Testnet Refresh V2

Dear Community,

We are taking the time to write today, to announce the new testnet schedule and reward structure for the Testnet V2.

As we discussed in the beginning of the year, we will have a refresh of the testnet about every six months and will have different things to test during every version of the testnet.

For the next testnet (V2) we will test many things, such as Ubuntu 22.04 compatibility and many community xcash dpops improvements on github. We also have two protocols and one new DPOPS voting feature to test. We will make a separate announcement on these once the snapshot has taken place.

The testnet snapshot will be at block height 980000 which is estimated to happen around November 21, 2022 that is about 4 weeks from today.

The testnet will then start producing blocks on January 2, 2023 that is about 10 weeks from today and 6 weeks from the snapshot.

This will give about 4–5 weeks (6 weeks but will take a week or two for me to setup seed nodes and make sure everything is working) for everyone to setup their delegate and vote after the snapshot has taken place. We will detail the changes and all protocols we will test in the testnet V2, the same time the snapshot takes place, in another article.

This way everyone has the full schedule of what will be tested for the next months and can decide if they want to participate in the testnet V2. We have set the dates to be around the holidays and to give enough time for anyone who wants to participate to setup their server and ask any question they might have.

How To Prepare For The Snapshot

You will need to have any xcash you want to be cloned onto the testnet in a wallet you have the private keys for (not xbank or exchanges and not wxcash) only paper, mobile, CLI and GUI would be supported.

QUESTION: I already have a mainnet delegate, and a voting wallet with my xcash, can I use the same setup on the testnet?

Yes. At this point since DPOPS is on mainnet and deemed secure it should be fine to reuse your data. Of course their is no guarantee some kind of bug in the code or testnet code will exist that allows a testnet participant to view sensitive data, but we are not too worried about this, and will be using our seed nodes (wallet and VRF keys) on the mainnet for the testnet as well.

We also suggest you start looking for what server you might want to use, this way you are ready after the snapshot to setup and vote or have people vote for you. The same requirements for xcash dpops will work, and we will support and encourage to use Ubuntu 22.04 (the latest LTS)

New Testnet Reward Structure

Its important that we have the full testnet amount and full participation of the community (50 servers), to test these new protocols. These will require everyone to be active and fully engaged. Because of this, the new structure of rewards will be the following:

The first block of each day in the month (according to UTC time), will be worth 300,000 mainnet xcash. This has been decided as the best way to ensure participation each day from the community, and the fairest way to have the contest. It also adds some excitement each day, as you have a new chance each day to win!

This will be easy to log as we all will have logs of this on our xcash dpops servers. Everyone can verify with the following terminal command:

journalctl --unit=xcash-dpops -n 1100000 --output cat | grep -A 18 "00:00:20 UTC"

This has been chosen as the best way for now to do the “contest” because it is random and the VRF system can pick the winners. It also does not take any previous participation in to consideration, but at the same time rewards constant participation.

The xcash will be sent to the test delegates public address on the mainnet, sometime in the following month (so make sure to back these up when installing your testnet server at the print out of details at the end of the installation)

We are looking forward to the next testnet cycle (testnet V2) and hope that everyone is as excited as we are to test the next protocol.