MultiversX Validators Announcements

🎖 Mission #4 FINAL update & The Purge 2 Hello Nodes team, Mission #4 is like the year 2020 - let's hope it just ends already. In spite of all the frustration, it's been a good learning experience, we found out more about the tools & protocol and we've bonded together more, which is exactly what we want. ⏱ Mission 4 ends today at 20:00 UTC. A patch is coming after that. So, even if we break it, it's worth a shot - if you still haven't reached 150 000 txs, give her all you've got to try and make it. Check your nonce:

erdpy account get --nonce --address=erd1... --proxy=https://api.elrond.com

Try catching up:

python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=10 --bulk-size=300

📊 If you reached 150 000 transactions per wallet by Friday 26 June 20:00 UTC, mission accomplished - 10 000 points. Check with 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie 🚨 The Purge 2 We will be issuing a fresh patch Saturday 27 June around 08:00 UTC. As soon as we confirm it to be stable, we start doing TPS, in 1000 increments, until we reach 5000. Important: we will be issuing the transactions ourselves, to make sure that we are in control of the TPS. Purge rules: • Node with rating below 55 as of Sunday 28 June 23:59 UTC will be purged • No unjailing ⚙️ System specs: 1 node = 2 CPU, 4 GB RAM, 80GB storage (SSD ideally), 100Mbit bandwidth 📡 Check your bandwidth with a speed test like these here (link) 🛠 Check our "How to choose a VPS" section of the Elrond docs FAQs if you're looking for moving away from Contabo: https://docs.elrond.com/validators/faqs ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 resumes - check the info Hello Nodes team, What a week! Mission #4 will live in infamy. For those of you who missed the chat - Contabo VPSes were largely the culprit of recent issues, as they've been throttling network bandwidth from 600Mbps down to 20Mbps. TL;DR - don't use Contabo. 👉 Please do - Check your nonce:

erdpy account get --nonce --address=erd1... --proxy=https://api.elrond.com

Then resume sending as per the instructions in @alwin79 's table (link) - please estimate your successful TX % based on the intervals you know you've been sending in. python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=45 --bulk-size=(check table) 🦸‍♀️ Please enable alerts from Bonnie, we will ping you if the network gets clogged 🚨 The Purge 2 We will issue a new patch and start a new purge over the weekend. We will be in a moderately high TPS Saturday & Sunday. Nodes that end the weekend with a rating below 55 will not continue. Getting jailed over the weekend will disqualify you. 🏋️ Preparing for the purge: Ensure you are running 2CPUs, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 100Mbit per node. The network part is really important. Don't be on Contabo. 📡 Check your bandwidth with a speed test like these here (link). ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 update - Stop All TXs! Hello Nodes team, The network performance keeps degrading, Shard 0 Hitrate (minted blocks/rounds in epoch) is at 65%, Shard 1 at 57%. 🛑 Stop all transfers - please stop all, as soon as you see this message. We will return with info about when it's safe to resume and how. ⏱ Mission 4 timeline extended until Friday 26 June 20:00 UTC 🛡 The main element of a team is its members being team players - committing the same resources as everyone is required for us to be successful. We can't conquer new horizons if we don't work together as one. Last call to revisit your node setup and follow our recommendations. 🚨 The Purge 2 is coming - low performing nodes and operators repeatedly ignoring our calls to band together & reduce TX sending will not proceed after the next patch. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

⚠️ Team, network in trouble, let's SLOW DOWN Hello Nodes Team, She's at her limits, let's take it easy on her. Please stop any ongoing transactions. If you are speeding up for any reason, please stop altogether. Let's give her room to breathe, so she can handle all TXs. 👉 Please do: STOP any high TX sending outside of specs. STOP if your nonce is over 150 000 👉 Only run like this: python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=45 💢 Nodes with ratings below 50: do your best to address the situation: more CPUs, RAM, SSD instead of HDD, higher bandwidth. Reminder on specs for each node: 2 CPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB HDD (we're considering changing to SSD!), 100Mbit We're considering another purge, so we don't have to keep spamming announcements about "slowing down". Thank you for understanding!

⚠️ Team, there are ZERO reasons for us to be at this high TPS. Please, SLOW DOWN. If we are forced to take time to find out who is not playing by the common-sense rules we clearly communicate, we will do so and simply remove the offenders, altogether. Let's act as a team. SLOW DOWN. 👉 Please do: STOP any high TX sending outside of specs. STOP if your nonce is over 150 000 👉 Only run like this: python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=45

🎖 Mission #4 Update 5 - Let's take her for a spin Hello Nodes Team, First and foremost, we are the best team! Some of us were eager to see "how fast it goes" and tweaked the transaction sending tool for speed, at the detriment of others. As a result, synch issues started manifesting. 🛡 We successfully defended against that last night, together, by slowing down the network and ensuring its recovery. We're back in normal parameters, so let's resume Mission for with 1tps per wallet, meaning 5 seconds sleep before getting nonce and 45 seconds sleep after sending, for the default bulk size of 50 transactions. 👉 Please resume transaction sending with the following command: python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=45 🦠 Shower thought: we're coordinating the second restart of our blockchain economy, after the first more relaxed measures eventually re-escalated into a general issue, affecting us all and again slowing down our economy. Soon, the new economy will run on this backbone, and it's up to us to manage it carefully, not for ourselves, but also others. ⏱ Scoring resumes, timeline extended with 4 hours until Friday 26 June 12:00 UTC. Steady does it, team. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 Update 4 - Let her cool down Hello Nodes team, Mission #4 in BoN: Onchained is probably the most exciting one we've had so far! People are eager to see "how much it can go" and running the transactions with more than we recommended. As a result, we have a lot more TPS than planned, sent from the very validators that need to process the transactions and synch issues can occur. Let's take a break from sending now and resume in a few hours, with a longer sleep-after-bulk 👉 Please do: stop your TX sending, let the network cool down. ⏱ Transactions between now and Thursday 25 June 08:00 UTC do not count towards the mission's goals. 💪 We had processed 102mn transactions on Wednesday 24 June at 22:00 UTC, after ~1 week into this release. 🛡 Team, the whole purpose of this incentivized event is to try and see what we can do to break the protocol. Spamming from inside seems to work, but that's not a likely scenario outside of a nothing-at-stake environment. Now, let's defend against our own attack and act as one to recover. 🚧 Explorer speeds are not what we are used to. We make this compromise to resume Battle of Nodes while we work hard to bring you best of Elrond yet. Thanks for your understanding. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 Update 3 - We carry on. Hello Nodes team, Explorer functionality is restored and we continue Mission #4 with a new tool, slightly increased goals and a longer timeline. Our Nodes team member Michael shared the ❤️ in an awesome video. 🛠 Transaction sending can resume only with using this tool: • Install: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-sdk/master/examples/BoN/mission4bulk.py • Run:

python3 mission4bulk.py --pem=Elrond.pem --sleep-before-recall=5 --sleep-after-bulk=15

Replace Elrond.pem with your respective wallet.pem The tool does this: • sleeps for 25 seconds (default), configurable with --sleep-before-recall=T1 (seconds) • query proxy for latest nonce for the wallet (default is api.elrond.com), configurable with --proxy=http://address:port • sends 50 txs with the correct nonces, all at once, configurable with --bulk-size=X (number of TXs) • source address: taken from the .pem wallet you use • destination: the two addresses specified for Mission #4 (link) • sleeps for x seconds after sending the bulk, configurable with --sleep-after-bulk=T2 (seconds) We encourage you to experiment with it, but please be mindful of not exceeding our recommendations, so as not to overload the network at this time. This is meant as a stability test under moderate load, not stress test. Thanks for keeping that in mind ✌️ 👨‍🔧 Tinkerers, there's a new version of erdpy! A cool new feature for us: you can use your own observer nodes instead of api.elrond.com for this mission (you couldn't in the previous version). Get it 👇 wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-sdk/master/erdpy-up.py | python3 ⏱ Timeline for the mission resumes now and is extended until Friday 26 June 12:00 UTC. 📊 The goal for the mission is extended to 150 000 transactions in total, up from 100 000, to account for already executed transactions, the improved tool and the extended timeline. 📺 Fellow Elrond Validator and #battleofnodes participant @boxmining did a great video on Elrond, with an awesome interview with Beniamin and a great description of his hands-on experience with our community and tech (spoiler: ❤️). Let's share the love back and watch, like & comment on his video (link). 🚧 Explorer speeds are not what we are used to. We make this compromise to resume Battle of Nodes while we work hard to bring you best of Elrond yet. Thanks for your understanding. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 update #2 ⚡ From Lucian Mincu: Hey guys! quick update, it seems that the elastic search DB was under flood during the last days as well. For this reason the explorer might be unavailable until tomorrow morning when we'll set in place another set of access rules more strict for every request sent to it and we'll set it back online for everyone. In the meantime the chain indexing will still be processed as we have allowed only internal communication until the morning. We'll get back in a few hours with more updates. 🙏 ⚡️ Hello Nodes team, An important lesson emerges from the previous mission: "Spam where you validate? Not even nonce!" . 🚧 A storm of invalid-nonce transactions has been generating issues with transactions, block proposals, Elasticsearch. ⏱ Mission #4 is on hold and will be resumed when fixed, extended accordingly. 👉 Please do: - stop sending transactions -> Ctrl ^ C - restart your nodes -> cd ~/elrond-go-scripts-v2 -> ./script.sh stop && ./script.sh start - wait for further instructions -> ... ✋ Stopping transactions - using the send-bulk-tx option would rapidly send transactions in the right order, but in such a large distributed network, they would be received in the wrong order some times. We addresses this with the updated erdpy script, but that was too little too less. Further-more, the process intensive tx-sending scripts are ran by most on the same computers as their Validators, eating up precious resources. Let's stop sending for now, we have something better in testing. 🔁 Restarting nodes - the transaction pools fill up with wrong nonce TXs and while waiting for the correct nonce to eventually come, more bad ones come. They are also propagated over the network optimistically, which results in an invalid-nonce storm. Restarting the nodes clears the tx-pool, so please let's do that. ⏳ Wait for instructions - we have a more apropriate tool in the testing, which checks the right nonce, sends a tx, waits, checks again, sends, etc - this will send transactions in the same order and can be tweaked. We'll share that with you all, together with the time to resume this mission. 📊 Mission scoring will be given in full for the extended duration of the mission. Transactions sent between Tuesday 23 June 12:00 UTC and the next announcement for resuming the mission DO NOT COUNT. This means 👇 - if you didn't manage yet due to network issues -> no penalty - if you keep spamming now -> no benefit 🛡 Team, let's act as one and defend together. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 update Hello Nodes team, The latest mission is awesome and we can see transactions flowing into the two addresses, check them out: Shard 0 | Shard 1 There are sometimes issues with looping the send-bulk-tx scripts, because of messages being received in incorrect order, or with a higher than expected "nonce". Let's have a look at that: 🔢 nonce, short for "number once" - it's an increasing number associated with each account every time it sends a correct transaction. Accounts start at 0, the first transaction has nonce 1, the second nonce 2, ..., nonce n. Decentralize systems make it a point of only processing transactions in the order in which they were issued. 🔂 Decentralized systems are also spread across the world on anonymous computers, so even if you send a burst of correct messanges with nonce 1000, 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004..., in a very short period of time, they might be received like 1000, 1001, 1003, 1004, 1002, for example. This means the burst of messages will no longer be processed until a message with nonce 1002 is sent again. So if you see you transactions sending correctly, but the explorer does not display them, that's a likely cause. 🙌 One of the ways to address this issue has been put into a neat script by erdpy's father @andreibancioiu • The script: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-sdk/blob/master/examples/BoN/mission4.py • How to install it:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-sdk/master/examples/BoN/mission4.py

• How to run it (replace alice.pem with your wallet's .pem file name): python3 mission4.py --pem=alice.pem 👁‍🗨 Observers: if you are running your own and using them for this mission, please be aware of the anti-flood prevention built in on your nodes by default. The settings are located into config.toml section under [Antiflood.WebServer] # SimultaneousRequests represents the number of concurrent requests accepted by the web server # this is a global throttler that acts on all http connections regardless of the originating source SimultaneousRequests = 10 # SameSourceRequests defines how many requests are allowed from the same source in the specified # time frame (SameSourceResetIntervalInSec) SameSourceRequests = 100 # SameSourceResetIntervalInSec time frame between counter reset, in seconds SameSourceResetIntervalInSec = 60 🔎 TL:DR: if you do more than 1.66 requests / second from the same source (i.e localhost) to your own observer, over a time period of 1 minute, your own observer will deny your requests as a built-in protection, in case that your nodes are exposed publicly. Make sure to tweak that for increased performance! ⚠️ Reminder: the mission is worth 10000 points. If you want to win Battle of Nodes: Onchained, you might want to try and see what you can do to get an advantage for your nodes, perhaps at the expense of others. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #4 - TX Spam Hello Nodes team, We're happy to introduce a transaction spam mission, where you are all warmly invited to spam, but in an orderly fashion. We're looking for each wallet to send at least 50k transactions in a day and spend at least 1500 xERD doing so. 🏆 The goal - send at least 50 000 intra-shard transactions and at least 50 000 cross-shard transactions, from each of your registered wallets, by Wednesday 24 Jun 12:00 UTC. So, at least 100 000, 50k intra, 50k cross shard. More is encouraged, but not scored extra. Specifics: • you must use as destinations the two wallets from the previous missions, which are:

erd1hqplnafrhnd4zv846wumat2462jy9jkmwxtp3nwmw8ye9eclr6fq40f044

erd1utftdvycwgl3xt0r44ekncentlxgmhucxfq3jt6cjz0w7h6qjchsjarml6

• you must send at least 50 000 transactions to each of them • the transactions must each transfer 0.02 xERD - use a value of 2 and 16 zeroes as DENOMINATION instead of the default 18 🔢 Denomination: when you are transferring 1 ERD you are actually transferring 1 x 10^18 of ERD's smallest denomination. So in order to send 0.02 xERD, you need to send 2 * 10^16. In the script specified in the documentation, that is achieved by changing the number of zeroes from 18 to 16 where it says DENOMINATION Fun Fact: our French community has an ongoing poll (link) on what the smallest denomination should be named. 👉 How: You can use erdpy & the "sending bulk transactions" guide (link). Replace the addresses under declare -a TRANSACTIONS= with the two specified above. Let it run on a loop. • Something like this will work from a Linux terminal:

    source script.sh

👆 replace this with your script's name, as generated from the documentation above then

    while true
    do
      echo "Press CTRL+C to stop the script execution"
      send-bulk-tx
    done

⚠️ Limitations: api.elrond.com only allows 3000 requests per 5 minutes from an IP - more will get you blacklisted temporarily for 5 minutes. If you want to do more, try setting up additional Observer nodes and replace the PROXY value from api.elrond.com to "(youraddress):8080" 📊 Scoring for missions: Mission #1 - 1000 points (uploaded on the leaderboards!) Mission #2 - 1000 points Mission #3 - 5000 points Mission #4 - 10000 points Let the spamming begin! ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

📊 Introducing The Leaderboards Hello Nodes Team, The scores have arrived! We explained the scoring mechanism in our previous post, which you can review here (link). Let's dig into the scoring! ⏱ Measured Intervals 👇 🔽 Dry run - 2000 points / 24 hours • v1.0.125 6/4/2020 14:00 - 6/5/2020 20:00 • v1.0.126 6/5/2020 20:00 - 6/8/2020 19:00 • v1.0.127 6/8/2020 19:00 - 6/9/2020 23:00 - newcomers that could not stake due to Metachain issues got full online score • v1.0.128 6/9/2020 23:00 - 6/11/2020 12:30 • v1.0.129 6/11/2020 12:30 - 6/11/2020 23:00 - scoring break due to mainnet configs in testnet release • v1.0.130 6/11/2020 23:00 - 6/13/2020 11:00 🔽 Normal: 5000 points / 24hrs • v1.0.131 6/13/2020 11:00 - 6/14/2020 7:00 • v1.0.131 6/14/2020 7:00 - 6/14/2020 11:00 - scoring break due to seed nodes issues • v1.0.131 6/14/2020 11:00 - 6/15/2020 3:00 • v1.0.131 6/15/2020 3:00 - 6/17/2020 11:30 - no penalty for jailed nodes due to unJail issues 🎖 Missions scoring will be included in the next update 🚧 Known issues to be addressed next week: • Elrond Foundational nodes ranked even if not eligible for rewards - will be hidden ✅ • All nodes that were online are displayed, not just the finally registered ones - invalid, will be removed ✅ • Sorting by Performance not possible - will be ⌛ • Negative scores: jailed time is recorded even if node is offline, and deducted from the online time, so nodes that were offline for most of the time got negative scoring - will make 0 ✅ ⏳ The short period scored so far resulted in noticeable differences, even between nodes running on exactly the same hardware or VPS. As the period grows while at the same time TPS increases and attacks intensify, good nodes will inevitably even out between them and climb the leaderboards. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

📊 Scoring in Battle of Nodes: Onchained & 🎖 Mission #3 Hello Nodes team, Fairly measuring the performance of anonymous internet computers randomly shuffled in & out of a sharded blockchain under constant attack is as complicated as it sounds. Here’s how we are doing it. TL;DR: Score is the sum of Performance & Missions. Performance means having good nodes online with the latest version, Missions are fun & educational challenges. Let’s dig in: 💪 Performance Scoring We observe the duration between patches as the period starting with the genesis time of a patch and the genesis of the one that follows. Online time for nodes running an old version is penalized with 10% and jailed time is penalized with 100%. The resulting “uptime” is then normalized with a peer rating average and scored against the value of the interval. Each interval has a value proportional to its importance in the economy of the event: • Dry-run: 2000 points / 24hrs - 04 June 14:00 UTC - 13 June 23:00 UTC • Normal: 5000 points / 24 hrs - right now • Countdown & special events: 10000 points / 24 hours - to be announced Example: • Patch v1.0.126 was from Friday 05 June 20:00 UTC to Monday 8 June 19:00 UTC. • The correct version in this interval was v1.0.126 & v1.0.127 - the nodes updated to the new version v1.0.127 in the measured interval. The old version was v1.0.125. • Uptime for a node = Online time @ latest version + (Online time @ old version)*0.9 - Jailed time • The period measured was 71 hours in an interval worth 2000 points per 24 hours, so the entire interval was 5915.27 points and 1 second is worth 0.023148 points <- Interval Value per second • The average Peer Rating for that interval was factored in according to the following formula: Peer rating modifier

 = (average rating-10)/90*04 + 0.8

At a maximum rating of 100, that modifier is 1.2 and decreases until it reaches 10, at which point the node is jailed. Read more on Peer Rating here (link) So the Performance score is:

((Online time @ latest version + (Online time @ old version) * 0.9 - Jailed time) * Interval Value per second) * Peer Rating Modifier

The core philosophy is that 2 nodes that have 100% uptime at the latest version will be differentiated by how useful they were to the network, measured by Peer Rating. 🎖 Mission Scoring Missions are educational challenges meant at provoking participants to learn more about the Elrond tech and how it works. We gradually progress from editing configuration files to understanding sharding, monitoring and other cool challenges. Mission score is based on difficulty, time it takes and how important it is for us that you guys grasp those concepts. For example the Keybase Mission #1 is 1.000 points for editing a config file for coolness, the sharded wallets Mission #2 will be 1.500 points because you know understand State Sharding, and the monitoring missions will be worth 10.000 points or more, with others in between. 📊 Total Scoring The total scoring will be the sum of Performance Scoring and Mission Scoring. You will be able to sort the leaderboards by Performance, so you can see which are the most highly performing nodes who stand up well to all the flooding, TPS spam & other attacks. 🎖 Mission #3 The next mission is identical to Mission #2 - send 1000 ERD to the corresponding addresses for the shards your wallet is in. If your wallet is in Shard 0 send to: erd1hqplnafrhnd4zv846wumat2462jy9jkmwxtp3nwmw8ye9eclr6fq40f044 If your wallet is in Shard 1 send to: erd1utftdvycwgl3xt0r44ekncentlxgmhucxfq3jt6cjz0w7h6qjchsjarml6 The catch: you must send 5 x 200 ERD transactions for each wallet, all within a 40 seconds interval in total. Gamers can do the multiple tabs and clicking madly approach. Others can try erdpy, our Python SDK & CLI. 👉 Read the documentation about installing it, converting your wallet into a .pem file and using it to send bulk transactions: https://docs.elrond.com/tools/erdpy ⏱ Mission #3 Starts now and ends Saturday 20 June 23:30 UTC 🙋‍ Get help from our devs @ElrondDevelopers

🎖 Mission #2 timeline extended for half the rewards Hello Nodes team, We appreciate the efforts you all have made so far to perform the mission in time. Well job, as we say. If you haven't had time to take out of your busy schedule to do the mission on time, you still can, for half the score. ⏱ Mission #2 timeline extended with 12 hours until Thursday 23:30 UTC 📊 Scoring for the extended period is reduced by half. If you did the mission in time, you get full score, if you do it before the new timeline you get 50% score, otherwise 0. This stuff is not easy and the explanation below is terrible and not accurate at all, BUT it gives the general idea. 🗺 State = All the street addresses in a city 📬 Shard = The addresses in one city region 📟 Metachain = Public transport dispatch 🚎 Node = A city bus assigned to a different city region each day 👉 Key takeaway: An address is always in the same shard, a node is randomly assigned to different shards. Read on for a better understanding 👇 First off, it's important to understand the difference between Node Keys and Wallet Address. They are similar in a way that they both use cryptographic private & public key pairs to authenticate & sign. However, the private & public key of a node is not associated with the blockchain state, it just authenticates the node in the Elrond network. The wallet on the other hand is connected to an account, whose address & contents are a part of the Elrond Blockchain state. The "wallet" is the piece of software allowing you to interact with the blockchain, and its address is the account address you use it to connect to. State is sharded and distributed to a certain execution shard, based on the last digit of its hex address. An address will always be associated to the same portion of the state assigned to a shard, as long as the number of shards do not change. A validator's assignment to process transactions pertaining to a certain shard will vary - this is what we call shuffling a node to a different shard. Think about the whole thing as a city with its entire streets & addresses. Think about that map as "the state". Now split that map into regions/neighborhoods/sectors/whatever you call a portion of the city where you live. That region is a shard and when you put them together, they make up the entire state. Now think about validators as buses handling public transport in each of the shards. You can assign one bus to be on different regions in different days, just like you can assign a validator to take care of different shards in different epochs. Buses change shards, addresses don't. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie

📣 Infrastructure update Hello Nodes team, Busy day with the latest release, which once again helped move things forward with a big improvements to APIs, the explorer and the wallet. 🧧 Wallet - Functionality fully restored, it is now again working in 100% of the cases 🌐 Explorer - Clicking on a sent transaction from the wallet no longer displays a "not found" message that requires refreshing. "Pending" status will be displayed immediately instead. 🔅 API improvements - 🦸‍♀️ Bonnie is no longer confused about nodes being Eligible & shuffling at the same time & others. ⚔️ Attack in progress! - shields up team, the network is burning. Battle of Nodes yet again proves to be the best Chaos Monkey (Netflix tool!) we can hope for. Thank you team! 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie

📣 Patch v1.0.132 is live, Mission #2 Hello Nodes team, The latest patch fixes the unJail transaction, which in the previous release would only reset a node's rating without actually unjailing it. Multiple fixes & improvements can be found in the full patch notes. ⏱ Genesis time Wednesday 17 June 11:30 UTC 🚧 The Wallet is intermittently working, due to some of the underlying servers having problems. If you're lucky to get a good one, it works, if unlucky, it doesn't. 🛠 Work in progress to restore. 🚨 The Purge - As announced, nodes which were jailed Sunday 14 June 23:59 UTC are henceforth removed from Battle of Nodes. Jailed nodes who sent 1 un-jail transaction over the weekend were not purged, as stated in the description (link). Fair rewards will be distributed to purged nodes for their participation so far. More details after official scoring launches. 🙋‍♂️ Was I purged? Ask Bonnie. She will give you the list of your nodes. If there's nothing, you were probably purged. 🔰 The unJail command is fixed, scoring resumes with penalties for Jailed nodes. 📊 Scoring data is in good hands now and the leaderboards will be introduced today, with up to date scores. 🎖 Mission #2 - State Sharding Elrond's sharding architecture is truly complete, as besides network and transactions, Elrond also shards state. 🤔 What is "state"? For simplicity’s sake let’s consider a valid state of a blockchain is a map of all the accounts and the coins in each of them. A transition to another valid state means taking care of all the transactions done between accounts during the current block and the next. 🤨 How do you shard state? Again for simplicity, let’s consider a blockchain with 30 accounts and 3 shards. State sharding means each of the three shards will be responsible to track the state of 10 accounts each. By reducing the scope for each shard, the overall throughput capability of the blockchain increases. The erd1... addresses are in bech32 format, they need to be converted to hex before. By looking at the last character of the hex address, you can tell which shard it is in: 0️⃣ 0,2,4,6,8,A,C,E 1️⃣ 1,3,5,7,9,B,D,F 👉 The mission: determine the shard your wallet is in and send 1000 xERD to the right address by Thursday 11:30 UTC. If your wallet is in Shard 0 send to: erd1hqplnafrhnd4zv846wumat2462jy9jkmwxtp3nwmw8ye9eclr6fq40f044 If your wallet is in Shard 1 send to: erd1utftdvycwgl3xt0r44ekncentlxgmhucxfq3jt6cjz0w7h6qjchsjarml6 🔢 Determining the shard for a bech32 address can be done in multiple ways: 🦸🏼‍♀️ Iif you give Bonnie your erd1... bech32 address she will reply with your hex address and its shard 📄 You can see the hex address in your wallet's keystore .json file ⌨️ You can use our CLI (link) and issue the following command👇

erdpy wallet bech32 --decode erd1...(your address here)

📊 To get score for this mission, you need to send from the exact wallet you registered for each of your nodes - the 1 wallet = 1 node rule applies. Sending the right amount to the right address will get the respective node scored. Check your wallet & node association with Bonnie. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie

📣 Introducing Bonnie, Metachain status & patch schedule Hello Nodes team, The patch scheduled for tonight will only be released tomorrow morning. Several tests are running over the night to make sure the new patch can be deployed on the public testnet. 🚧 The Metachain is stuck - the great response of validators earlier was much appreciated but ultimately not a fix. We understand the source of the issue and are grateful for finding it. It will be fixed with the new patch early tomorrow. 🦸🏼‍♀️ Introducing BoNnie - the Elrond Network bot that nodes everything about your Validators! She is now an official member of the Elrond family, as per our agreement with @drdelphi , who will keep maintaining her. Bonnie knows all the registered nodes based on the telegram username you submitted in the registration form and she can tell you more about them, even alert you if they're offline. Give her a try! 🚨 The Purge - As announced, nodes which were jailed Sunday 14 June 23:59 UTC will be removed from Battle of Nodes as of the next patch. Jailed nodes who sent 1 un-jail transaction over the weekend were not purged, as stated in the description (link). Fair rewards will be distributed to purged nodes for their participation so far. More details after official scoring launches. 🙋‍♂️ Was I purged? Ask Bonnie. She will give you the list of your nodes. If there's nothing, you were probably purged. 🔰 The unJail command has issues in the current release, in the sense that it would restore the node's rating but not effectively unjail them. As a result, nodes that became jailed after The Purge ended and the first attack hit, will not be penalized for the duration between Monday 15 June 0:00 UTC and the genesis of the next patch. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie

🚨 The Purge is over ⚔️ Attacks begin Hello Nodes team, The weekend purge is over. The moderate TPS environment was able to make the good nodes shine! The others are jailed, so attacks henceforth are mounted against good nodes. Let's get this started. 🚨 Nodes which were jailed 14 June Sunday 23:59 UTC will not mode forward. Nodes which weren't validators over the weekend will not move forward either. ⚔️ The attack from last night was mounted by @drdelphi who managed to get a lot of nodes jailed and stop all the shards from producing blocks. When the attack stopped, the blockchain recovered. 👨‍⚕️ The Doctor explains: " I have setup an attack scenario from 33 machines spread all over Europe (40 nodes). Each machine has between 2 and 10 CPU cores, 4 - 60 GB of RAM, and an average of 500Mbps bandwidth. The nodes continuously sent stake transactions with 2048 BLS keys, but no value. The peak used bandwidth was over 500Mbps. While the attack was ongoing, no shard produced any block, but the moment I stopped the spamming, the network recovered. Almost 200 validators went offline during the attack, including some of my own nodes. One of my nodes didn't recover and I am unable to restart it. Still investigating why." 🟢 Green light for the next scheduled attack by @sebler 🗓 Schedule your attacks with @SeverMM to make sure you are eligible for a reward 🚧 https://explorer.elrond.com is now back online 📊 Scoring & list of remaining nodes will be announced soon. 🤖 Get acquainted with 🤖 @BoNmonitorBoT - we're making her official soon ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase