Soundcheck: Incentivised Testnet

Chainflip Labs is pumped to announce our incentivised testnet, henceforth known as Soundcheck. Soundcheck is a dry run for the Sandstorm release, which as community members will know, is a giant milestone for the project.

Soundcheck will commence on the 15th of December 2021 and will conclude on the 19th of January 2022. 250,000 $FLIP tokens are up for grabs and will be distributed proportionately to users based on their leaderboard standings. Completing various tasks, participating in updates, uncovering bugs and providing feedback will all earn points on the leaderboard.

E.g. participant scores 100,000 points - the total points earned by participants is 4,000,000 - user will earn 2.5% of the available tokens (250,000), 6250 $FLIP.

What Soundcheck is

Soundcheck is a dry run for the mainnet validator network. We intend this testnet to live forever, as a live testing ground for mainnet releases in the future. Testnet will reach technological parity with Sandstorm towards the end of the incentivised period. This is a chance for community members to familiarize themselves with the Chainflip network and provide feedback before the rubber hits the road come Sandstorm.

Soundcheck will include the following functionality:

• 150 validators with auctions for validator slots occurring daily
• State chain consensus and finality
• P2P Networking across the entire protocol process including signing and making sure that can scale (we will likely be moving away from libp2p which has become a bottleneck)
• Schnorr key generation & signing ceremonies with 150 participants
• Ethereum transaction witnessing with 150 participants
• Ethereum smart contract interactions including reliable Schnorr key actions
• Ethereum gas fee calculations and reliable gas tracking with a sensible refund/failover system
• Smart contract stake manager vault rotations
• Automated Governance actions including auctions, epoch rotations, slashing, and rewards, maybe also solvency checks
• Backup validators
• Reward distribution, including cross-chain withdrawal certificates and other complex logic to handle the adjustment to balances including weighted and benchmarked state chain transaction fees
• Staking, unlocking, and claiming via valid withdrawal certificates generated by a selected set of 100 of the 150 validators through an aggregate Schnorr signature with smart contract interactions
• Runtime upgrades and support for secondary client network upgrades in the CFE and external chain clients
• Monitoring and alerting software for validators and all other deployed infrastructure

What Soundcheck isn’t

It is important to note that Soundcheck does not include swapping functionality. Soundcheck is the foundational layer of the network, upon which the AMM will be built. It is the boring stuff - the pillars and concrete - whilst the AMM and swapping functionality are the glass coffee table and king-sized waterbed you install shortly after. And we all know you can’t build a beautiful retro penthouse on shaky foundations.

We are hoping to run a similar testing program for the AMM (Ibiza) once the LBP has concluded and Sandstorm has been released early next year.

Examples of tracked events (subject to change)

Participant earns points if these events are detected on chain:

• Validator places a bid
• Validator wins a slot
• Validator successfully does keygen and becomes a part of the new epoch
• Validator goes offline
• Validator comes back online after going offline
• Validator successfully completes a runtime upgrade
• Validator successfully completes a CFE upgrade
• Validator unlocks excess tFLIP
• Validator successfully gets issued a withdrawal certificate and takes tFLIP out of the staking contract
• Validator becomes a backup validator in an epoch
• Validator unstakes

Additional FLIP rewards

In addition to the tasks above, we will be manually rewarding FLIP for feedback, bugs and exploits based on the criteria below:

• Participant offers good UX feedback (up to 1,000 FLIP)
• Participant identifies a bug (up to 10,000 FLIP)
• Low severity, low complexity: 1,000 FLIP
• Medium severity, medium complexity: 2,000 FLIP
• High severity, high complexity: 10,000 FLIP
• Participant identifies an exploit in the code (up to 30,000 FLIP)
• Low severity, low complexity: 1,000 FLIP
• Medium severity, medium complexity: 5,000 FLIP
• High severity, high complexity: 30,000 FLIP

Chainflip Labs reserves the right to absolute discretion when it comes to the additional FLIP bounties it will pay to participants, and will only announce them at the conclusion of the program.

Important dates

• 1st December 2021: Applications will open. We will share the application form on all of our key channels (Twitter, Telegram, Discord). In preparation for the application, please have the following information handy:
• Mainnet ETH address. We will be sending real FLIP rewards to this address.
• Discord username/ID: We will be adding participants to a testnet channel for feedback and user support.
• Email address.
• ETH Rinkeby testnet wallet address. We will be sending testnet ETH and testnet FLIP to this address. It doesn’t matter if it matches your mainnet wallet address.
• A small paragraph about your experience/knowledge with server/validator operation
• 7th December 2021: Technical documentation goes live. Users who have had a successful application will be able to start setting up their validators and completing the registration.
• 15th December 2021: Soundcheck officially goes live, we will start distributing tFLIP to successful applicants. Applications will continue to be processed throughout the lifetime of the program.
• 5th January 2022: The Labs team might attempt to push through a runtime upgrade and/or a CFE on the live network. Validator operators might need to respond within 12-24 hours to avoid getting kicked off the network if there’s a problem.
• 19th January 2022: The rewards program ends, but the testnet lives on. All points will be tallied up, and the corresponding FLIP rewards will be shown to participants for distribution immediately after the LBP.

Application information

Anyone that gets their hand on some testnet flip (tFLIP) will be able to join the test network validators. However, in order to build closer relationships with the community and most of all to stop some 15-year-old basement-dwelling prodigy from farming the crap out of this program so that the rewards end up being unfairly distributed, we have had to put in place an application process for the incentives.

We want every successful applicant to get a fair shot at the prize pool and to be rewarded fairly, so we are aiming for a 1 applicant 1 validator policy. In order to achieve this, successful applicants will have to complete a KYC step. We understand this can be annoying in crypto, but it’s the only reliable way we can meaningfully deter greedy people from farming the program and hoarding juicy $FLIP. With that being said, please do not apply if you are uncomfortable with completing a verification step. The verification is done by a third party with full GDPR compliance and will only be used to ensure a fair program. We are not required to store this information once the FLIP tokens have been distributed.

If you’re interested in running a validator or just want to see how the network works in action, this is a great program for you. As we are expecting a lot of demand and don't want the rewards to be diluted too much, so we will accept a maximum of around 500 applicants.

Full details on what’s required to run a validator and for the application itself will be released in the week leading up to applications going live.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it. We will be releasing more information along the way, and we are always keen to answer any questions you have in our Discord or Telegram channels. There will be some ups and downs along the way, but we hope you are as excited as we are to try and break this thing.

As always, catch you on the flip side, comrades.
Chainflip Labs.