We officially completed our cEconomy phase 2 SGN alpha testnet program. We would like to thank every one of you for joining us as one of our SGN validators and delegators. Since we launched our SGN alpha testnet registration on March 9, we received an overwhelming response in terms of registrations and setups. Without your help and feedback, our SGN alpha testnet program won’t be this successful. We will learn from all the feedback we received and prepare a much better testing program next time. Please stay tuned for an upcoming SGN beta Testnet!
Overview
For the first SGN alpha testnet, we started with 8 carefully vetted validators, which have tons of experience managing nodes and fulfill validator responsibilities. In total, we have selected 150 delegators across 44 countries to participate in our cEconomy SGN alpha testnet program and have collected over 300 feedback and suggestions. Like all testnet products, we have encountered several bugs during the testing process. 🙁 We quickly fixed most of them and updated our system to address these issues.
We will reward all delegators for participating and testing our State Guardian Network. We will reward the top 3 winners ranked by the ending testnet CELR balances for each delegator, based on the number of rewards the participant has. We are giving out a total of $3,000 to all delegators testers. After a full month of detailed testing from all delegators, we present you the top 3 winners from the SGN testnet! Congratulations to the top 3 winners and all delegators! Everyone’s a winner!
What we learned from this testnet?
Technology
Thanks to the testnet participants, we have identified several bugs when dealing with corner cases. Some bugs were quickly fixed, while a few others pushed us towards more essential architectural improvements.
For example, one particularly interesting issue is to keep the mainchain and sidechain in sync with easy and error-free validation for both current and past blocks, while coping with the fact that validator nodes may rely on unstable third party ETH gateway providers. This caused some hassles during this testnet, and was not able to be fixed quickly. We have improved architecture to address this issue in our develop branch, which will be launched in our next testnet.
Another important issue is failure recovery. With our architectural design, the sidechain should be able to recover from a total failure caused by many (>1/3) nodes being temporarily failed and recovered. However, this didn’t go smoothly as expected. We are making improvements on this as well for our next release.
User Experience
We provided a web UI for the basic operations. Though it served its purpose well, letting users easily finish operations they intended to have, we understand that for a real DPoS system, delegators cannot make confident delegations without knowing more background information about the validators. Some testnet delegators lost their testnet tokens due to their validator being failed and punished, but did not know who was running that validator. Since this is an Alpha testnet, we did not provide such a platform for validator background and reputation information sharing, which will be launched for mainnet.
What’s coming next?
We are working towards the completion of SGN features soon, including commission fee, governance, and a set of features to improve the reliability, robustness, and usability of the sidechain. We will have a thorough code audit after feature completion. We plan to launch a Beta testnet with all the cool features and enhanced stability in Q2. Stay tuned!
We truly appreciate all of your support! Please stay tuned for our next testnet with a much more stable system and even more new features! Connect with us and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!
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