Testnet Incentives Program Report #2

Conversation AADAO
1

Introduction

In November 2023, Hypha established the Testnet Incentives Program with funding from AADAO. This program has evolved over many months to reward validators for consistently showing up to participate in educational events, changelog reviews, upgrade drills, and performance improvement research opportunities. This program has now run for 1.5 years and has distributed $200k worth of incentives to power the largest and most well-established public testnet in the interchain.

Looking back at TIP over the last 6 months

The provider testnet’s primary mission has been supporting the adoption of the Hub’s major product offering in the last two years: Interchain Security. In the last six months, that priority has shifted to running several non-mainnet upgrade paths to facilitate the development of IBC Eureka, and training validators in upgrade drills.

Non-governance coordinated upgrades are far riskier than governance upgrades as operators need to manually set a halt height and swap the binary at the appropriate time before restarting their node. With the rapid pace of development, many stack security patches, and migrations required to adjust security issues in smart contracts, this style of upgrade has been very common on the Hub this year.

Noting this, we ran several drills for validators to grow more familiar with the process to reduce the risk of something going wrong on mainnet.

provider going forward

The provider testnet has long been the final step for upgrades before they head to mainnet. On the testnet, we’ve used upgrades with 40-60 validators to see how different setups will handle a migration and check if there are any final instructions necessary for cosmovisor or other automation to handle a particular upgrade. We’ll continue to run pre-mainnet upgrades on provider and incentivize them.

Hypha has also used provider to run validator training, educational events for new features of gaia, and data collection for performance improvements that can be upstreamed to interchain stack repos. We intend to continue running these events on an as-needed basis, but there are fewer new features for gaia than there were at the inception of provider and thus, fewer opportunities for highly produced events.

What does this mean for TIP?

  1. New funding - ICL will be funding TIP for the next 6 months with a budget of 45k.

    1. With an estimate of 1 upgrade per month, we expect to pay ~$150-200 USDC per upgrade.

  2. Reduced participation requirements - Interchain Security is no longer the product vision for the Hub, so we will be relaxing the requirements around running consumer chains and using assigned consumer keys.

  3. Less frequent TIP events - We’ll be focusing on having fewer events overall while keeping them high quality, in order to reduce the time commitment expectations on validators. We expect to be running upgrades as needed and one event per month that we put more emphasis on.

Incentives have been paused for the month of July while we recalibrate and set up a new structure with the necessary tracking.

Conclusion

provider has long served as the Hub’s testing and training ground for gaia-specific features. The focus of the interchain right now is on developing stack-level features and the Hub’s validator set is already extremely responsive and highly skilled. Additionally, Interchain Security is no longer a primary focus on the Hub so there are fewer required chains for Hub validators, reducing the need for the subsidy provided by the Testnet Incentives Program.

Going forward, ICL will be funding the Testnet IncentivesProgram with 45k USDC for the next 6 months. Hypha will be relaxing the participation requirements and aiming to host incentivized events which are higher quality but less frequent on the provider testnet.

We’re very grateful to AADAO for funding this program since its inception in 2023 and to all the Hub validators who continue to participate in the common good of the Hub!

Record of testnet events

  • Jan 14: provider upgrade to Gaia v22.0.0-rc0

  • Jan 21: pion-1 upgrade to Neutron v5.0.6

  • Jan 28: changelog review of ICS v6.4.0

  • Feb 4: CosmWasm multisig contract demonstration

  • Feb 11: pion-1 upgrade to Neutron v5.1.1

  • Feb 18: provider upgrade to v22.2.0, IBC client recovery demonstration

  • Feb 25: pion-1 block party

  • Mar 6: Upgrade to v23.0.0-rc2

  • Mar 11: Upgrade drill for coordinated upgrade (non-gov)

  • Mar 18: Upgrade to v23.0.0

  • Mar 25: Upgrade drill for halt and recovery

  • Mar 27: pion-1 graduation drill

  • Apr 1: Upgrade drill using rollback command

  • Apr 1: Provider upgrades to gaia v23.0.1

  • Apr 8: Information gathering for build environment

  • Apr 15: Observability tooling demo and setup

  • Apr 22: Performance load testing baseline

  • Apr 29: Provider upgrades to gaia v23.1.1

  • May 23: Provider upgrades to gaia v23.3.0

  • May 20: Provider upgrades to gaia v24.0.0-rc0

  • May 27: Provider upgrades to gaia v24.0.0-rc1

  • Jun 3: Performance load testing with cosmos sdk fix

  • Jun 10: Gaia v24 changelog review

  • Jun 17: Provider upgrades to gaia v25.0.0.0-rc0

2 Likes
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Sounds great. Looking forward to these new events!

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Hello, thank you for this report. However, Interchain security remains a premium feature of the hub and must be considered as such. The hub offers this service, which works, and which should still be improved, supported and marketed! ICS is still in the forefront with new chains that are likely to join (EVM, institutions, banks, etc.)

Guinch

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Hi! intersting update, thanks a lot!