MultiversX Validators Announcements

📣 Release v1.0.138 is live, Leaderboards updated Hello Nodes team, We have a new release which restores the synch speed to Awesome, along with a number of other features and fixes. Leaderboards have been updated. After the official end of BoN, we invite you for a special weekend. ⏱ Genesis Time Thursday 16 July 0:00 UTC 📊 The Leaderboards have been updated with all the missions, and the performance score up until Saturday 11 July 15:00 UTC. We will do one more update after the end of Battle of Nodes, to settle the final scores. 🧩 The Assembly - Battle of Nodes: Onchained ends on Friday 17 July 15:00 UTC. We invite you to keep your nodes running over the weekend for a special event. We aim to give the world a glimpse of what true scalability means. All the needed ingredients for it to be spectacular will be there: never tried before, a bit crazy, highly experimental, likely to succeed, impossible to score. It will be an honor if you choose to spend the weekend with us. Leave your nodes online after the battle ends, and be a part of history. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

📣 Release v1.0.137 is live Hello Nodes team, The latest patch fixes the memory allocation problem which required some nodes to be restarted in order to fix. The ChainID & version identifiers are now used in transactions, to prevent replay attacks between releases, including mainnet. ⏱ Genesis time Monday 13 July 12:30 UTC ⚠️ Important: Battle of Nodes: Onchained will end Friday 17 July 15:00 UTC. Stay tuned for prize pool announcements & leaderboards update. 📊 Scoring for this period is 10 000 points, expect high TPS 🔰 50% of the jailed nodes, which were still online yesterday evening, were added as validators 🔐 Unjail costs 2.5 ERD now, so people can unjail themselves, but with scoring impact. This keeps scoring fair, allows operators to correct and increases stability of the network. 🧑‍💻 erdpy users, new release! Check the announcement here https://t.me/ElrondDevelopers/2677 Please run the following to stay compatible with the new changes:

erdpy config set withChainAndVersion true
erdpy config set chainID v1.0.137

🚧 Several components of the Elrond infrastructure are undergoing post-upgrade maintenance, to accommodate changes ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🌤 Sunday update Hello Nodes team, The amount of TPS that has happened since Saturday evening until now was not sustainable by the network in its current condition. We've had too many nodes in jail and too many nodes with low rating still being eligible, since the jail was full. Considering the above, we go on a scoring break until the next patch. 📊 Scoring stops Saturday 11 July 15:00 UTC and resumes with the next patch. 🏖 A bit of break will do us all good. Enjoy the rest of the Sunday, team. 👉 Please do: leave your nodes running, even the jailed ones. We're looking to restore up to 50% of an individual participant's jailed nodes. A 2x boost in resources. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #6 BoNitoring Cheatsheet Hello Nodes team, Here's something to guide you on the remainder of the best mission in Battle of Nodes: Onchained, so far! 👉 The full description of Mission #6 📡 Set up monitoring - Netdata, Zabbix, Icinga2, Telegraf, any other 🤖 Create a monitoring bot with @BotFather ✍🏻 Set both its name AND username to "bon" + first 10 chars of any of your registered BLS (validatorKey.pem) key + bot Example: bon89efd1bddbbot 👁‍🗨 Send your bot's name to @Mission6 and expect OK! If you don't get it, something's wrong 🔐 Use its token to connect your monitoring solution to Telegram. The token looks something like this: 1337623040:AAEP7OUjbuGRVv7Wt-g_7HcLlx_-Z7OWdFN ®️ Use "1108536078" as Telegram recipient in your monitoring solution 🔔 Generate at least 1 alert for each of the following: CPU, RAM, Disk space, so minimum 3 per bot 📣 Check @BoNitoringChannel for your bot's messages to see if you succeeded 👌 You are done, you can stop sending alerts there 🙏 Early @BoNitoring members, please adjust to these parameters 📊 Scoring for this mission: 10 000 points for each node belonging to a participant that correctly completes ⏱ Measuring for the mission ends Friday 10 July 23:59 UTC, alerts sent before are valid 🔐 Keybase ID: not relevant for this mission, it was an early idea that we immediately discarded ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🎖 Mission #6 - BoNitoring Hello Nodes team, The monitoring mission is finally here. This is possible thanks to one of the most helpful group on the internet @Elrond_Netdata_Users which consists of members of the Battle of Nodes community, so no surprise there. The mission involves deploying some sort of monitoring solution for your VPS/server and setting it up to send alerts via Telegram. This requires you to set up a Telegram bot. We will ask all participants to demonstrate they are monitoring by generating specific alerts, which we will then pick up from the @BoNitoringChannel and score. 📡 Monitoring - Use one of these amazing unofficial guides. The Netdata solution is probably a good place to start for novi • Icinga2 by @ALwin79 • Zabbix by @josefco_ap with Elrond plugin by @ErAsEr21 • Telegraf by @ubun3t • Netdata by @FRANK1957 👇 Netdata, it is a small - light agent that will blow your mind when you see what it produces. The install takes a few minutes because it does not come precompiled, so it downloads source and compiles everything. Once installed you connect to it from your browser at http://<your ip>:19999 To install: bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --stable-channel 🤖 Telegram will be used to collect alerts for scoring this mission. • Set up a telegram bot and call it bon(the first 10 characters of one of your node's keys)bot - Example: bon89efd1bddbbot , made of "bon", "89efd1bddb" and "bot" • Talk to @Mission6 and tell it the name of your bot, like bon89efd1bddbbot • Use its token to connect your monitoring solution to Telegram. The token looks something like this: 1337623040:AAEP7OUjbuGRVv7Wt-g_7HcLlx_-Z7OWdFN • Use "1108536078" as Telegram recipient 📈 When the mission measuring period begins, set very low thresholds for CPU Usage, RAM Usage, Disk space to generate alerts in the @BoNitoringChannel group. If we see at least one of each alerts for one of the BLS keys of a participant, as per the bot's name, all their nodes get the mission points. ⏱ Measuring for the mission starts Thursday 09 July 12:00 UTC and ends Friday 10 July 23:59 UTC 📊 Scoring for this mission: 10 000 points for each node. ⚠️ Please don't uninstall the monitoring solutions immediately after the mission ends. We will randomly select validators & ask them to provide a screenshot of their monitoring interface including a node identifier and timestamp. 🔐 Get ready for the next mission by reading up on how to secure your server. Our partners from Viastake have a good guide you can use: https://www.viastake.com/2020/05/01/how-to-secure-your-server-like-a-boss/ ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🌤 Sunday Update - TPS & Chill Hello Nodes team, Over the last couple of days, we have been steadily increasing TPS up to the current "sweet spot" of 1200 TPS, where good validator nodes are at around 75% capacity and hovering over 90 rating, while others are slowly descending into jailing area. Moving forward, we're upping the score to 10 000 points for 24 hours, to properly differentiate the good nodes from the others. Monitoring mission ahead, get a head start 👇 📊 Scoring increased to 10 000 points per 24 hours from Sunday 05 July 10:00 UTC 🚀 We're flying at 1200 TPS. 2000 transactions are being sent every 20 seconds from 12 wallets, 6 in each shard. 12 * 2000 / 20 = 1200 TPS . This seems to be a sweetspot for the current validators network, as average node load for a node running the recommended specs is 75% CPU & RAM, with ~18Mbps used on average. How do we know this? 👇 📉 Monitoring - serious validators use proper monitoring tools. We recommend you get a head start on the next mission and get some form of monitoring going. We have a few guides and you can look for more solutions on your own or contribute what you are already using. Bonnie can tell you what's going on with your node, but she doesn't know the details of why, which is important for your nodes' health. The next mission will require you to send us your alerts, get a head start with these links. 📡 Set up some monitoring using one of these amazing unofficial guides: • Icinga2 by @ALwin79 • Zabbix by @josefco_ap with plugin by @ErAsEr21 • vilya by @flyingstone (beta) • Telegraf by @ubun3t • Netdata guide by @FRANK1957 👇 Netdata, it is a small - light agent that will blow your mind when you see what it produces. The install takes a few minutes because it does not come precompiled, so it downloads source and compiles everything. Once installed you connect to it from your browser at http://<your ip>:19999 To install: bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --stable-channel 🎖 Mission #6 will involve you directing specific alerts to one of our emails or agents, instructions will follow. Does not officially start now. You have time to select any of the above and get some monitoring going before we announce it. 💥 Want to become a Genesis Validator? Read this: https://t.me/BattleOfNodes/172 ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

Our custom implementation of Zabbix, monitoring all the Elrond Foundational nodes

Oracle VM VirtualBox monitoring - a local Linux VM guest running on a Windows host, sending all the TXs right now

Netdata - simple & nice UI

📊 Leaderboards updated Hello Nodes team, The Leaderboards have been updated with performance scoring up to 28 June 23:59 UTC and includes Mission scoring up to #4. Scoring covers the following periods: • Release v1.0.132 6/17/2020 11:30 UTC - 6/27/2020 14:00 UTC , 5 000 points / 24 hours • Release v1.0.134 6/27/2020 17:00 UTC - 6/28/2020 23:59 UTC, 10 000 points / 24 hours, no peer modifier, no jail time 🎖 Mission #4 scoring summary - Sending hundreds of thousands of transactions must have been a lot of fun, for anyone. There were times where we thought "she" couldn't take it, asked you to start & stop a few times, watched "her" recover, quite an intense experience. It was also very frustrating, as people were concerned about the calls to stop, extensions, parameters changing and so on. We can hope life as a mainnet validator will be extremely boring but we should prepare for it being exciting. In that regard, Mission #4 turned out to be an achievement, even if it didn't go according to the original plan. ✅ We decided to give max points to everyone who reached the 150k transactions milestone, and boosted those who took care to stop sending when we asked. We also scored those who did not reach the milestone with 0.0333... * TX + 0.04 * TX(t) - 150k of transactions sent in time would mean 11 000 points. TX - transaction, TX(t) transaction send in times when it was ok to, aka not when we said stop. This scoring methodology was chosen to alleviate concerns about fairness, especially in light of technical issues & short notice call for action. The rest of the scoring methodology can be reviewed here https://t.me/BattleOfNodes/222 ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

📣 Patch v1.0.136 is live Hello Nodes team, The latest patch fixes the issue with nodes not being able to come online after the reshuffle restart. Mission #5 is here. Please read on 👇 ⏱ Genesis time Wednesday 01 July 13:00 UTC 🎖 Mission #5 - Smart Contracts "Hello World!" Smart Contracts are persistent scripts which can be deployed on the blockchain and called upon to perform specific tasks. They can be simple automations of repetitive tasks, such as sending transactions. They can also perform actions involving complex logic, on & off-chain data, be part of a larger mesh of interconnected smart contracts, and so on. Smart Contracts will be important in the life of a Validator. They help automate rewards distribution, manage delegations from 3rd parties, participate in governance and tap into the DeFi potential of your stake. Before we get into all of that, let's first try deploying and interacting with one. 👉 Please do: deploy a copy of the "Counter" smart contract from each of your wallets. Collect the results of the deployment (transaction hash & resulting Smart Contract address) and send them in the data field of a transaction, together with 100 xERD, following the rules of Mission #2. Repeat for each wallet. Scriptable 👌 Details: • Counter smart contract deployment tutorial (link) • Deployment output example: { "tx": "b6175893ec56b9fc26592f0c8a90ce5f2a2d002289ac080d8a402c1d161cae64", "contract": "erd1qqqqqqqqqqqqqpgqg88kuq70vkwawnp77n354jte5j8kr59rtcxqpeht57" } • Mission #2 details (link) - Shard 0: erd1hqplnafrhnd4zv846wumat2462jy9jkmwxtp3nwmw8ye9eclr6fq40f044 - Shard 1: erd1utftdvycwgl3xt0r44ekncentlxgmhucxfq3jt6cjz0w7h6qjchsjarml6 • Transaction value: 100 xERD • Get the latest erdpy version:

wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ElrondNetwork/elrond-sdk/master/erdpy-up.py | python3

• Remember to run this before starting the tutorial:

export PATH=${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}

⏱ Mission #5 duration & score: Complete by Friday 03 July 13:00 UTC for 2500 points. 📊 We resume with performance scoring at 5 000 points / 24 hours 🙏 Auto-update script now looks at locally installed node version, instead of running node version, allowing offline nodes to be upgraded as well. Thanks @FRANKF1957 "Counter" tutorial updated to accommodate "blockchain street punk" culture and make the "get" output readable for humans. Thanks @trahtales Mission #5 text updated to include erdpy update & PATH variables. Thanks @Cryptokev79 ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🚧 Known issue: Nodes do not restart after reshuffling Hello nodes team, We have acknowledged an issue with the latest release, where nodes shuffling out of a shard at the end of an epoch will no longer come online after restarting. Working around it is not feasible. We take a break and wait for a fix. 📊 Scoring for this period will be a flat 208.33 points / hour, calculated as 5 000 points / 24 hours, for every hour from the genesis of this patch until the genesis of the next one. This score will be assigned to all nodes which were online in the first epoch of this release, i.e. in the first hour after Tuesday 30 June 17:00 UTC 👉 Please do: Leave your VPS/servers running. A patch will be released soon, which will automatically update them and restore functionality. 🎖 Mission #5 has Smart Contracts - get a head start and read the relevant documentation (link). ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

📣 Patch v1.0.135 is live Hello Nodes team, The latest patch fixes the "blacklisting" of harmless nodes and unjails all nodes. Removal of slow nodes continues - jailed nodes due to performance issues won't be able to continue. ⏱ Genesis time Tuesday 30 June 17:00 UTC ⚠️ Nodes which were offline due to the "blacklist" issue might have auto-update issues. Check your node and make sure you upgrade manually if the auto-update fails:

cd ~/elrond-go-scripts-v2

./script.sh upgrade

Do you want to remove the current Node DB & Logs? -> Y 🚨 The Purge continues slower - Peer Rating evolution is reset to normal. An Eligible validator is jailed after 12 consecutive epochs of not proposing a block. Rating does not change for Validators (Waiting). An unJail transactions costs 2 500 000 xERD. Nodes jailed due to performance issues will henceforth be removed. In that sense, The Purge continues, but at a slower pace. 🧪 TPS testing - please refrain from sending bulk transactions yourselves. We want control of the TPS environment moving forward - we will slowly increase to ensure everything happens in a stable environment. 🙏 Thank you for understanding. This is blockchain and every xERD generated is traceable to the registration form. We kindly ask that you don't have us do the extra work of tracking and penalizing offenders. 🎖 Mission #5 has Smart Contracts - get a head start and read the relevant documentation (link). Details about the mission itself will be released shortly after. 📊 Offline nodes due to the "blacklist" bug will not be penalized. ⏳ Leaderboard update & Mission #5 details will follow in a separate post. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

Validators: General Update Hello Nodes team, After an intense weekend, we kicked Monday off with an important series of mainnet announcements for us validators. Battle of Nodes continues with a new release tomorrow, smart-contract based Mission #5. Read the whole update. 👉 Please do: keep your node online, expect patch tomorrow morning ~ 09:00 UTC ⭕️ Offline nodes that won't start even after a restart - know issue, no action needed, scoring will not penalize these cases. 🚨 The Purge 2 Nodes which were jailed over the weekend will NOT be removed. We do have plenty of other casualties: nodes that did not start with us on Saturday will not move onwards. If you were not able to be online due to understandable reasons but want to proceed: check if your node is on the excluded list and contact 🧙🏻‍♂️ @SeverMM to help you get back in the game. ❌ List of excluded Nodes & reason (link) 📊 Scoring for The Purge 2 will be awarded based on uptime, without considering rating & jailing, so as to keep things fair. Same rules apply for scoring until the next release. We keep promised 10 000 score /24 hours for the period between Saturday 27 June 17:00 UTC (genesis time for the current release) and Sunday 28 June 23:59 UTC (end of The Purge 2). The period after that is again at 5 000 score / 24 hours. Leaderboards have been updated with Mission #2 & #3 scores. Performance & Mission #4 scoring is work in progress. 🤩 More Validator slots added to the mainnet launch without affecting APR. Get on the Mainnet Whitelisting form (link) for a chance of joining us as a Genesis Validator. Read the full announcement, which also mentions Saturday 4 July as an important date to mark down in your calendars: mainnet date will be communicated and Genesis Staking 2.0 starts! ⏱ A new release will be made Tuesday 30 June ~09:00 UTC, which will already include fixes to issues noticed over the weekend. 🎖 Mission #5 has Smart Contracts - get a head start and read the relevant documentation (link). Details about the mission itself will be released with the next patch. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

Genesis Staking 2.0 & Mainnet Launch Update presentation is LIVE! The presentation by Beniamin & Lucian is happening right now. Join them to get the latest updates about staking & the mainnet launch and ask your questions for the AMA at the end. 👉🏻 https://www.pscp.tv/ElrondNetwork/

🚨 The Purge 2 - we take a break Hello Nodes team, Several nodes are in jail and some nodes are not catching up. We make a break now and wait for a new release soon. Great work from everyone trying to recover! 👉 No action needed for now. Even if your node is jailed, it will get scored like any other node if left online. We tried recovering but the specially implemented rapid decay for node rating made it so the 5 hours the TX spam ran unattended last night lead to more issues than we can fix ourselves. 🕵️‍ What happened: We achieve a high TPS environment by periodically sending simple transactions via multiple entry points into the network. We use an equal number of wallets in shards 0 & 1, and send an equal number of transactions both intra-shard and cross shard. The operation is done using multiple Observer nodes with tweaked anti-spam parameters, to allow this kind of volume of transactions to go through. We periodically query the respective nodes to get the correct nonce of the source wallet and send transactions with the correct nonces hence-forth. This is a measure to prevent flooding the network with invalid nonces, which can cause the transaction pools to be filled with un-actionable transactions and network congestion. One of the observers we used for this process has failed over the night and exactly the invalid nonce situation has happened for Shard 0. As a result, multiple nodes got jailed, regardless of performance. 📊 Scoring will count online time only, to account for the rating issues with Shard 0 Enjoy the rest of the weekend team, we resume with a new patch. ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🚨 The Purge 2 - a quick look at the data Hello Nodes team, A look at data overnight shows interesting stats: • 52 million TXs in 12 hours • Shard 0 hitrate consistently lower than Shard 1 hitrate • Shard 0 nodes struggling more than Shard 1 nodes • The same amount of TX was being pushed through both • A lot of nodes in jail that we know for a fact are within specs 👌 We stopped the Transactions, the shards immediately started to recover in terms of hitrate. Sending TXs has now resumed at half the intensity. 👉 Please do - Share your node's info (public key & wallet) with us and we will help with unjailing your nodes. We will send 2.5mn xERD for each wallet so you can unjail that's the cost for this release 🔰 Unjail - tell the network that your Validator is ready to resume working, after being kicked out because of low rating • Address: erd1qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqpqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqplllst77y4l • Amount: 2500000 • Gas limit: 6000000 • TxData: unJail@YourNode’s192BLSkeysFromValidatorKey.pem

📣 Patch v1.0.134 is live, The Purge 2 begins Hello Nodes team, The latest patch brings a number of important fixes and has a config tailored for The Purge - Peer Rating decay increased to accelerate jailing of low performing nodes, unJail transactions are much more expensive. ⏱ Genesis time Saturday 27 June 17:00 UTC 🚨 The Purge 2 rules: • Node with rating below 55 as of Sunday 28 June 23:59 UTC will be purged • No unjailing ❌ List of excluded Nodes & reason (link) 👌 Be online, have your node running 2 CPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD, 100Mbit - each, have fun 📊 This high-TPS interval will be worth 10000 points per 24hrs ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards

🚨 The Purge 2 - getting ready Hello Nodes Team, The Purge 2 begins soon. A snapshot has been taken of all the registered validators. Nodes that are online but jailed have made it in the list as Validators in the next patch. Offline nodes are not included and will be purged automatically. If there is any good reason why your validator was offline during this snapshot, please contact 🧙‍♂️‍ @SeverMM ❌ List of excluded Nodes & reason (link) 👌 Be online, have your node running 2 CPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD, 100Mbit - each, have fun ⏱ Patch ETA - 2 hours, team prepping already ⚔️ See you on the battle #fiedl ! 🛡 🌐 Useful links: Start Here | Explorer | Wallet | GitHub | Docs | Issue | Winning | Stake | Unjail | Keybase | 🦸🏼‍♀️ Bonnie | Leaderboards