The journey of Regen’s incentivized testnet “regen-test-1001” and what lies ahead.
Regen network recently published the highly anticipated results for its incentivized testnet, which was operational for 4 months. In this post, we'll look into the purpose for hosting an incentivized testnet and the goals accomplished by the Regen dev team and the overall community. So let’s dive into the journey of Regen network’s first incentivized testnet, named regen-test-1001.
regen-test-1001 did not actually begin its life as an incentivized network. The genesis time for this chain was 5 June 2019 at 20:31 UTC. It was converted into an incentivized one after a month into its inception. The main purpose to host this public testnet was to achieve 3 major goals:-
- Test the upgrade module and address any issues raised by the cosmos hub and Cosmos-SDK community.
- Test Regen Ledger’s functions built for application-specific goals of a censorship-resistant ecological ledger and contracting platform.
- Coordinate with the validator pool around the governance process.
The upgrade module was tested by implementing 2 software upgrades for the chain. These upgrades were El Choco upgrade and Amazonas upgrade aptly named after the locations where pilot projects for Regen are currently ongoing. Let’s take a little look at the details of these upgrades.
El Choco upgrade
This upgrade was first proposed on July 29th, 2019 with its voting period lasting for 4 days. El Choco upgrade was for letting more validators into the validator set by reducing the limit of bonded tokens required to become one. The proposal passed successfully and the community of validators was prepared for the upgrade, which was scheduled to occur on August 6th. This upgrade did not go as smoothly as everyone was expecting. A detailed postmortem of this can be found here. To summarize, a number of validators fell out of consensus due to upgrading a little early than the rest. So the chain halted at the upgrade height 952626 for roughly 2 hours. It was back online producing blocks once 70% of the voting power was synced. The silver lining for this upgrade process was that it has lead to the development of cosmosd, a daemon watcher which switches the binary automatically when it detects an upgrade is needed.
Amazonas upgrade
Proposal for this upgrade was submitted on September 22nd with the upgrade taking place on September 26th. While the El Choco upgrade faced issues during the upgrade process, Amazonas upgrade faced a few issues before the upgrade. There was a concern amongst the community regarding the availability of validators for the upgrade. The reason for this concern was due to the failed upgrade of Cosmos mainnet which happened a few days prior. A redelegation effort was undertaken by the devs to make sure more than 70% of voting power is online during the upgrade process. This effort paid rich dividends when the upgrade process worked like a charm. The chain was up and producing blocks in less than 3 mins. Many of the validators put complete faith in cosmosd and letting it take care of the upgrade process.
The testnet was discontinued on October 11th after passing one final proposal to increase the number of blocks a validator can miss before getting jailed. Earlier the limit was set to 50 blocks which was to be changed to 5000 blocks.
Takeaways from the testnet
Regen team successfully accomplished every goal which was set at the start of the testnet. There was successful testing of the Regen ledger. There was successful coordination amongst the Regen team and the validators community for the governance proposals. Possibly the biggest takeaway from this testnet is the successful completion of the upgrade module in regen ledger which was eventually merged into cosmos-sdk and gaia (pending PR). Overall the testnet was considered to be a massive success.
Testnet incentive Results
A point system was formulated and awarded to all the validators accordingly. The complete results list can be found here and the incentive scheme here
Top 10 performers amongst the validators:-
- Easy2stake
- Umbrella
- ChorusOne
- ChainLayer
- ION
- POS Bakerz
- Melea
- Novy
- Forbole
- InoTel
What’s next?
With the conclusion of regen-test-1001, a new testnet has been launched named congo-1. This is a community-driven testnet spearheaded by ChainLayer and ChorusOne. Regen network has plans for another round of incentivized testnet before the launch of their mainnet which is scheduled to happen in Q1 of 2020. Details and hints about the next incentivized testnet might drop in the congo-1 testnet. So keep your eyes and ears open for any tidbits of information regarding it.
A few helpful links
Website:- https://www.regen.network/
Github :- https://github.com/regen-network/
Regen tesnets :- https://github.com/regen-network/testnets
Telegram :- https://t.me/regennetwork_public
Twitter :- https://twitter.com/regen_network
