MultiversX Validators Announcements

📊 Leaderboard update & next steps Hello Nodes Team, We updated the scores to include Round 4 & Mission #1, go check it out. Still to do: Round 5 score and Round 1-3 uptime bonus, as decided earlier. 📆 Round 1 of Phase 2 starts this week, likely on Wednesday. Throughout this round there will be a constant transaction flow from Elrond, giving nodes in Shards 0-4 the chance to earn as much as the Metachain, due to capturing transaction fees. 🎖 Mission #5 will be back with exactly the same idea, perhaps slightly different figures (i.e. minimum transaction amount). Keep scheming. ⚠️ Round 2 of Phase 2 (next week) will have an interesting scoring feature - validators running on Linux and MacOS will get 100% of the score, while validators running on Windows will get 80% 🧐 Why? Our innovative Virtual Machine uses 3rd party dependencies that do not play well with Windows at the moment. The mainnet therefore won't have a Windows native client. 👨‍💻 You can still run validators on your Windows machines, but with a Linux virtual machine on top. We will share an official tutorial. Stay tuned for the Phase 2 start announcement. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎬 Closing Round 5 of Phase 1 and Phase 1 overall! Hello Nodes Team, What an eventful Round 5! We had a stable network, 3 full missions and the start of perhaps one of the coolest mission so far. But we also tried turning up the heat and increasing the TPS count beyond what is presently reasonable. 30k TPS though, HOW COOL IS THAT?? Anyway, back to Earth, for now. We close Phase 1, start with Phase 2 next week and re-start Mission #5 as well 🎬 Round 5 of Phase 1 ends Sunday 10 November 23:59 UTC 📊 Scoring for Round 5 will be made of uptime & completed missions. Small bonus for uptime in Shards 1 & 3 to account for the restarts 🎖 Mission #5 is cancelled in its current form due to issues with Shards 1 & 3. It will come back next week 👉 Please do: make sure nodes are running up until Sunday 10 November 23:59 UTC for maximum uptime and keep your eyes on the announcements channel for the start of Phase 2! 📆 Overall schedule at this point is 2 weeks over the initial estimates. Thank you for you continued support as we make incredible progress! 🏋️‍♂️ Prepare your nodes - Phase 2 will feature constant transactions that we will send over the network at varying rates, with scoring tuned to discourage sub-par systems General scoring - thank you all for the feedback about uptime fairness. Our goal is to encourage everyone to run a node for as much as possible, not to aggravate those who do their best to maintain uptime but get a "hiccup" due to conditions outside of their control. 🤩 We will apply a retroactive 0.7% bonus (~10 minutes / day) for daily uptime scores, without going over the maximum possible. This evens out the scores for those who do their best to maintain high uptime, and does virtually nothing for those who turn on their nodes occasionally or are offline for longer periods of times due to other conditions. ⚔️ See you on the battle #field ! 🛡

📢 Shards 1 & 3 are stuck Looks like we flew too close to the sun - 30k TPS! Maybe as a result, shards 1 & 3 are currently looking for a couple of blocks to resume synching. 👉 Please do: restart your nodes in shards 1 and 3, if you haven't already 📊 No score penalty for restarting your nodes ⚔️ See you in the battle #fiedl ! 🛡️

📢 Paging nodes in Shard 1 and Shard 3 👉 If your node is stuck, please restart! 📊 No score penalty!

🎖 Battle of Nodes Mission #5 Hello Nodes Team, Perhaps one of the biggest wonders of blockchain is that it provides an efficient solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem. Byzantium was so filled with wars and political infighting, that the term "byzantine" became synonymous with complexity and deceit. 🏰 The Byzantine Generals Problem is when a bunch of generals from the Byzantium empire surround an enemy city to attack it. Success will only be achieved if they coordinate so all attack at once. With no phones and a propensity for treachery, things really get interesting. 📄 If you love reading, check this 1982 research paper by Leslie Lamport, it will give you some insights into how old the problem is, how old the actual math solution is and maybe even make you wonder what took Satoshi so long to implement it? 🧝‍♂️ Blockchain technology solves this problem with neat mathematical variations that help decentralized networks achieve consensus. At Elrond we invented something we call Secure Proof of Stake, read more about it here. If you want a fun & practical example, here it is: 📊 The scoring over the weekend will be decided via one single transaction from each shard, so 5 transactions decide all the scoring. The originating wallet must be in the shard for which points will be distributed. The minimum value of the transaction is 1.000.000 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. 🧐 Example of payload: 004b262af9256b4fb09964c32489cb193bc75553ce96fd635de56afa2cb105 15000 d60b64080d7e27f09947d65a86ef42cc4d2d7f011cbe5252cd983be2373a5 10000 221a61101b89427432d107f1deef094b71f1d59bc246e3b94eb8ca888917 5000 With the above we will assign points to the nodes which registered with those public keys (initialBalancesSk.pem) as instructed: 15k, 10k, (anything 2.412.000 or less). 👉 Send the transactions to this wallet: 801b47492f5df19493fdd6e36a958aad390e9bb54a517c1a8d21cd90812cc255 ⏱ Mission #5 ends Monday November 11 20:00 UTC. Transactions received after that are disconsidered. 💰 The transaction, per shard, with the highest amount of ERD, wins 📊 Each winning transaction per shard gets to assign 2.412.000 points by assigning each node points in the data field, as explained above 🧮 Why 2.412.000? Maximum score per day is 10.000. We will do this mission over 3 days. 50% of scoring will be uptime, 50% will be mission. So 5.000 points each day will go to the mission. 3 days x 5.000 points per node x 804 community nodes = 12.060.000 points, split by 5 shards = 2.412.000 🤴 The winning transactions decide everything and are final, no mistakes. Anything goes - a single node can get all the points from all transactions and any possible combination you can imagine 🚀 If you think 1.000.000 ERD is too much, keep your eyes on that TPS counter over the weekend - more transactions, more fees, more block proposer fees! ⚖️ In case more than 2.412.000 points are assigned in the data field of the winning transaction, we will only award points in the order received, until reaching 2.412.000, no more after that 😱 "But why should I entrust my money and identity and chance to succeed to complete strangers, that's crazy!!!" Yes, it is. And yet we do it, every single day of our lives. Blockchain is important. “He who controls the ERD controls the universe.” ― Frank Shardbert, Dune ⚔️ See you on the battle #field ! 🛡

🎖 Battle of Nodes Mission #4 Hello Nodes Team, Mission #4 is going to teach us a bit about the concept of gas in Elrond - what is it, why is it used and how does it work? 🕵️‍♀️ What is "gas"? - Gas represents the fee for doing stuff on the blockchain. Like a car's engine that uses gas to work. And then the analogy stops here. There are two things about "gas" that you need to be aware of: 💵 Gas price - it determines the price for executing a simple operation Transferring ERD from one account to another is 1 simple operation. Executing a smart contract means more, which we will discuss later. A higher gas price will be executed faster, in case we are in a high TPS environment, also for later. 🚧 Gas limit - it determines the amount of ERD you want to spend for a certain transaction. If a smart contract has a loop, it will burn all your available money, as it will execute an infinite number of transactions, each of it costing you the equivalent of the gas price. So you set a limit to protect yourself. In Elrond, you send out the maximum limit as fee and will get back the difference from the actual cost. See how Elrond is bringing change to the blockchain world already? 🧐 Current limitations: In the present pre-mainnet implementation, we fixed the Gas Price to 0.001 ERD and the Gas Limit will always be indicating the actual transaction cost. Example: Gas Price is calculated in units of 10^-4 ERD (0.0001) and the current price is fixed to 10 units of Gas Price (0.001 ERD). We set a fixed Gas Limit of 100, which means a simple transaction will cost 0.1 ERD (100 units of gas, priced at 0.0001 ERD each) <- this will be made simpler in the final wallet. Also, we need to name our currency sub-divisions, start thinking ;) 📨 Storage fee - storing a byte of data on the Elrond blockchain costs 0.001 ERD. So the storage cost will be number of bytes x storage fee 💰 Transaction fee = Gas Price * Gas Limit + Storage cost 👉 The mission: send a 900 ERD transaction with 100 ERD transaction fee from the staking wallet of each node (initialBalancesSk.pem) to: 56e62bbe733a6bae27b4039f780d3dbf3d31f78afdf0c9b3d5999b2e3b265e23 ⚠️ Currently this is only easily possible by adding a payload to a transaction, aka putting some text in the Data field. The current wallet implementation uses UTF-8 in the Data field, so maybe you can use this tool to help you get that payload juuuust right ⚠️ The Gas Price and Gas Limit fields in the wallet are intentionally greyed out. Do this mission properly by carefully reading this message and sending 1 transaction per node with 900 ERD and 100 ERD transaction fee. ⏱ This mission is in effect as of Thursday 07 November 18:00 UTC and will end on Friday 08 November 18:00 UTC "Gas, gas or gas" - sticker on blockchain-hippie van ⚔️ See you on the battle #field ! 🛡

🎖 Battle of Nodes Mission #3 & other updates Hello Nodes Team, Mission #3 will be a bit easier than the previous one. The goal here is to get you guys looking a bit under the hood of your nodes, see what happens when you mess around with things. Simple things first - node display name. 🕵️‍♀️ NodeDisplayName represents the friendly name a user can pick for his node in the status monitor. You can change it in the prefs.toml file located in the elrond-config folder 👉 Give your node(s) a name, if you haven't already, by updating your prefs.toml file(s) 👉 Send a transaction with 900 ERD and your NodeDisplayName in the Data field to b96bb87913469147272ddceb69dfb6041817ea9e0c6b16558bc25b1b57f5432a ⚠️ Send 1 transaction for each node, don't group or split ⏱ Mission #3 is in effect as of Wednesday 06 November 16:00 UTC and will end in 24 hours on Thursday 07 November 16:00 UTC. Please make sure to correctly send out the transactions by then 2️⃣ Perhaps aptly named "number 2", according to some opinions, yesterday's mission was both challenging and tedious. Due to these reasons we decided to give those of you who didn't have a chance to complete Mission #2 in time a chance of doing so. 👉 You can complete Mission #2 untill Thursday 07 November 04:00 UTC with a 50% score penalty. 📊 Leaderboard update is in progress. @SeverMM is old and we're still teaching him how to use computers. He spent his last two days trying to guess his own password before asking for help. 🤦‍♂️ 💰 Bonus points if you change your node's name to something that breaks something, somehow ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎖 Battle of Nodes Mission #2 Hello Nodes Team, Now that we have a proper functioning blockchain, time to have some fun and discover some of the interesting Elrond sharding properties. 🧐 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 when the sum of the coins in all of the accounts is equal to the total supply. 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 speed at which they process transactions increases. 👉 In Elrond, you can see which shard an address is in by looking at the last character of the address. Check it out here: Elrond Sharding Map 👉 The mission: send 875 ERD for each node, split in 5 transactions of 175 ERD each, originating from an address in each shard (0-4), with the node's staking address (from initialBalancesSk.pem) in the data field, to this address: 9a81adb5b5f3633724e92604cbc8c79b9addd4413d814b5e3f605c1fe1a33491 😯 Recap: - 1 wallet in each shard - 5 transactions per node - 175 ERD each transaction to mission destination address - any number of intermediary transactions - 875 ERD in total for each node - each transaction sent from a different shard wallet / account / address - each transaction with only one of your node's staking wallet address in the info field - 5 different transactions for each node 👉 What needs to be done actually: For each node: - node earns rewards, up to 875 - check your existing wallets and map them to shards - create new wallets for the shards you are missing at point 2 - Make sure those wallets have enough funds to send the needed transaction amounts + gas: -> recommended 176 (175 ERD for mission + 1 ERD for gas) - You send 175 ERD to the indicated address, with the node's staking address in the data field Repeat for the other nodes. 👌 You can reuse the wallets for your account if you have multiple nodes, but different wallets are expected for different accounts ⚠️ You can't have wallets in the metachain, only in the "regular" shards (0-4) 👉 Create new wallets here: https://testnet.elrond.com/#/wallet/ ⏱ This mission is in effect as of Tuesday 05 November 16:00 UTC and will finish in 24 hours, on Wednesday 06 November 16:00 UTC 📊 Scoring for Round 5 will be done for uptime only. Mission #2 is a lot of work so we will make it worth 50% of the score for Day 1 of Round 5. 🤯 Here's an example spreadsheet for someone running 6 nodes 🏷 Tutorial for creating a new wallet "Instructions unclear, ERD stuck in ceiling shard" - anonymous Elrond memester ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Announcing Round 5 of Phase 1 & Latest Patch Hello Nodes Team, We trust you got a good rest over the weekend and are back with fresh energy for Round 5 of Phase 1! We have launched patch v1.0.38 which contains a series of fixes and improvements. ⚠️ Reminder: This is a Phase 1 - Build extension. We're aiming for a stable network and a few missions, no stress testing or attacks. 🎟 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 Monday 04 November 09:00 UTC. Official uptime monitoring starts Tuesday 05 November 09:00 UTC, 24 hours from the announcement. Be sure to update your nodes before that time. ⏲ The genesis time is Tuesday 05 November 07:00 UTC, but scoring will start Tuesday 05 November 09:00 UTC, so as to keep our commitment of 24 hours notice for everyone. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🌤 Battle of Nodes will resume after the weekend Hello Nodes team, Testing the current patch is taking more time than initially estimated, mainly due to the complexity of the issues addressed requiring proper care and tinkering. The dev team informed us that they are not ready to release now. So let's enjoy the weekend and stay tuned for an announcement on Monday. 👉 Please watch the announcements channel for an update 🎖 Mission transactions sent in time but not executed due to the issues will be considered. Please DM @SeverMM with the TX link or a screenshot of pending transactions, if it's the case 📊 Leaderboard info is currently being processed and will be updated early next week "The worst part about war is not the fighting, but the waiting" - anonymous shopper on the eve of Black Friday, 1984 ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

🎬 Round 4 of Phase 1 ends early Hello Nodes Team, While patch v1.0.37 fixed a very important issue, its deployment did little to fix the subsequent issues generated by shards 2 & 3 getting stuck, as they were trying to roll back to blocks far behind the ones already notarized by the metachain. No going back to the future, it seems. Not until the next patch, at least. 👨‍🔬 Notoriously eccentric blockchain alchemist Radu Chis explains what happened. ⏱ Official end of Round 4 is Thursday 31 October 18:00 UTC 📊 Scoring for Round 4 will not factor in the proposer rate after Wednesday 30 October 18:00 UTC - a comfortable amount of time ahead of block 17175 on Shard 3 👌 Even if you didn't patch to v1.0.37 you will not be penalized, as Round 4 ended in the grace period ⏰ The new patch and official announcement will come on Friday 01 November during UTC business hours, with 24 hours notice before the official start of Round 5 👍 Shutting your node down from now on until the official start of Round 5 will not have any effect on score "We have to go back, Marty! Back to the Future!" - Doc Emmet Brown ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Client version 1.0.37 released Hello Nodes Team, The latest patch is here! It removes the cause of the "too many open files" error nodes running on Linux experienced, which will allow all nodes to be able to initiate the recovery process and get the shards with issues unstuck. 👉 Please do: Backup your keys, set up the latest version of the node, restore keys, start node 👉 Please do not delete the database ▪️ Linux scripts 🔹 Windows scripts ▫️ MacOs scripts 👆 Scripts make your life as a node operator easier, when used properly. Please follow the links above and try updating your nodes in a more automated way. 🔎 Check scripts before updating, latest tags are v1.0.37 and BoN-ph1-w4-p1 ⚠️ If you're using your own scripts, make sure you update the binary and the p2p.toml, located in the \src\github.com\ElrondNetwork\elrond-config folder 📊 Due to shards 2&3 having gotten stuck since around Wednesday 30 October 23:00 UTC, scoring from then and until Friday 01 November 11:00 UTC will disregard the block proposer rate, to keep the daily scores comparable accross shards. This announcement is in effect as of Thursday 31 October 11:00 UTC. Version monitoring starts Friday 01 November 11:00 UTC, 24 hours from now. Be sure to update your nodes before that time. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Announcing the Battle of Nodes Prize Pool Split "After seeing the excitement and amount of people that have joined the event, we decided to increase the prize pool to $60.000, as a sign of respect for the amount of attention and resources you guys decided to dedicate for helping and challenging us." - Beniamin Mincu, Elrond CEO 🤑 Rewards for issue discovery, testnet operation and community support 👾 Vulnerabilities - $20.000 🏆 Top 7 accounts - $4.850 📊 Leaderboard - $32.500 for +800 nodes 🧞‍♂️ Community - $2.500 for 7 champions Official prizes and more details in this detailed Medium post. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🚧 Too many open files error Hello Nodes Team, Several Linux nodes are throwing a "too many open files" error. This is because TCP connections are treated as open files and counted towards a max, which is 1024. So when connected to 1.000-ish nodes, Linux won't open more files and let our validator software do its thing. We've prioritized the implementation of the feature to prevent this. Patch coming! 👨‍🎨 Coding Artist Iulian Pascalau explains: https://t.me/ElrondValidators/21471 🌏 The issue is manifesting overall and is causing delays to some transactions. The shards are progressing, sometimes slower. 📊 As this situation is global, no change to scoring. 🎖 Missions: we will make sure you don't get penalized if your correct transaction, sent in the right timeframe, is pending due to this situation. 👉 Please do: keep your nodes online and watch this channel for the patch announcement. "If it's not broken, why not break it?" - ancient Round 1 proverb ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎉 Battle of Nodes: Mission #1 Hello Team Nodes, Round 4 seems to be smooth so far, let's see if we can make things more interesting with a mission. This first mission is a simple, non-combat one. Lore: Elrond has recently been listed on CoinCodeCap.com. The name is a clever play on CoinMarketCap.com, but instead of tracking token price and trading volume, it tracks GitHub activity. This is a very good indicator about a project's liveliness and the team's commitment to keep building. It therefore is not a surprise for anyone that Elrond is ranked high because of our very active development team. Besides the number of commits to a project's GitHub repository, CoinCodeCap also tracks its "popularity", which is measured by the number of times a project has been "Starred". Help us become more popular and make Elrond's rank on CoinCodeCap something we can all be proud of! The Mission 🎖 Star our GitHub repository 🥙 Fill in this culinary themed form 💸 Send a transaction for each node to: Bba53f97539a4a1e058362b97203024e066ce563303ca8723cedd29490690cc2 👉 Full Mission Guide & Tutorial - mandatory read! - https://link.medium.com/vGEzH7Wjb1 ⏱ This mission is in effect as of Tuesday 29 October 13:30 UTC and will end Wednesday 30 October 13:30 UTC. Transactions sent after that time will not be considered. 📊 Successful mission = star in GitHub + fill in form + send transaction with correct data and 800 ERD. Not doing one of the above = no points! ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl! 🛡

📊 Leaderboard scores for Round 3 are up! Hello Nodes Team, Scores for Round 3 have been uploaded to the Leaderboard, go see where you stand! Due to the metachain synch issues last week which pretty much started right after kicking off Round 3, we only used uptime information. 👉 We applied the version penalty for nodes that updated after the 24 hour grace period which ended Friday 25 October 09:00 UTC 👌 We granted a 30 minutes bonus to all scores on Friday, to cover for extra restarts that were performed while troubleshooting ⏱ Friday scoring spanned 7 hours: 11:00 - 18:00 UTC, so max score was 2.916 (7/24*10.000) 🚧 Glitch in the Matrix: nodes running clients older than v1.0.36 are displaying "N/A" under "Version" ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Announcing Round 4 of Phase 1 & Latest Patch Hello Nodes Team, We trust you got a good rest over the weekend and are back with fresh energy for Round 4 of Phase 1! We have launched patch v1.0.36 which contains a series of fixes and improvements, as well as the genesis for Round 4, which will officially start Tuesday 29 October 07:00 UTC, +24 hours from now. ⚠️ Reminder: This is a Phase 1 - Build extension. We're aiming for a stable network and a few missions, no stress testing or attacks. 🎟 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 👉 Node names are taken from prefs.toml instead of config.toml, starting with this patch, please edit accordingly ⏱ This announcement is in effect as of Monday 28 October 07:00 UTC. Official uptime monitoring starts Tuesday 29 October 07:00 UTC, 24 hours from the announcement. Be sure to update your nodes before that time. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🎬 Round 3 of Phase 1 ends early Hello Nodes Team, The patch was too little too late for recovering the blockchain from its earlier issues. Recovering it via an accurate orchestration of all node operators simultaneously would be both beautiful and impractical. Battle of Nodes is a tough competition but it also is ~350 people from 43 countries who are looking forward to the weekend. So, we're calling it now and starting fresh next week. ⏱ Official end of Round 3 is Friday 25 October 18:00 UTC 📊 All scoring for Round 3 will be done based on uptime. A 30 minutes per node overall bonus will be included for servers that were online, to account for restarts, without going over 100% 🏵 Round 4 will come next week. Phase 1 will be extended to make sure we have a stable blockchain to move into Phase 2 with. ⏰ The new patch and official announcement will come on Monday 28 October during UTC business hours, with 24 hours notice before the official start of Round 4 "Blockchains are like life - whenever you feel things are not working out, you can just keep the knowledge and start from the beginning." - Aristotle ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

📣 Synch loop? Delete DB and restart 🐌 After deploying patch v1.0.35, some nodes are experiencing synchronization issues. 🤔 Is my node in a loop? If the "current synchronized block nonce" varies and the latest synched block is not progressing - yes 👉 Nodes stuck in a synchronization loop should stop, delete the databases and start synching from scratch. 📊 Scoring for earned rewards will only resume after Metachain recovers, and not earlier than Saturday 26 October 11:00 UTC, so please re-synch by then to avoid any scoring penalties. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡

🏃‍♂️ We're catching up! Hello Nodes Team, Following a successful campaign by our very own Lucian, Iulian, Sebastian & the rest of the team, the metachain is finally recovering. Good job to them and to all of you involved to make this recovery possible. 👉 If you haven't patched already, please do so, grace period has ended Friday 25 October 09:00 UTC. 🔎 What's happening right now: The metachain is presently notarizing the blocks in the other shards at block height ~8.000, whereas in reality they are at ~20.000. We estimate it will properly catch up in 8 -12 hours. 📊 Scoring will take into account this interesting situation, a later update will come on that. 🍅 ... so Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and squishes him... and says, 'Catch up.' ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡