Hey Cosmonauts,
We are beginning planning for gaia-8000.
Things to discuss in this thread are the validator ceremony for gaia-8000 and any other thoughts or questions.
A short summary of features for gaia-8000
Lots of UI changes
Internal code structure changes
Randomized testing
Many bug fixes (mostly minor)
Add transient store
Msgs are no longer run on CheckTx
Gaia-7003 spun up pretty nicely. Assigning more steak to the more active and engaged validators who are likely to come online promptly, while still having a larger set of smaller/newer/still learning validators participating is a good compromise.
This is only a guess, but seems like the distribution of bonded atoms at mainnet genesis will probably be similar to this pattern.
First of all I want to thank the Cosmos team for their great work and effort to continuously improve the network. It is very exciting to see not only the networks stability and capability grow, but also the community. As an active part of the community and a validator on the testnets for quite some time, I would however like to discuss some things about the ceremony and the genesis file.
We all know that the decision for gaia-7003 happened quite spontaneous. I was online most of the night from Thursday to Friday to attend the ceremony of gaia-7002, the finding of the bug and how we proceed afterwards. As we all know, not everyone was online for the ceremony since we all live in different time zones and people need to sleep sometimes (yeah aurel I know, validators never sleep 
). I think we can improve participation in the ceremony by better coordinating and communicating the time it happens. Therefore, I would like to propose that we vote on the time of the next ceremony, so that we find the time where most people can be online.
Also I would like to know how “our most active contributors” were selected for increased stake in the new genesis file. While I understand the need to spin up the new testnet as fast as possible, I feel that this process happened quite intransparent and on the basis of personal preference. I don’t want come across salty because I wasn’t “one of the chosen ones” but I feel that it is unfair to either decide this on personal preference or the fact that someone isn’t online at the short timeframe of creating the new genesis file. I also think that it is troubling that right now 16 out of 132 validators (12%) hold more than 50% of the voting power. Especially if we want to use the testnet for the voting on proposals this could cause problems.
Last but not least, I would like to thank all the people in the validator chat for helping each other out during the last few days. It’s super cool to see everyone working together 
These are great questions.
The configuration of the genesis state in gaia-7003 was made mostly my being tired and wanting to get a genesis block out Wednesday night.
We can fix the steak distribution by having the faucet send out 1000 steak to every validator currently online. That would even out distribution. I’ll synch with @Greg on this on Monday if we are still up.
@jlandrews made the argument that we didn’t really have enough data from 7002 about who was really online which made sense.
Yeah I totally agree we should even things out a bit more for gaia-8000.
With the release of Gaia8000, are we going to take the current state, or have a new registration?
I would prefer not to do another registration and instead state with current state with some modifications.
If there is a new registration, I believe there will be a lot of never online validators again. It in turn punishes those online validators and those who want participant in the testnet.
Just an idea: How about we start with a solid group of validators that we know will keep the testnet running and give them each quite a large share of steak. New validators can receive 5 steak (a small amount) from the faucet and prove that they want to actively participate in the network. If they stay online for one week (just a suggested period of time), they can start a proposal on the testnet. If accepted, each large validator sends them a share of their steak so that they get a major validator themself.
I know this would be a lot of work, but it would give everyone the chance to prove himself and “never online validators” would only account for a small share of steak. Also, we would have a great use case to try out voting on proposals. The issue with this is that we would rely on the big validators following the rules and we would see a certain degree of centralization.
My suggestion today with 7004 was to just have iqlusion (or another team members node(s)) take a very large amount of steak, then distribute out portions to diversify the steak as nodes come online. The problems we had before with registrations was trying to outvote the steak that wasn’t online, and this would not only allow us to get up and running, but once the steak is spread out amongst actives we can function like a faucet for the team (as it seems faucet functionality is hit or miss at times).
I understand it kind of goes against the grain to centralize a large portion of the steak, but I think we have had enough time playing with 65-67% active steak that it isn’t the primary focus of bug testing at the moment, and bringing a testnet up, live, and running as soon as possible provides a better environment for the whole in a more efficient manner.
i thank u for returning the 50steak that i lost due to unbonding bug & 20 steak out of nowhere. im quite pissed that proceau/delegate-now shows up on 7004 launch & gets 1000+ steak. better give weight to long time helpful testers adrian, aurel, chris remus, greg, jack, katernoir, kwun yeun, melea, pooch, ryan figment, suyuu, etc.
So what Tendermint is currently planning for is gaia v0.24 release between Friday Aug-3rd and Tuesday Aug 7th.
Depending on when v0.24 is released with can expect a gaia-8000 genesis to be published between Monday Aug 6th and Thursday August 9th.
If gaia-7004 crashes in the meantime, we will almost certainly just start a gaia-7005
I’m pretty sure that - if gaia-7004 crashes - we will have gaia-7005 up in no time. Validators are now used to the process and act faster.
Regarding gaia-8000, since @zaki gave an estimated timeline, we could now discuss how to find the best time for a ceremony with as many validators online as possible.
Does 8000 still imply the start of Game of Steaks? If so, I have some thoughts about launching the two in coordination w/each other. If not, I’ll save the comments for now.
We need fees implemented to do game of steaks.
If we don’t have fees implemented, I can’t use voting power as a proxy for success.
For v0.24
We are waiting on a set of PRs to be merged.
Keep an eye on the PRs below to estimate when we might start the gaia-8000 engines.
Quick update on the plans for gaia-8000
We have a tagged release candidate and are running internal testnets. We still need to fix a bug in gaiad export and run the automated fuzzing tests for some time.
I think we could realistically have gaia-8000 on Friday or Monday. Validators what do you prefer?
I’m comfortable with both options, but find it hard to turn down a weekend off
the day than is ready, is ok for me.