NEAR to become a ‘Block Producer node’ will also contribute to mainnet operation.
NEAR presents 20 challenges, and when all challenges are over, an evaluation is conducted based on node operation & development capabilities. In addition to node operation, the challenge consists of the below tasks on various topics, such as on-chain data analysis or smart contract design using third-party DApps, etc.
- Data analysis from staking and validators and visualizing the data with a dashboard
https://github.com/near/stakewars-iii/blob/main/challenges/007.md - Propose an improved staking solution for Aurora in terms of making the APY sustainable, making staking farms more decentralized, and how one user could earn multiple staking farm rewards simultaneously, etc.
https://github.com/near/stakewars-iii/blob/main/challenges/011.md - Create a Dashboard for Hardware metrics/Near Validator metrics
https://github.com/near/stakewars-iii/blob/main/challenges/019.md
In Stake Wars III, verse2 not only successfully submitted all the challenges but was selected as 1st place winner among 1287 participating teams. These achievements in Stake Wars III show that verse2 has excellent capabilities in product development and infrastructure fields, such as node operation.
Furthermore, in solving the challenge, verse2 was able to increase the understanding of NEAR’s DApp ecosystem quickly. Team verse2 will continue to work as Chunk-Only Producers and Block Producer nodes in the future, contributing to the decentralization and stabilization of the NEAR mainnet.
You can also find the rankings of Team verse2 and other validator teams participating in Stake Wars III in the official post from NEAR.
(NEAR Stake wars final ranking: https://url.kr/jnq315)
verse2 is a builder from the beginning. We contributed to various DeFi protocols and diverse ecosystems as an infrastructure builder (e.g., Layer 1, wallet, IDE, node validator, etc). More than 60% of the team is Product based. Making verse2 a specialist in developing Onchain Structured Products.
