MultiversX Validators Announcements

🚧 Blockchain in recovery mode! Hello Nodes Team, A change pushed to our own 100-ish nodes 15 minutes ago triggered an edge case. The recovery mechanisms of the protocol have kicked in. We are monitoring as the chain recovers and will keep you guys updated. "I gotta get my tool" - Kip, Gone in 60 Seconds ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Round 4 of Phase 2 Hello Nodes Team, After having our fun with the new autoupdater, we've made some improvements to how it works and updated the cheatsheet to be a lot more helpful to everyone. It's important to note that all these changes are community driven, based on your feedback, ideas and requests. If ever there was a time to feel proud for having done something together, team, today is one of those times. 👉 Please do: backup your keys 👉 Please do: follow the updated cheatsheet (link) carefully and step by step. This will install the latest client version and configure the autoupdater ⚠️ Carefully check every step of the process, compare the output with the cheatsheet. Please report any inconsistencies in the chat so that we may fix them ⏱ Official monitoring for Round 4 of Phase 2 starts on 05 December 12:00 UTC 📊 @alwin79 & @KoenApps keeping things real for everyone, thank you guys! "First Time Again" - The Walking Slashed ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Round 3.2 of Phase 2 Hello Nodes Team, Autoupdaters are fun. We released patch v1.0.47! 👉 Please do: backup your keys, update your nodes to the latest version 👉 If autoupdater doesn't yet work: - navigate to "elrond-go-scripts-v2" folder - do "git pull" - follow the steps in the cheatsheet (link) ⏱ Monitoring for Round 3.2 of Phase 2 will start on 04 December 23:59 UTC 🙏 Thank you all for helping each other out! We're lucky to have you guys. "Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock." - Frank Herbert ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

📣 Round 3.1 of Phase 2 Hello Nodes Team, Round 3 of Phase 2 started on time, 03 December 2019 20:00 UTC. But then... well, shard happens. We sent out a special transaction as a test before starting Mission #6, but it got a different response from the metashard than we expected. The metachain tried recovering for a bit, but it wasn't going to recover. So we issued a new release. 👉 Please do: backup your keys, update your nodes to the latest version 👉 If autoupdater doesn't yet work: - navigate to "elrond-go-scripts-v2" folder - do "git pull" - follow the steps in the cheatsheet (link) 📊 Nodes that were online at 20:00 UTC with patch v1.0.44 will get full score, nodes with v1.0.42 will get 80% of the score ⏱ Monitoring for Round 3.1 of Phase 2 will start on 04 December 23:59 UTC 🙏 Thank you all for helping each other out! We're lucky to have you guys. "Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock." - Frank Herbert ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

📣 Round 3 of Phase 2 & Autoupdater Hello Nodes Team, Our new patch and installation tool and autoupdater are finally here! 👉 Please do: backup your keys, delete existing databases 👉 Install patch v1.0.42 by using our new installation scripts & enable autoupdate 🧐 Follow the instructions in the readme.md (link) or get started with this cheatsheet (link) <- authored by @IulianPascalau ! 🎞 Check out this super detailed video guide (link) by our own @Micabytes 📊 Round 2 of Phase 2 ended just as it was starting, Monday 02 December 19:00 UTC. If your node was online with v1.0.41 at that time, congratulations: you got 5.000 points - the maximum score for Phase 2 of Round 2 ⏱ Round 3 of Phase 3 officially starts Tuesday 03 December 20:00 UTC ⚠️ Please make sure to have v1.0.42 running with autoupdate, patch v1.0.43 will arrive Tuesday 03 December 20:01 UTC, version scoring starts Tuesday 03 December 20:30 UTC "This release shall henceforth be known as Episode III: Return of the Seedth" - Valley of Wolves ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

📣 End of Round 2 of Phase 2 & Next Steps Hello Nodes team, Round 2 of Phase 2 will end tonight. We're then going to launch a new patch, together with our installer and autoupdater. We're giving you guys an uptime score for all nodes online with v1.0.41 at the right time! Bonus announcement of Shadowshards 👉 Please do: install v.1.0.41 if you haven't already, make sure your node is online on Monday 02 December 19:01 UTC (Today!) 📊 Nodes running v1.0.41 at 19:01 UTC will get a flat 5.000 points added to their score for Round 2 of Phase 2 ⏱ Stay tuned for a 19:00 UTC announcement with the new patch and installer. The 24 hours notice will apply, for the last time! 🤩 Battle of Nodes will keep to its scheduled payouts, and be extended with more rewards! - scoring for BoN will be over on Friday 06 December 23:59 UTC - payouts for leaderboards, top accounts (*important note), community and security (*important note) will be done in max 3 days after - Battle of Nodes: Shadowshards will start Saturday 07 December 0:01 UTC. Details soon! *️⃣ - Top accounts & Vulnerability are both prizes that we linked to exploiting the network somehow. The attacking action will mostly be done in Shadowshards, so the payment for these parts will be explained in detail in a future post about the BoN follow-up. (spoiler: we pay more money overall, with some reasonable changes) "Shadowbringers, Shadowkeep, Shadowlands... it's been done to death. We need something original, guys!" "I got just the thing..." ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

📣 Official Patch Release and Round 2 of Phase 2 Start Hello Nodes Team, Weekends are great - everyone recognizes your right to be left alone and do the things you love most. Which we embrace fully, so we can focus on our work. We're counting on you guys being normal people, so even if we're launching the patch on a Saturday, we will only start monitoring on Monday. 👉 Please do: Backup your keys, delete the old database, set up the latest version of the node, restore keys, start node ▪️ Linux installation guide ⚠️ Does not work on Windows ▫️ MacOs installation guide ⏱ This announcement is in effect as of Saturday 30 November 19:00 UTC. Official uptime monitoring starts Monday 2 December 19:00 UTC, 48 hours (because of the weekend) from the announcement. Be sure to update your nodes before that time. ⏲ The genesis time was Friday 29 November 11:00 UTC ⚙️ Relevant tags: v1.0.41 and BoN-ph2-w2 👻 Remember: we removed ghost nodes. We defined a node as "ghost" if it was offline for 7 days or more during Rounds 4 & 5 from Phase 1 👨‍🍳 The installation & auto-updater tool are still in the oven, our chefs are cooking around the clock 🖼 Bye-bye Windows! This patch will not work. This is the last call to move to Linux! "I've ran out of emoticons." - not Sever ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Final Phase 1 Scores are up Hello Nodes Team, The final Phase 1 scores have been uploaded. You will see how 153 nodes share the first place with max score, trailed 350 nodes with less than 10% score difference. Phase 2 will rock the leaderboards, though! 👌 We see the current tight scores as a success in terms of how you guys managed to keep the nodes online, patched on time and also do missions. Good job, team! 📊 The Leaderboard is updated with Phase 1 scores 👉 What will you do with your ERD holdings at mainnet? Please help us plan the mainnet launch as good as we can by filling in this survey (link) ⏳ Auto-updater & next patch: Soon(tm), not today, likely tomorrow. Please follow this channel for the official announcement "Honey, why is the heat not working?" - #nopressure ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Purging Ghost Nodes! Hello Nodes Team, While we wait for the new rating system, which will dynamically adapt the shards to discard "lazy" nodes, we are manually removing some ghost nodes. This will increase the liveliness of shards and allow for higher TPS for our tests. 👻 We defined a node as "ghost" if it was offline for 7 days or more during Rounds 4 & 5 from Phase 1 👉 Please find the nodes to be purged at this sheet (link). If you find your node there and want to turn it back on, please let @SeverMM know about it. 👴🏼 Thanks in advance for not trolling the old man, he foams at the mouth quite easily. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! ⚔️

⏳ Auto-Updater delayed, Round 2 of Phase 2 starts "normally" Hello Nodes Team, The Auto-Updater will not be ready today. We decided to do a number of changes all at once, so we do it right from the get-go. New features: 🔹 running the Elrond nodes as daemons - for the Windows guys: the "service" equivalent on Linux 🔹 having a very competitive set of installation, update and auto-update scripts - competitive as in "you guys raise the bar so high, we feel obliged to keep up". Thank you for that! 🔹 an updated TerminalUI - the nice window with all the node info 🔹 proper tests for everything Thank you for understanding regarding these timeline changes. Until further notice, the overall Battle of Nodes timeline stays unchanged: we finish on 06 December. ⏱ Patch v1.0.41 is undergoing tests and ideally comes Tuesday 26 November (time tbd). Monitoring for Round 2 of Phase 2 starts 24 hours after the patch will be launched. 🖼 Windows guys! Are there any of you left? We really don't want to make this unfair to anyone - if you're still running a native Windows client, please shift to Linux! Just ask in the channel and let's get you the help you need to come over to the dark side. "It's ready when it's ready" - ex-project manager ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

⏳ Auto-updater status Hello Nodes Team, Our auto-update solution has become a lot more elegant than initially planned, but also created one additional dependency, which needs a bit more work. 👉 Please stay tuned for the official announcement of the auto-updater tool and relevant instructions. ⏱ We'll communicate again latest in 6 hours with an update. Thank you for your patience, it's needed for us to do everything right. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎬 Closing Round 1 of Phase 2 Hello Nodes Team, Round 1 of Phase 2 is now over! It was a very good run, thanks for all your participation. We had the epic 5 Generals mission, our longest round yet, TPS was nice, some new errors were found, fun was had by all. 📊 Monitoring has stopped Friday 22 November 14:00 UTC, exactly 1 week after the start of Round 1. It is now safe to turn off all nodes until Monday (please read below) 🚧 Shard 2 had troubles adding new blocks for the last 14 hours or so. We actually know why for a long time and the development for the improvement is done and it will be included in the next patch. So we grow! 📡 An automatic update script is being tested right now. We will offer it to you guys on Monday 25 November 12:00 UTC (estimate). From that point over, all nodes will have 24hrs time to opt into using the script. After the 24 hour grace period, a patch will be issued. The Latest Version penalty will henceforth be decreased from 24 hours to just 1 hour. 🧐 Why an auto-updater: This is so we can release patches faster, restart the blockchain faster and overall be more confident about spamming the network. Remember that Phase 3 is coming as well, recovering from those deadly attacks will be interesting! 👉 Please do: make sure you watch this announcement channel in the 24 hour period starting with Monday 25 November 12:00 UTC and onwards for the autoupdater instructions. 👌 Delete the databases, they are no longer needed, Round 2 starts fresh 👻 While we wait for the hot new rating system to clean out offline nodes and low performing ones, ghost nodes will be purged. 70-ish nodes haven't been online in a while, so we will remove them in Round 2 of Phase 2. They can be re-added to the next Round, if you decide to turn them back on. "Some say Mondays are terrible. Nothing a new patch can't fix." - aspiring ex-smoker ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

🚧 Shard 2 is stuck Hello Nodes Team, Shard 2 hasn't added a new block in more than 9 hours. There are ongoing discussions and checks, a decision on the topic will come soon. We will communicate back in maximum 3 hours with a status and next steps. 📊 Scoring will be unaffected, we will communicate exactly the decision to make things fair. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎥 Battle of Nodes Recap & Next Steps Hello Nodes Team, We're working to bring you a very friendly and non-intrusive Validator client auto-update tool. In the meantime we're increasing and decreasing TPS and interpreting results. 🎖 The next mission will be to update your node in under 1 hour from the patch release with this tool. The tool will be released at time "x", then a new patch will be issued at time "x + 24 hr" and mission scoring will happen at time "x + 25hr". You will have a 24 hours interval to deploy the auto-update tool on your node and then we plan to see all nodes updated within 1 hour from the new patch. "x" = soon(tm) 📊 To even out scoring between those who had full uptime but no time for missions and those who dilligently did missions even if they couldn't maintain 100% uptime, we're normalizing the score for the coming period. Please check the current calculations here - feedback welcome! 🖼 Still running on Windows? You're OK and getting 100% score for Round 1 of Phase 2. Please consider migrating towards Linux for Round 2 of Phase 2, we will only award 80% of score for Windows clients starting then (date not announced). Do the poll and reach out if you still need help: https://t.me/ElrondValidators/33137 💌 In the meantime, our war correspondent writes home to his wife about his experiences on the battle #fiedl. A romanced recap of the Battle of Nodes event so far: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/tales-of-war-a-letter-from-the-front-line-950ff6b5b465 "The toughest mission so far challenged the trust we have in one another and had us doubt our comrades. They wanted to re-enact the Byzantine Generals problem and have us risk it all on trusting just a few of us. But we pulled through, thanks to our field medic and his heavy lifting robot." ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎖 "5 Generals" - Mission #5.2 updates & Phase 2 Timeline Hello Nodes Team, The "5 Generals" mission had some very interesting outcomes, with all of you working together as a team, with the help of Dr. Delphi and his bot. The now famous duo that are thus awarded the completely fictitious and extremely well deserved 🥁* drum roll * 🥁 👑🤖👑 "Cyber-Crown of the 5 Shards" 👑🤖👑 - a ceremonial headpiece worn by the traditional mechs assembled from 5 Byzantium generals & their elephant robots back in the 11th century. Congratulations @drdelphi & @BoNmonitorBoT for earning everyone's trust and honorably fulfilling your destiny! 🤔 The results are extremely interesting, because while the bot managed everything, it was still down to the player's tactics to decide how to allocate their points. Some chipped in as much as they could for their one node, some distributed points evenly between their multiple nodes, others boosted just one of them, while apparently others pooled more than 6 nodes to boost just one. 🧐 The figures can be observed on the blockchain explorer here (link) and perused in a simpler form in this spreadsheet (link). 📊 Obviously the mission rewards topple some expectations and create some interesting Leaderboard action. The goal of this event is of course to have fun and excitement, but above all to test the Elrond blockchain, make it better, more secure and to make sure you guys have all the right knowledge. 👉 As we move into our more intense testing & adversarial phase, scoring will be adjusted to reward performance much more than just the uptime and missions so far. 🕵️‍♀️ Our working balance approach is to make Phase 1 total max score = Phase 2 + Phase 3 total max score. This will balance the efforts so far with the intense task of running a node in a high TPS & adversarial environment ⏱ Round 1 of Phase 2 will be running until we announce a new patch, which is estimated on Thursday. Scoring continues until the official announcement of the end of Round! "Man and machine, power extreme!" ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎖 "5 Generals" - Mission #5.2 updates Hello Nodes Team, The current version of the testnet seems stable so we've turned up the heat a bit more. We're hovering at around 900 TPS right now, so far so good. We're going to keep the current version of the testnet for a few more days and gradually increase the TPS count. In the meantime, let's get back to scheming! "5 Generals" is back, as announced on Friday. We're changing some things a bit, to make it more interesting and relevant, full details below. 🧐 The original Mission #5 is HERE (link), we consider that as baseline with the changes below 🎖 Mission scoring for the first 4 days of Phase 2 will be decided via one single transaction from each shard. The originating wallet must be in the shard for which points will be distributed. The minimum value of the transaction is 500 000 ERD, without considering gas. The transaction with the highest value, without gas, is victorious. The data field must include the public key of nodes and points assigned to each of them. 📊 Scoring in the first 4 days of Phase 2 will be split as 50% mission, 50% a mix of uptime, earned rewards and proposed blocks. Max score per day is 10.000 points, so you can get max 20.000 points for mission and max 20.000 points for uptime + rewards. Check the formula as below: First 4 days score = ( (1 x Percent Uptime + 2 * Number of Earned rewards / (Hitrate * Max Number of Earned Rewards) + 3 * Proposed Blocks / Maximum Proposer Rate) /6) * 20.000 + Mission #5 score) 💰 2.920.000 score points allocated for each winning transaction. Why? (Number of community nodes online * mission score for 4 days) / (5, the number of non-meta shards) 🧮 Click HERE (link) for a spreadsheet with figures and examples and HERE (link) for an explanation of the terms 👉 The transactions should be sent at this address: f41cbb0cb63d5dfbdbaea7a9dc220828523a362592e9cd6f89e517f173c4387a ⏱ Please send the transactions by Tuesday 19 November 18:00 UTC “The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.” ⚔️ See you on the battle #field ! 🛡

📣 Phase 2 Successful Start & Mission #5 Returns Hello Nodes Team, We're live in the Challenge phase of Battle of Nodes. The blockchain is stable and we're soon going to turn up the heat, just a bit this time. 🎖 Mission #5 - "5 Generals" is back! Start scheming. We will soon post the details regarding to minimum transaction value. As we increase the number of transactions flowing through the network and determine a stable throghput, we will calculate the average earned rewards and balance them. Metachain nodes earn more validator rewards but do not earn transaction fees. More on that soon! ⏱ Round 1 of Phase 2 will run through the weekend and until Tuesday - exact cut-off time to de determined. 👉 Check out the CPU & RAM load on your nodes, sub-spec nodes will fall behind in number of earned rewards and proposed blocks 🖼 Still running on Windows? You're OK and getting 100% score for Round 1 of Phase 2. Please consider migrating towards Linux for Round 2 of Phase 2, we will only award 80% of score for Windows clients starting then (date not announced) ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

⚡️Community contribution flash campaign⚡️ ⚔️As the fierce warriors battle for the top spot in the Battle of Nodes, with interesting quests, we launch our own quest for knowledge with our second Community contribution campaign. 👨🏽‍💻Our quest this time is to find how is the validators experience with Elrond, what feels like to be a validator and contributor to our great tech and what kind of person has the skills to take Elrond network to a whole new level. 📑The format to follow is this: - A short article between 600 - 800 words - The first paragraph should include a short description about yourself, how you discovered blockchain and if you have any previous experience about running a miner, validator, masternode or any kind of technical activity for a blockchain protocol, to describe how was it, the good and the bad parts. - The second paragraph should focus on how you discovered Elrond, why did you liked Elrond and decided to run a node and what is the experience of running a node, the good and the bad parts. - The overall focus should be on a light comparison between other tech and Elrond, about how you perceive our progress so far and what should we improve in our network to make you stay with us and participate once the mainnet is live. -Again the emphasis is on QUALITY and ORIGINALITY. ⏰DEADLINE: Sunday 16:00 UTC Countdown link: https://bit.ly/2ObruSA REWARDS for the best submissions: 🥇 First place - 0.2 REP + a little surprise 🥈Second place - 0.2 REP 🥉All the other QUALITY submissions - 0.1 REP *QUALITY means respecting the structure and having a coherent story, any deviation from the subject or incoherent articles, as well as copied content will be discarded.

📣 Announcing Round 1 of Phase 2 Hello Nodes Team, Hungry for more BoN action? Looks like meat is back on the menu! We have patch v1.0.40 for you guys, come and get it! 🎟 Nodes that participated in the previous rounds are whitelisted by default 👉 Please do: Backup your keys, set up the latest version of the node, restore keys, start node ▪️ Linux installation guide 🔹 Windows installation guide ▫️ MacOs installation guide 👌 No need to keep any old databases ⏱ This announcement is in effect as of Thursday 14 November 14:00 UTC. Official uptime monitoring starts Friday 15 November 14:00 UTC, 24 hours from the announcement. Be sure to update your nodes before that time. ⏲ The genesis time is Friday 15 November 14:00 UTC ⚙️ Relevant tags: v1.0.40 and BoN-ph2-w1 🐘 Known issues: Validator RAM usage will spike on first start and return down to normal as soon as the first garbage collection process executes. If your node is running on a sub-spec configuration (less than 4GB RAM) it will shut down immediately after start. 👉Resolution: please run your node(s) according to specs, with at least 4GB RAM. 🖼 Still running on Windows? You're OK and getting 100% score for Round 1 of Phase 2. Please consider migrating towards Linux for Round 2 of Phase 2, we will only award 80% of score for Windows clients starting then (date not announced) ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Updates about Phase 2 start, Scores and Mission #1 Hello Nodes Team, The Leaderboard is now updated with all the scores from Rounds 3 & 4, including Mission #1. We uploaded the instances where the scores awarded for the Mission were less than full here, go check it out. ⏱ Uptime bonus: as previously announced, we decided to grant an uptime bonus to clear up the issues from a missed network package or failed heartbeat for whatever reason. Uptime scoring is meant to encourage you guys to keep nodes running all the time, not make you angry that in spite of your scripts and expensive VPSs, you lose points. We heard you. 🤩 We applied a flat 2.5% bonus score to everyone, without exceeding the maximum 10.000 points per day score. This fixes the tiny differences between our 100% operators while nod doing anything for people who are offline for longer periods of time 🎖 Mission #1 scoring - because of our "Nobody gets left behind!" philosophy, we decided to award partial scores to people trying their best in the mission. We split it in 4 parts: Transaction with proper amount, Transaction with proper info. Filling in the form, Starring the Repo. Doing at least one of those was scored. Obviously people who did the full mission got full points and are way ahead of the rest. 👉 Please check the Leaderboard, check if your nodes are in the Mission #1 issues list, and get in touch with @SeverMM to fix anything related to transactions. No GitHub or Forms issues, I already did my best to address that individually with everyone I could. 📆 Patch is almost ready, testing it one more time overnight. Expect Phase 2 announcement on Wendesday and actual start on Thursday. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡