End of Phase 1a
The Phase 1a of Game of Zones which started on May 6 at 12 AM PST has now ended. The main objective of the first week of the competition was liveness, and rewards depended on the ability of the teams to keep a live connection for the longest duration of this phase. The competition started with 120+ teams/zones and most of the teams had a live connection for more than a day. Some of the teams finished with more than 3 days of live connections while Sentinel and Responsible Chain maintained a live connection for the entire duration of the Phase 1a.
Phase 1a presented all the participants with a chance to get acclimated with the competition/GoZ Hub and at the same time brought forward crucial bugs/issues. Various teams reported issues on the GoZ Github Repo and GoZ team promptly fixed the same. The first week of the competition demonstrated fusion of technology and community spirit.
The actual stress testing of the IBC module will begin with Phase 2 (Start date May 25). On May 8, the GoZ team hosted a Twitch Stream and shed some light on the technical issues and answered all the questions from the participants.
We would like to thank the GoZ team for constantly working and providing us with updates. You can check out the updates on the Game of Zones Cosmos Network Developers website.
In case of any issues regarding the scoring you can reach out to the organising team at [email protected].
As per the official announcement the winners for the first Phase will be announced by the end of this week (2nd week of competition).
Takeaways from GoZ Phase 1a:
The first week of the competition wasn’t as smooth as one would have wanted it to be but it served as a great learning experience for all the participants. We believe that most of the teams did not expect the first Phase to be so intense but still managed to do well in the later stages of this Phase of the competition.
The Cosmos Network Community is one of the strongest communities out there. We mentioned in our first blog the contributions made by the Community towards GoZ, but these contributions haven’t stopped. We would like to specially thank the P2P Validator team for keeping the teams updated on their positions for the first phase with their Unofficial leaderboard.
What we know based on our learnings from Phase 1a:
- How to set up our own zone and relay transactions using ibc commands (available through relayer[`rly`])
- After experiencing gas price volatility, we understand how it affects transaction clearance likelihood
- Difference between channels and paths and their significance
- Paths are essential in making IBC tx and how to keep the paths alive by keeping clients updated
- How to set up our own sentry for hub node to handle official outages
- Semantics of packets, ibc packets, transactions and various other ibc languages
Leaderboard:
The leaderboards at the end of Phase 1a:
IRISnet, Kugs-030, WeStaking, Genesis Lab, Chainapsis, VGNG.io, snakey and source-xgoz did a terrific job in reconnecting to the hub after the initial connection drop.
We at Persistence and Audit.one constantly improvised and successfully finished in the Top 5 (as per the metrics of VGNG leaderboard) and Top 25 (Longest Connection time; source: P2P Validator leaderboard) of the first phase even after losing connection after about 18 hours into the competition.
The team is looking forward to Phase 1b and we are confident that we will achieve better results in the upcoming Phases of the competition.
GoZ Phase 2
Phase 1a was all about maintaining a live connection for the longest duration but now we are moving towards Phase 1b and Phase 2 of the competition. The main goal of the Phase 2 of Game of Zones is to focus on throughput, and the winning team will be the team that relays the most packets on the GoZ Hub.
Scoring for Phase 2 according to the latest blog:
- Packets relayed to the hub by your relayer key are the most important metric to judge winning: 1 Point
- Packets relayed from the hub are the second most important metric for the week: 0.5 Points
- Packets relayed among other chains are less important to your team’s performance than the first two metrics mentioned above: 0.1 points
Persistence CTO, Deepanshu Tripathi believes that “In Phase 2 we’ll get to know about n to n sovereign chain connections and its feasibility in relation to TPS.”
In Phase 2 will find out whether:
– n to n will be feasible or not
– n to hub is a good model
– n to hub will clog up hub
The Phase 2 was initially scheduled to start on May 11 at 12 AM PST but has been delayed due to some software instability. The bug was found in the Cosmos SDK and all the Cosmos teams (IBC/Cosmos SDK/ Tendermint/ Interchain Berlin) worked hand in hand to resolve the issue.
The GoZ team decided to restart the competition after a break and has meanwhile decided to shift their focus on the following:
- Getting a new version of the hub software deployed.
- Trying to get bugs in event emission fixed so that they can run a fully functional scoreboard
- To structure the hub networking to have more stability.
We expect things to be very different from Phase 1. This is where the real testing of IBC comes in and we expect nothing but a very competitive yet friendly environment in Phase 2.
We look forward to the second Phase of GoZ and lots of inter-chain communication and chaos (Chaos is a ladder, remember?).
Note: The blog is edited after publication in accordance to the latest update by the GoZ team. The team has decided to restart the competition owing to the unstable hub in the Phase 1a. The new schedule is as follows:
About Persistence
Persistence is a Tendermint-based, specialised Layer-1 network powering an ecosystem of DeFi applications focused on unlocking the liquidity of staked assets.
Persistence facilitates the issuance and deployment of liquid-staked stkASSETs, allowing users to earn staking rewards while participating in DeFi primitives, such as lending/borrowing and liquidity provisioning on DEXs.
Persistence aims to offer a seamless staking and DeFi experience for PoS (Proof-of-Stake) users and enable developers to build innovative applications around stkASSETs.
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