Welcome to Stake Wars 2
We have been dropping hints about the second instalment of our incentivized staking contest for a while now and it’s finally time to detail the mechanics, the rewards and all the finer points of this next chapter in our journey to engage the community and test the robustness of our network. First, let’s have a very quick reminder of how our decoupled execution environments (domains) work.
Domains: A Lightning Refresher
You may be familiar with the process of farming on our incentivized testnet but are you aware that there is another way to participate as an operator? Farmers provide consensus to the network with the more space pledged, the stronger that consensus becomes - the harder it is for a bad actor to commandeer the chain for their own purposes.
That energy efficient consensus is leveraged by the domains that sit atop it to ensure consistency when ordering transactions. The transactions are then executed by operators and the chain state is maintained in a secure fashion. Operators stake an amount of tokens to provide a level of economic security to execution and a comprehensive suite of fraud proofs is used to identify and punish (slash) any operator who does not act in good faith.
Domains can be thought of as rollups that share the farmer provided consensus. This means it’s possible to spin up and tear down domains as easily as submitting a transaction. If your project needs its own execution environment with its own token, why not use a domain and avoid the considerable overhead of bootstrapping a network of validators to secure consensus?
Stake Wars 2 will be Multi-Domain
Looking back at the original Stake Wars, the contest was held on a single domain - Nova which is the team-deployed EVM runtime based environment. For this exciting second instalment, the team will be deploying a new, additional domain based on the Auto ID runtime which we have been working away on in the background and you can read about on the Autonomys Academy. Auto ID will enable a new generation of products which require identity at internet scale and beyond. More on that later!
We expect operators to follow transactions so it will be the responsibility of participants to analyze where the activity is and setup where they believe the best opportunity can be found. Remember that the activity on the domains is likely to change throughout the contest as we have a number of initiatives as part of Hacker Month 2 that will change the profile of where the transactions are coming from and where they are being executed.
The Phases
Stake Wars 2 will run on Gemini 3h for between 6 and 8 weeks depending on progress and any issues we find and need to resolve. This time will be split across these distinct phases:
Phase 0 - Prelude to the Realm
Team will deploy and test the Auto ID domain to prepare the battle arena. Final touches will be added to the staking interfaces which have been migrated over to Astral since the original Stake Wars.
MinStake is set to 100TSSC on both Nova and the Auto ID domains. This means that to take part as an operator you must have at least this amount to stake on the network when you register. We appreciate that there could be smaller farmers and even established validator crews who are late to the game but would like to have a chance to participate. And for those we intend to have a claim mechanism on our block explorer Astral. To ensure we are onboarding dedicated members of the community and in an attempt to avoid sybil abuse, the MinStake claim will only be available to wallets which are associated with a Discord account that has the verified farmer role. This can be earned by farming a single block or vote reward - more details can be found in our official docs here.
Operators are free to register and invite nomination at any time before we hit phase 1. Note that another change since the first wars is that storage fee deposits have been introduced. You can read about these in great detail over on the Autonomys Academy but the TLDR is that an amount of an operator’s stake is reserved for storage fees when they register. This reserve is held and used to pay for the storage fees of bundles created by the operator of the nomination pool they create on registration. This is another new feature we need to test at scale but do not be alarmed when 20% of your operator stake is locked up in the background.
Once the scene has been set, we will start the competition proper…
Phase 1 - The Quest for Dominion
This is the main storyline. The start block for the contest is announced and the game is afoot. Remember that the goal here is for operators to maintain uptime and upgrade to any new releases as quickly as possible. Nominators should select operators they believe they will get the best return from.
A big change since the original contest is that nominator limits have been removed. A limitation in the number of registrations it was possible to process on epoch transition has been resolved by our wonderful engineering team and the previous restriction has been removed.
Phase 2 - The Trials of Innovation
These are side quests that everyone is invited to take part in. The team will be providing more details closer the time but the tasks will be designed to test particular facets of the changes we have made to domains since Stake Wars. Tasks will likely include the following:
- Test unlimited nominator count to identify any unforeseen limits.
- Test nominator slashing throughput.
- Test domain storage fees
- Test the staking interface, provide feedback.
- Test cross-domain messaging (XDM).
It’s expected that the full list of specific tests will evolve so further phase 2 challenges will be announced as we home in on exactly what we need. Those who help us out here and provide feedback will not only earn additional rewards but help us hit mainnet beta in the greatest shape we can possibly be in.
Close - Epilogue: The Grand Celebration
Once we are happy that all changes to domains have been tested and any fixes deployed and retested we will close the contest by announcing the final block. This will give us a chance to reflect and take action on lessons learned as we prepare for the Subspace Foundation forging ahead with the mainnet launch.
The team will hold a community event to celebrate the journey we have been on and pick out our favorite happenings to highlight.
Rewards
Stake Wars 2 has 0.3% of total token supply allocated to it as rewards. This total amount is split into the following three sub pools:
- 0.1% split proportional to transaction fees earned by operators.
- 0.1% split proportional to transaction fees earned by nominators.
- 0.1% will be split between those bold adventurers who help us with the trials in phase 2.
Additionally, USDC prizes will be awarded to EVM and Auto ID developers who deploy dApps during Hacker Month 2 which will run concurrently with Stake Wars 2. Our aim here is to develop our builder ecosystem and generate organic transactions on the network to complement the synthetic load the team will provide. All while testing the deployed domains for bugs and bottlenecks.
Finally, after the popularity of the verified farmer Discord role, we will be introducing verified operator and verified nominator roles too. Don’t forget to pick them up in the wallet sidekick on Astral!
Things to Note
Our overarching goal for Stake Wars 2 is to test the latest updates to domains and their staking functionality. We anticipate that challenges will arise, things will break and unforeseen issues will come to light. We ask that you judge us on the transparency and fairness of our response to those events when they happen rather than the fact that they have occurred on our testnet.
Drawing everything together, here is some additional information and next steps if you want to take part in Stake Wars 2:
- All operator participants will need to sync their nodes from scratch on their chosen domain, this is likely to take a number of days so make sure you plan accordingly.
- An operator can only run on a single domain. You will need to pick which one you want to operate on. Or run multiple operators which will require
MinStakefor each registration.
- An operator can only run on a single domain. You will need to pick which one you want to operate on. Or run multiple operators which will require
- If you are starting form zero and want to take advantage of our
MinStakeairdrop claim initiative, it is paramount that you start farming with as much space as possible immediately to stand a chance of earning the verified farmer role before the claim window closes. - A word on domain liveness. A more comprehensive breakdown can be found in the original Stake Wars rules of engagement but the TLDR here is:
- Do not register your operator node until it has synced.
- If you expect your operator node will be down for a while (it happens), we ask that you deregister and reregister to avoid causing any liveness issues. This will be monitored manually but with larger stakes comes a larger responsibility.
- Please do give the original rules a read through as they all apply to Stake Wars 2.
- We will be tuning domains as we go so expect runtime upgrades to the network along the way. These should be seamless but upgrading operator software in a timely fashion will be essential.
- The security audit of domains is ongoing and you can follow the challenges we have left and are actively working on in the Subspace GitHub. This does mean that there are some known bugs with the current implementation. Anyone found exploiting them will be summarily disqualified from the initiative and their rewards earned distributed among remaining participants.
- If anyone finds something we are not aware of we would be extremely grateful if this could be communicated to the team. There could even be a token of our appreciation on the table for reporting a critical problem we were not already aware of.
- A quick reminder about our dedicated Stake Wars channels in Discord. Drop by and say hello.
#operators(chat and support)#nominators(chat and support)#operators <> nominators(promotion, P2P support)
- We fully expect to see political campaigns from operator teams trying to attract farmers to nominate to their operators. But please, keep these activities in the Stake Wars channels. Repeated infractions will be penalized.
- Staking on Autonomys is different to a number of other proof of storage networks and is only necessary to participate in our execution environments. We’d like to make it crystal clear that farming on Autonomys does not require a user to own any tokens before getting up and running.
Join the Adventure!
Stake Wars 2 is not just a part of our testnet; it’s an epic journey blending competition, innovation, and community collaboration. We invite all community members to participate, contribute, and celebrate the evolution of our network.
Together, let’s shape the future of Stake Wars and blockchain technology!
Stay tuned for more updates and detailed instructions as we approach the start date.
Onwards, Stake Warriors!