The last course: “Become a Master Validator” is about to begin! It starts Monday, Feb 10th at 16:00 UTC and ends with the close of The Great Celo Stake Off on Wednesday, Feb 26th at 16:00 UTC.
TL;DR things to do now:
- Upgrade your nodes
- Claim your accounts
- Check you’ve scheduled your audit, and run through the checklist
- Make sure entities whose validators are in your group signed up for the audit and their setup is as secure as yours
Following a proposal from several active participants, we will now require every team to claim all of their accounts in their metadata in order to make the leaderboard more accurate and transparent. ALL existing accounts must be claimed by Wednesday, Feb 12th at 16:00 UTC, or for any new accounts, within 24hrs of creation. Please double-check your metadata!
New Release
With the start of Phase 3, there’s a new release of Celo Blockchain available:
Node upgrade instructions here.
It’s a backwards compatible upgrade. Remember to upgrade both validators and proxies. If you’re participating in the Master Validator Challenge, you don’t need to upgrade before your audit session.
The Attestations Challenge is Complete!
The Attestation bots will be disabled. After that, the rate of successful attestations will be tallied. If you completed more than 95% of the attestation requests, a multiplier boost of 20% will be applied to your entity’s total BTU balance at the end of TGCSO. Note that the 20% boost is by entity not by validator run by the entity.
Don’t shut your Attestations Service down just yet! If you’re participating in the audit you’ll need to show a working Attestations Service to receive the points allotted for that.
Next Course: The Master Validator Challenge
The Master Validator Challenge is now underway. If you registered, you should have received an email with scheduling details. Please head over to #stake-off-phase-3-audit on Discord for tips, tricks and answers. Remember that the security audit will only cover one validator (of your choice), along with its proxy and attestation service. That “best” validator (whichever group it is in) will determine your personal audit score.
If you control one or more validator groups, the boost applied will be taken from the minimum of the audit scores awarded to you and every validator affiliated with any of your groups at any point during Phase 3. More information here. If you have signed up for the audit and run third party validators in your own group, talk to those participants, gain confidence that they signed up for the audit themselves and their setup is as secure as yours!
Sharpen Your Knives
Slashing support has been added to ContractKit (Celo CLI coming soon)! Handy validators might want to use that to build tools that detect double signing or persistent downtime in other validators and report it to the protocol.
More Space in the Kitchen
We’re completing the scale testing of a network with 120 validators, and feel confident that we can soon expand Baklava to bring in more validators that are currently having challenges getting elected. Which brings us on to….
Governance
The cLabs team will also be testing Celo’s on-chain governance mechanism, which includes proposing several changes to the platform through both regular governance proposal (voted on by testnet Celo Gold holders) and the hot fix mechanism (where proposals can be executed by a ⅔ majority of validators). Participation and feedback is appreciated! At the Team’s discretion, regular participants and those serving up great governance proposals may be rewarded through the Incentivized Community Challenge. Things that cLabs will be proposing:
- Extend governance stage durations: right now, stages are 15 minutes long, making coordination a little tricky. Luckily, the on-change governance process can change itself!
- Increment minClientVersion via governance proposal: when nodes start, they check this on-chain value, and if their version is lower, they quit. This can be overridden, but is an effective nudge to get nodes upgraded.
- Increase validators to 120!
More Prizes!
The potential prize pool and the number of participants that may receive Mainnet Celo Gold beyond the top 50 is also increased! (subject to Terms and Conditions) Details will be announced in due course.
Community Awards
The cLabs team will continue to award Mainnet Celo Gold (subject to Terms and Conditions) as part of the Community Challenge, the Security Vulnerability Program, and for validator tools and code contributions as part of the Grants Program.
In Phase 2, the following bounties were granted:
- Community challenge: A total of 1,600 Mainnet Celo Gold will be awarded to Stella for helping grow the community and making the first on-chain governance proposal, Bi23 for creating www.thecelo.com, and to ChainLayer for helping uncover colluders.
- Security Vulnerability Program: A total of $3,000 plus 2,000 Mainnet Celo Gold will be awarded to one participant for exploiting a vulnerable RPC configuration assessed as a medium risk based on severity per CVSS (the Common Vulnerability Scoring Standard). Report here.
Pass the Sugar!
Last but not least, the team will be hosting a community feedback call on Thursday, Feb 13th at 16:00 UTC to discuss the dynamics of the competition thus far and understand any further suggestions or concerns that you have. There will be another chance for feedback at the end of Phase 3 Retrospective.