Thank you for your contributions to The Great Celo Stake Off to date! We have been impressed with the level of engagement and enthusiasm from the community since we launched Phase 1 on December 4th 2019.
The start of Phase 2 is being delayed to provide additional time for the team to include several late-breaking changes that will improve network stability (including a fix to improve the slow epoch block times we’ve seen in the last few weeks). In addition, Phase 2 will land a significant batch of changes that weren’t complete when Phase 1.1 started December 11th 2019. As such, we have decided to delay Phase 2 launch by a few days. The new schedule for Phase 2 is as follows:
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C Labs will push the new Docker image and begin to upgrade the network starting 15:00 PDT Friday January 10
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BTU rewards will be disabled until 0800 PDT Tuesday January 14
A new extensible slashing mechanism allows a validator or validator group’s LockedGold to be forfeit. Phase 2 includes three slashers: one for double signing with the BLS key, one for downtime, and one that supports slashing by a vote through Celo’s on-chain governance mechanism. Read more on penalties for slashing here.
To keep things interesting, a set of new voting bots will be deployed on Baklava, and will deploy LockedGold to vote for groups whose validators have good uptimes, don’t get slashed, and generally provide the bots with rewards. We will also be increasing the rate at which attestation requests are made, so be sure to have set up your Attestation Service.
There are CLI improvements too. The Exchange function has been improved, and a new function allows validator groups, validators, and voters detailed information about the rewards they’ve received over one or more epochs. A new Terraform template will make it easier to stand up a validator and proxy on cloud platforms or your own Kubernetes clusters. We particularly welcome contributions of other tooling like this.
On top of this, there have been a number of security and stability improvements to the IBFT consensus mechanism, and improvements to celo-blockchain logging to surface the details that matter and allow to not have to scroll past the ones that don’t.
Furthermore, validators are invited to gain an edge in the development of the protocol and to gain additional BTUs. C Labs invites validators to write scripts that search for validators that have gone offline. Learn more on how to technically contribute to the Celo protocol here.
Lastly, a couple of weeks ago, we kicked off the Incentivized Community Challenge to reward community members for a variety of contributions to the Celo Protocol. Read more for information on how to increase your chances of acquiring Celo Gold here! We also hosted a webinar on getting started running a validator. You can watch the recording here.
Claire, Jelena, Vanessa, and Tim
On behalf of the team working on Celo