1-year Ongoing Free TON Testnets Support Contest
Currently, there is a boom in raising and launching test nodes of various projects. Every day hundreds of newbies want to learn how to test and run test nets, but they usually do this according to the instructions of various communities. Free TON, on the other hand, offers to reward the most talented and motivated Nodrunners by launching a competition for creating and maintaining test networks on its own blockchain.
Motivation
In order to support the testing of smart contracts without paying gas on the mainnet, and/or in order to test new blockchain features and functionalities, several test networks are required. These testnets should have clear rules for validators to join. There could be several networks set up for different purposes. Support for such networks will require long term commitment in order to preserve testnet stability.
Timing
Submission period: 20 September 2021 – 20 October 2021 23.59 UTC
Voting period: 15 days
Participants must:
- Provide a list of initial members of their network (testnet members), their public keys and multisignature wallet with those keys as custodians. Members/custodians of each testnet can change from time to time via on-chain voting.
- Clearly describe the purpose of the testnet.
- Provide a reference to a Telegram group where all issues related to testnet support could be openly discussed.
- Clear guide for new validators to join the network in form of the document in the Github repo.
- Provide the network itself, i.e.
5.1. It should be available through GraphQL interface using DApps server.
5.2. Anybody should be able to become a validator using the network configuration published on Github.
5.3. The network configuration should be up to date (no more than 1 hour delay).
5.4. Github issues should be responded to within 24 hours and adequate issues should be resolved within one month. - The provided network requirements are
6.1. The minimum number of validators is 13.
6.2. The servers should be placed in several different geographical locations.
6.3. The network operation center should provide the network health indicator which could be accessed by web-browser.
6.4. The network should withstood 100 external and 100 internal messages per second.
6.5. Restore time in case of the network failure should be no more than 3 hours.
6.6. Support Groth-16 TVM instructions;
6.7. Automatic giver for developers; - Propose method to calculate the availability of the TestNet (details are in the Availability Monitoring section).
Evaluation criteria and winning conditions
Jurors should vote based on the experience of initial members, relevance of declared testnet goals to Free TON development goals, transparency of the network’s guide, and compliance of the submission with all the requirements for the participant.
The winner must score at least 4 points.
Rewards
Onboarding reward:
- 1st place: 100k TON
- 2nd place: 75k TON
- 3rd place: 50k TON
Rewards can be used as discretionary funds by an on-chain vote by testnet members.
By the end of each month for the period of 1 year, testnet members should prepare and submit reports with the following data:
- Testnet uptime in % of time the network was available including DApp server availability (% SLA).
- Usage report: number of smart contracts that were deployed, number of transactions, features tested, etc.
- How many validators (with validator msig address) participated in the validation process excluding initials nodes.
Monthly based rewards:
Based on each report TONs will be transferred to the network’s multisignature wallet in amounts calculated as follows: 10 000 TON x (100% - Penalty rate)
| TestNet availability A (% per month) | Penalty rate (%) |
|---|---|
| 99.90 > А ≥ 99.72 | 5 |
| 99.72 > A ≥ 99.45 | 10 |
| 99.45 > A ≥ 98.9 | 15 |
| 98.9 > A ≥ 96.71 | 20 |
| 96.71 > A ≥ 76.98 | 50 |
| 76.98 > A | 100 |
Road to MainNet
In case of Main Governance approval, each testnet validator who participated in the testnet validation process (except initials) may be eligible for Lock Stake to their depool in MainNet (evaluating criteria and other conditions will be formulated and approved in separate contest in Main Governance).
Availability monitoring
It will be a separate contest for developing the Free TON blockchains availability monitoring system. After this system will be developed, the testnet availability will be counted based on this monitoring system data. Before that:
- Every participant should create and propose their own method to calculate the availability.
- These proposed methods should be independent of the network so the same method could be used to monitor availability for any rewarded testnet.
- The resulting availability of a particular TestNet will be counted as the average of the available measurement by the methods proposed by all competitors.
- Measurement overhead before a fully automated system is developed will be rewarded with 10% of the monthly based reward to the person responsible for measuring availability.
Relevance check
Over the course of 2 months, members of the DevEx subgov will review and determine whether or not there has been any real usage of the testnets based on each network’s members and A&S SG reports. They will be able to vote to stop further support of any testnet program that is found to be unsatisfactory.
Defense of contest submissions
At the end of the submission acceptance period, AMA-session will be appointed for participants, jurors and everyone else. At this session, each contestant team has to present their work.
The presentation language is English or Russian. The presentation time should not exceed 10-20 minutes.
If a contestant cannot present the work on-line, they should make a video recording and publish it on YouTube but any questions that arise should be answered.
Landing page - https://testnet.freeton.today/
Official news - https://forum.freeton.org/t/1-year-ongoing-free-ton-testnets-support-contest/11574/24
Developers Chat - https://t.me/freeton_dev_exp
Introduction to FREE TON (short course) - https://freeton.academy/courses/introduction-to-free-ton-ru/