- With NEAR entering Phase 1 we will suspend token rewards after October 2nd 2020. You are still free to add and update your guides, but you will not receive tokens.
- Changed
near-shell
intonear-cli
, reflecting the new naming of this tool: https://github.com/near/near-cli
- Nearcore releases are not using anymore branching, so the instructions to build the binaries are different. Refer to https://github.com/nearprotocol/nearcore/releases to see the new release mapping.
- Improved the README.md to clarify the role of challenges and add orientation of the files in this repository.
- A new challenge is live here! Deploy your CI/CD infrastructure to upgrade your node programmatically. This challenge will be very important if you plan to join MainNet Restricted as a validator.
- Added the staking cheatsheet
- The first validators officially joined TestNet, and they will progressively unstake and leave BetaNet.
- Thank you Figment Networks for the first experimental release of Figment Hubble on NEAR!
- Added the guidelines to join TestNet! See them here
- Added the Challenge 004, to learn how to dynamically adjust the stake of a pool: Challenge004
- Leaderboard modified: now it counts only expected blocks and uptime.
- Contributions listed in the challenges, they are worth to be read!
- Another BetaNet update was successfully completed, with minimal downtime. Congrats validators!
- New challenge available here! Build your monitoring platform and send alert emails in case of issues. Add
stefano@near.org
to your email recipients to receive extra funds for delegation.
We sent 75,000 tokens to all applicants, excluding obvious duplicates We received exceptional interest by the community of validators, with 300+ applications and 200+ PRs). We are processing all of them, sending 75,000 BetaNet tokens as promised, while making sure the network runs with no issues. As explained in the docs, there are 100 seats per shard, so BetaNet is running at capacity with a cost per seat right above 75.000 tokens - which means that our contribution will not be sufficient. How to solve this issue? Activate your network, and ask other validators to delegate to your staking pool. There are many of them with 100k+ tokens who can delegate 5-10k of their stake to you.
The plan is to start transitioning the first batch of validators to TestNet. As soon as that happens, the seat price will go down, allowing more folks to join BetaNet.
In the meantime, apply for the contributions as they are worth real NEAR tokens, and keep an eye on the seat price, using the command near validators current
.
- New
near-shell
- BetaNet Incident #0004
The release 0.24.0
of near-shell
is live! Update by using npm
and check with near --version
if you are up to date.
Incident Abstract:
The entire betanet crashed on May 22 at 09:36:47 UTC due to a bug that resulted in storage inconsistent state for every node.
Incident Description:
Betanet nodes crashed with the following error
StorageInconsistentState("Account stakepool_buildlinks.betanet with max of stakes 0 is not found")
It is a known issue that has already been fixed in master of nearcore, but the fix was not included in the last betanet release.
Remediation:
- Upon discovery of the issue, @Vlad Frolov and @Illia Polosukhin did a hard fork of the network with the same binary to restart the network.
- After @Sandi Fatic and @Bowen Wang joined, we realized that the issue is already fixed in master so we release a new version of betanet with the fix.
- We are going to improve on the incident communication internally and externally. We use will experiment a better integration with slack to effectively communicate when an incident like this occurs.
- We are also going to improve how critical issues get fixed and deployed to the live networks. In this case, the fix didn't get included in last Tuesday's BetaNet release because it was considered unlikely to happen. From now on, bugs that can cause the entire network to go down will be communicated differently, and the fixes deployed as soon as possible, unless it is technically impossible for the bug to occur (due to current restrictions to other functionalities).
- We will organize and implement a training to handle such incidents across more team members, instead of having time-zone constraints and waiting for certain team members to wake up. Specifically, this action will teach how to debug, make a decision about doing a hard-fork or not doing it, and, finally, how to deploy the fixes.
If you have questions and you want to know more, reach out on Discord.
- Stake Wars Ep.II is live!
- Deploy your Staking Pool Contract
We officially launched Stake Wars Episode II: The Return of Valdiators. This new phase will test the contract-based delegation of NEAR Protocol, and will offer new ways for validators to differentiate their services. More information on the official blog post. Remember to update your validator entry on the VALIDATORS.md, adding the link to your deployed staking pool.
To enter this second phase of Stake Wars, you will have to:
- unstake your tokens from your node
- deploy the staking pool contract (you can find more info in the initial-contracts Github repo)
- update the VALIDATORS.md file with the staking pool address
- delegate any original stake to the new contract
If you lost your tokens, or you just joined and you don't have enough stake, reply in the issue 289 with your staking pool address.
- New
near-shell
- New
nearcore
, improved consensus and networking for higher stability - BetaNet Incident #0002
NEAR's planned weekly update of BetaNet failed, the network didn't produce new blocks from 00:55 GMT to 7:10 GMT
Incident Description:
- NEAR began the scheduled weekly update of its
nearcore
node at 00:00 GMT - The deployment pipeline completed successfully at 00:55 GMT, with the release
Version: 0.4.13, Build: 38d54ba7-modified
- This update needed a hard-fork, with a new
genesis.json
file containing"genesis_height": "3818145"
. Previous releases were not able to sync to any block higher than3818145
- As planned, all NEAR's BetaNet nodes switched to this new release, and the new genesis block was broadcasted through NEAR's
boot nodes
- At 00:56 GM the Core Team informed NEAR Validators on Telegram and Discord that all nodes had to be updated and restarted asap
- This update could be automatically triggered by stopping and starting
nearup
(only fornearup
users), or in case of automated deployment pipeline, by downloading and compilingnearcore
from the branchbeta
- Multiple nodes were correctly updated, however the network reached 66% of the total stake only at 7:10 GMT, after 6 hours and 20 minutes from the advertised release messages
- At 7:10 GMT the network reached a quorum, with a throughput between
0.10 bps
and0.20 bps (blocks per second)
- At 10:49 GMT, with block 3822000, the protocol unstaked the validators which failed to update on time and the ones that were running the old release, bringing back BetaNet in its normal state
Remediation:
- An investigation is in progress: NEAR's Core Team is contacting all the node operators that were validators at 00:00 GMT, to troubleshoot the upgrade process and identify the issues encountered
- As soon as the investigation is complete, this remediation will be extended with the introduced measures in terms of bug fixes, new features, documentation and communication
- Released Road to Mainnet
- Released
nearup
to the validator community - Updated the Stake Wars 2.0 branch on GitHub
- Stake Wars has been redesigned to involve end-users, and test NEAR smart contracts delegation
- The reference network for Stake Wars is now
betanet
. We suggest you to install and run the new node via nearup - To obtain some betanet tokens and become validator, send a request via this form.
- Just update the issue templates. We are now measuring severity internally since the templates were just confusing.
- The simplified submission process is: just follow the template, and we will add label.
- If we add the
help wanted
tag, you can fix it and receive tokens as part of the competition as well
- sudo is no longer needed if you're on Mac, or if you're on linux and can run docker without sudo.
- We're using Github to collect genesis for this week. Please don't submit your keys for genesis if you can't make the call. Put in a PR againts accounts.csv with your changes.
- We're restructuring the program to focus on finding bugs that are based on QA scenarios rather than security breaches and attacks.
- You can find these in
scenarios.md
in this repo. HERE