Aptos Incentivized Testnet 3

Details

IT1 (Incentivized Testnet 1): Decentralized Startup

Estimated start time: May

Major Deliverables:

1. Registration and tracking website will be available prior to the start of IT1
2. Initially limited to 100 validator nodes (to be expanded in following later phases)
3. Tooling for decentralized network startup using GitHub
4. Documentation for running a production grade Validator

Goals

• Perform decentralized network startup using GitHub / Genesis tooling
• Remain online and participate through the completion of the testnet as measured by Aptos

IT2: Staking

Estimated start time: June

Major Deliverables

1. Staking and staking rewards support with test coins
2. Decentralized faucet support
3. Updated gas schedule, e.g., improved and well-documented cost for each operation within a transaction to make the cost of transactions predictable

Goals

• Validate that staking, rewards, and delegation work as expected
• Motivate validators to offer tokens via faucets to support distribution of test coins, delegation to validators, and ecosystem engagement

IT3: Governance and upgrades

Estimated start time: July

Major Deliverables

1. On-chain voting and governance
2. Lightweight state synchronization through backup and restore technology

Goals

• Perform a decentralized network upgrade via the on-chain governance
• Support new validators joining the network via backup and restore

IT4: Dynamic validator topology

Estimated start time: August

Major Deliverables

1. Support as many validators as possible
2. Validator DDoS protection

Goals

• Final warm-up before moving to Mainnet
• Validator DDoS validation

Community Opportunities

To help build momentum toward a game-changing mainnet launch, Aptos also plans to invite both technical and non-technical contributions across education, development, and growth. The community of intrepid Aptonauts will coordinate missions to explore the Aptoverse. This way, everyone has opportunities to get involved and earn rewards from quality participation. Aptos is openly discussing a few incentivized projects:

1. Aptoversity (education)
2. Bounties + Hackathons (development)
3. Creative Challenge (growth)

FAQ

What behaviors will be rewarded?

For every deliverable and goal, Aptos Labs with support from the Aptos community will determine the proper success criteria and incentives to understand the progress in the area. Some evaluations may have to be repeated, possibly with improved success criteria and with different incentives. Aptos will provide a clear determination of both the success criteria and incentives prior to starting every evaluation with the community.

What will the registration process look like?

Aptos is still working through the requirements to join incentivized testnet and what the registration process will include. Minimally, users will need to be able to supply a verified GitHub account in order to participate in the process as that is a dependency for the Genesis ceremony tooling.

When will there be more updates?

Aptos will share more details as Aptos gets closer to the launch of incentivized testnet. Many of these areas of ambiguity are noted in the roadmap.

When will you publish your tokenomics and white paper?

Aptos is actively evaluating different approaches to tokenomics and anticipate some form being published while Aptos is running the incentivized testnets. Similarly, Aptos white paper will encompass the work the team believes will be ready by Mainnet, which will also be forthcoming.

Could you elaborate on the validator participation size?

During IT1, the project will start with 100 participants. Aptos sets this number cautiously as this is the first time the software stack will be run in the wild. Internally, Aptos has evaluated much larger networks. Aptos anticipates increasing the number of participants in each ensuing round as the community establishes an understanding of deploying and managing an Aptos node. By IT4, Aptos anticipates allowing as many validators as possible.

Technical Roadmap

Between now and through the end of the incentivized testnets, Aptos will be upgrading the blockchain with many technical contributions. Many of these are listed below, most of which can be tracked via issues in GitHub repository:

Blockchain Core Stack

Networking

• On-chain discovery for fullnodes — no more need to advertise
• Improved network topology, e.g., differentiate upstream, downstream, and peer
• DDoS mitigations and evaluation for validators — both attacks from downstream fullnodes and validators
• Inline health checks to reduce unnecessary contention on the networking stack

Consensus

• Dynamic validator sets, subcommittees
• Removal of legacy consensus code
• Deep Safety Rules integration via a reference model to minimize copy overhead
• Key retrieved via environmental variables or configuration parameters
• Safety data storage within consensus DB (rocksdb)

Storage

• Fine-grained storage — current model leverages a blob store that limits the maximum storage capacity of a single account. Including native table extension.
• CRSN (Conflict resistant sequence numbers) — use windows of eligible sequence numbers rather than a sequential field
• Storage economics, anti- state explosion. Gas and state eviction.
• Performance benchmarking and improvements, including per-block instead of per-transaction state authentication structure maintenance.

State sync

• Synchronization using the latest state and state output deltas rather than transactions
• Backup and restore adapters for endpoints, e.g., AWS S3 buckets
• Intelligence between consensus and state sync, performance awareness, and role in consensus (validator set or follower)

Mempool

• Improved transaction serialization and stickiness, including parallelized support for transactions on the same account
• Eliminating or limiting validators broadcasting transactions

Executor

• Enabling parallel execution of transactions
• Reducing the granularity of merkle tree updates from transactions to blocks
• Removal of execution correctness trusted computing base

Virtual Machine (VM) / Framework

• Stricter enforcement on the mutability of modules, e.g., freezing versions for now and leaving open the ability for governance to enable it
• Error types or richer errors from non-core framework modules
• Modernized gas schedule that maps to actual usage — we’re still running on legacy gas schedule that offers little in terms of configurability down the road.
• Support for parallelizable sequence numbers allowing “out of order” transaction execution for a single account also known as conflict-resistant sequence numbers

Operational tooling

• Validator and fullnode creation and registration
• Key and Address rotation
• Backup and restore in collaboration with state synchronization
• Deep health checker
• Retrieve and print managed node information
• Retrieve and print on-chain information for a node
• Validate fullnode / validator deployment, e.g., run a standalone testnet

Smart contracts and frameworks

• Proof of stake, delegation, and rewards
• Governance / DAO upgrade framework replacing the root account
• DeFi or exchange app (community support desired!)

Performance tuning

• Evaluate waste using perf and apply valuable changes across validators and fullnodes
• Unified Tokio executors to reduce contention

Ecosystem

• Indexer to provide richer views of data, e.g., counts and lookup of distinct transaction types
• Incentivized testnet registration and monitoring website
• Wallet prototype/reference implementation Web extension and native
  1. Coin transferring
  2. NFT / Token publishing, viewing, transferring
  3. WalletConnect (2.0) support
• Visibility
  1. Collect metrics from the ecosystem on node and tools usage
  2. Validator and fullnode dashboard / scoreboard
• VS code plugin with support for Aptos local testnet / devnet
• Documentation for Aptos-core, Aptos’ Move, and Aptos’ Framework
• Aptos + Move CLI along with documentation
• Support node deployment with various tools. Provide deployment documentation (terraform, helm, kubernetes, docker)

Links

• Announcement
• Twitter
• Discord
• Website