Chainflip's Persistent Testnet - Perseverance

Ladies & gentleman, welcome to the (re) birth of Perseverance. Chainflip’s first persistent testnet. Yes you heard that right. As Simon mentioned in his latest community update (A must read), we will not retire Perseverance like our previous generation of testnets.

Paradise, we hardly knew ya. Long live Perseverance (!).

The lore of Perseverance is rich, as it is essentially being birthed from the ashes of Paradise Net. We were hoping that Paradise would be stable enough to be left to run indefinitely, however external deployment once again demonstrated serious problems with libp2p (more on that here) for multisig operations. We made the call to shut the network down, in order to focus on a more permanent fix, as we grew tired of trying to make it behave. We instead opted to develop a purpose-built system specifically for TSS communication.

Whilst we internally were happy with the tech up to the Paradise Net fixes, we needed a way to test other factors that releasing permanent code into the wild brings, such as:

1. Launch and maintain a persistent public testnet and practice upgrading it as we develop new features and fixes, so that we are better equipped and have better processes come mainnet.
2. Deploy and test our new networking upgrades to a public network as internal staging networks have not always been a good benchmark for this purpose.
3. Allowing you, developers, & the extended community a chance to interact firsthand with a Chainflip product that is the closest thing to the live version of what we are going to release than ever before - and will continue to do so through time.
4. Allowing us the opportunity to test and see how our processes, moderation, & support is with our community. Most of you will be interacting with us in some way in the future, probably with real money. Therefore having structures in place to deal with that out of the gates is essential.
5. Enabling us to grow our community. Community engagement for our previous testnets has been great, which shows us that you all thoroughly enjoy interacting with what we develop. We hope to attract builders, developers, traders and enthusiasts alike.

Although the Perseverance launch was delayed from its initial launch date of Oct 12th, it was so we could make sure that we follow through with our mainnet release procedure which we are confident we have now nailed down to a tee. Luckily, we also have such a strong community of Advanced Members who were able to assist us in internal tests to make sure that you all get the best experience possible. We thank you dearly.

Time to get some points on the board.

Having this persistent testnet will really allow us to test what our technology can do first hand. Our main goal here is to match the performance that we are getting internally, which is to successfully complete a full authority set rotation with 150 validators in just over 3 minutes, with zero attrition of nodes.

We also cruised through 300 signing ceremonies simultaneously on the internal Sisyphos network a couple of weeks ago, and we were hitting 1 signing ceremony per second. If we can do that within an external live environment, then we will have far exceeded our wildest expectations in terms of scalability.

Some helpful Perseverance parameters.

To make Perseverance more suitable for its purpose of being a hotbed for testing, we’ve changed some of the starting parameters to stop some of the weird things that we’ve seen on previous testnets from happening:

• Ethereum Network: Georli Testnet
• Epoch Duration: 3 Hours
• Claim Delay: 5 minutes
• Claim Expiry: 15 minutes
• Minimum Stake: 10 tFLIP
• Maximum Authority Set Size: 150 Nodes
• Bootnode Stake Amounts: 5000 tFLIP
• Authority Set Annual Reward Rate: 0.1% of total supply
• Backup Validators Annual Rewards Rate: 0.02% of total supply
• Initial Supply: 90,000,000 tFLIP

Unfortunately the hardest challenge of them all faced us: what to call this testnet? After receiving extremely mixed suggestions from our community, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and during a brainstorming session during our weekly war room meetings, we came up with the name Perseverance.

What does it stand for? Long story short, we have decided to name our one and only persistent testnet after a Night Club in Australia and a mars rover. The analogy however is strong. This testnet is here to stay, come rain or shine.

What are the next steps?

If you would like to be a part of the journey of Perseverance, here is a checklist of things to do in order to get ready:

1. Join our Discord if you haven't already, and enter our Perseverance Testnet chat;
2. Get some Test $FLIP from our 🚰︱faucet Discord channel (which right now is just me with a Metamask wallet);
3. Read our node setup documents here;
4. Set up your node as per the documents;
5. Ask any questions you might have to the team, associates & advanced members.
6. Track your performance on stake-perseverance.chainflip.io, As well as on our Block Explorer: blocks-perseverance.chainflip.io

Whilst out of the gate there are no immediate incentives to be running a node on the Chainflip Network (Besides an awesome community of other node operators), you all will be getting a first access to the closest thing to product ready that we have ever launched.

We are also exploring implementing a very unique and hopefully very fun incentives program for this test network…stay tuned!

(EDIT: And no, those incentives DO NOT include $FLIP airdrops.)

We also will have various other benefits, such as future bug bounties, competitions, the revival of Flippy, or even potential guild wars to determine the fate of the Testnet governance. It will also offer the opportunity for a lot of you to participate in the consensus and development of one of the most unique crypto products to come to the market next year.