Shelley Testnet: Your weekly rollout rollup. Week 24: W/E 6th December 2019

Week 24: W/E 6th December 2019

Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the Shelley Testnet program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in the community GitHub.

If you are not already part of the conversation, you’ll find a hive of activity over at the Stake Pool Best Practice Telegram. With over 3,000 members and steadily growing, this is a great resource for anyone interested in the program. Continued thanks to everyone from the community!

What’s Up
As we near the rollout of the Incentivized Testnet, we’ve started releasing information and documentation to get both ada holders and stake pool operators up to speed. Yesterday, we released a Stake Pool Operator guide on the testnet site. You can read more about this below in the Documentation & Content section. At the same time, the CF Stake Pool registration GitHub was opened for pre-registration. It is important to note that this is a p​re-​registration, meaning stake pool operators will be able to see whether their pull requests pass the automated CI tests for the required metadata, but the Foundation will not be merging any pull requests until the network is ready.

And now today, we are excited to announce that the Rewards Calculator has been published on the Incentivized Testnet website. This calculator can be used to estimate the approximate rewards for delegating your stake or running a stake pool. These rewards depend upon the percentage of network participation, which is the amount of ada from the circulating supply that is restored and delegated in the testnet. Please also note the figures here are not guaranteed and potentially subject to revision during the testnet program. But we feel it should offer you a good guide for you to assess for now.

On the code front, the latest release candidate, 0.8.0-rc9, provides nearly all the tooling for the reward mechanism. Now, users can experiment with receiving automatic rewards to their account. Stake pools can actually see what kind of rewards they’ll receive. With the community, we saw some great interactions as Cardano users challenged the Jörmungandr nodes with a million of transactions within a few hours last night. Not all made it to a block. There were nodes that held their ground but it was unrealistic to expect them to handle such a heavy load without a fault. And we found some. A flaw in the mempool, and issues in the chain processing. We will be fixing them for the next release, or at least providing the node with more tooling to counter heavy load like that. So thanks to all who helped us discover these issues, this is what testing is all about!

Support
At the end of last week, we decommissioned the Daedalus Balance Check wallet to coincide with the latest snapshot. The Support Portal team are now working hard to aggregate support-related articles for the Incentivized Testnet, all while preparing for support of the dedicated testnet wallet, Daedalus Rewards, which is scheduled to be released next week.

New Issues - 25
Resolved Issues - 236
Issue Backlog - 6

Documentation & Content
This week we added new content for stake pool operators to the testnet website to help users get ready for the rollout of the Incentivized Testnet. We published a comprehensive new stake pool operator guide on the site and also released this content as a standalone PDF for reference within our Resources section for easy downloading, in both English and Japanese. This guide shares an overview of the process and steps that a stake pool operator need to complete to run a pool on the Incentivized Testnet. We will be enhancing this guide soon with more how-to steps and additional content as more of the practical setup and configuration steps become available once the network is up and running.

A new IOHK blog post has also been published, which you can read here. It covers high level details on the rewards available through the Incentivized Testnet program. It explains the objectives of the research behind the incentive mechanism and the Ouroboros protocol that will be tested throughout the Shelley testnet.

DevOps Update
As always, the DevOps team were hard at work and this week was no different as IOHK gears up for the rollout of the Incentivized Testnet. We still have a bit further to go but we’re making very positive progress. Here’s a list of the work streams that are ongoing or were completed this week:

  • Testing new rewards parameters
  • Improving Haskell Genesis Generator in jormungandr-ops
  • Testing different bootstrapping options to start the network
  • Updating jtools to work with 0.8 changes
  • Updating jormungandr-nix to work with 0.8 changes
  • Testing new daedalus and cardano-wallet backend
  • Testing the stake pool registry
  • Planning improvements for tracking leader and network logs
  • Supporting multiple environments in nix-shell of jormungandr-nix
  • Hydra report for current network configurations for public networks
  • Networking debugging with developers to improve detection and remediation of block creation failures
  • Improved rate limiting of faucet
  • Created smart rolling deployment script for jormungandr using crystal
  • Created intelligent network issue detection script that automatically can restart bad instances

Community Content
Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels. This week, the community was busy discussing the upcoming rollout of rewards on the Incentivized Testnet, as well as spamming the current Shelley testnet network to see if they can break it.

  • Here is community member and Ambassador @oldcryptogeek, sharing about the first ada received on the testing environment.
  • @unspentpool on Twitter shared an image with their statistics showing that they reached 1 million transactions over the span of 4 hours on the v0.8.0-rc7 build. Note: they weren’t spamming the network all the time.
  • Telegram user StakeYourADA shared some graphs that showed some transactions statistics over a 15 minute and 6 hour timeframe.
  • And for the community, Chris Graffagnino made a guide for v0.8.0-rc7. Check it out if you are building a node on the testnet and need some direction!

That’s it for now!

Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team

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Wow! Thanks for sharing Maki!

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