With 2,739 verified participants, over 3k+ submissions, and a KYC bill of tens of thousands of dollars, Testnet 3 has come to a close.
This marks the final step to launching Mainnet 3 (v0.16). This incentivized testnet allowed the Akash community to rigorously test critical features by allowing real users to perform tasks to stress test the system beyond typical usage.
Over the last two weeks, we presented 38+ challenges from programmatic enforcement of inflation to letting other wallets deploy with your tokens. We took the developer further down the journey through enterprise-grade features, such as persistent storage, fractional uAKT, authorized spend, and inflation decay curve; bringing the Akash Network closer to the features offered by Big cloud providers.
In addition to the technical and qualitative challenges, there were bonus challenges involving creative content on YouTube and Medium that increased the participant’s likelihood to win from a prize pot of $200,000.
These challenges covered a wide range of improvements to the functionality and durability of Akash Network and allowed developers to stress-test recently released features as we look ahead to Mainnet 3, estimated for the end of April.
The Results
The goal was to yield real-world use cases, like deploying validators and nodes, running high-resource workloads, and expanding applications for the mining community.
With persistent storage unlocked, Akash for Node Infrastructure was validated. We saw 135 Avalanche and 117 Terra Nodes launch on the Akash Testnet within 2 days of announcing their respective challenges.
For the first time, we challenged users to create a Chia plot using Bladebit, save on persistent storage, submit working on SDL, and then terminate Deployment. We hosted a Twitter Spaces with Jonmichael Hands from Chia Network on potential use cases he was excited to see and opportunities that come with Chia mining on Akash Network. You can listen to the recording, here.
The full submission breakdown for week 1 was 2,390 with a majority of the submissions around inflation decay curve, authorized spend and fractional uAKT.
Check out the full breakdown below:
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Challenge 1.1r: Inflation Decay Curve: 697
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Challenge 2.1r: Authorize Spend: 622
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Challenge 2.5B: Misbehave: 162
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Challenge 3.1r: Fractional uAKT: 532
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Challenge 4.1r: Persistent Storage: 244
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Challenge 4.5C: Persistent Storage Community Content: 68
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Challenge 5 (14 Days): Storage Service Provider: 64
Week 2 was a little more time-intensive and produced 846 submissions with a majority focused on the Chia mining challenges and running a Cronos RPC Node.
Check out the full breakdown below:
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Challenge 9.1r: Run ETH RPC Node: 98
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Challenge 10.1r: Run BTC RPC Node: 42
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Challenge 11.1r: Run Cardano RPC Node: 51
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Challenge 12.1r: Run Cronos RPC Node: 32
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Challenge 13.1r: Run Arbitrum RPC Node: 86
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Challenge 14.1r: Create Chia plot using Bladebit: 7
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Challenge 15.1r: Run CPU Mining Pool on Akash: 27
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Challenge 16.1r: Run any Masternode: 20
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Challenge 17.1b: Open-ended deploy on Akash: 15
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Challenge 18.1c: Educate: 40
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Challenge 6.1r: Run an Avalanche PoS validator on Akash: 160
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Challenge 7.1r: Run a Terra PoS validator on Akash: 144
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Challenge 8.1b: Run a new PoS Validator on Akash: 55
What’s Next?
Our team will be actively reviewing submissions to verify rewards. We will provide timelines for rewards in the next 3 weeks or so and want to thank everyone for their amazing effort and time on our testnet 3.
In the meantime, our engineering is setting up a staging environment for internal testing, testing Mainnet 3 and provider updates, and prepping mainnet infrastructure.
Tune in today, Wednesday, March 23rd at 10:30 AM PST for a full Testnet 3 recap on Twitter Spaces: looking back and a look forward featuring our CEO, Greg Osuri, and CTO, Adam Bozanich, hosted by our Head of Community, Adam Wozney.
Set your reminder to tune in here.
Last but not least, thank you to all of our participants who spent time on our network and a special shout out to some all-star
Akash Insiders who spent the past few weeks supporting the community. CoffeeRoaster, Stelballe, Rodri, Guacamole, Andy01, itschloe, DanielSimlyVC, dimokus and piyush thank you all so much! Testnet 3 would not have been as successful as it was without your support!
