Tag: adversarial testnet

Announcing the Liveness Winners and Challenge Reward Winners of Game of Zones

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

It’s been a thrilling, at times bumpy, few weeks of fierce competition, but Game of Zones was an incredible ride that defied our expectations. Supporting the Cosmos Network and readying it for the Internet of Blockchains requires a diverse set of tactics and skills, and it’s clear from the incredible participation throughout the competition that there is a bright future ahead for IBC. Now that the competition has drawn to a close, the GoZ Team is thrilled to celebrate contributions of participants towards launching IBC and recognize outstanding work by taking a look back over the past few weeks of intense competition. 

Network Visualizers + Unofficial Scoreboards✨🔮

Throughout the competition, the Game of Zones team has been in awe of the visibility tools and explorers being developed by the community to support the IBC-enabled hub. Map of Zones, lead by Mira from Ztake.org, has done an incredible job of developing beautiful and informative visualizations of the network that have enriched the competition. Additionally, Vasily from the P2P.org team has done great work with their unofficial scoreboard here.

We would also like to recognize the IRISnet BlockChain Explorer  by the IRISnet Team, VGNG  by the VGNG team, and this Bitsong dashboard by the Bitsong team. Tools like these will be invaluable when IBC is mainnet-ready, and we hope to see more products like these available to provide more observability and visibility into the network’s operations when IBC is production-ready.

Competition Challenge Winners 🏆

The GoZ Challenge was designed to incentivize and measure performance against three specific practices that would be necessary for a healthy network: liveness, throughput, and security modeling. In order to prepare network operators for the Internet of Blockchains, it was important to ensure that participants developed fluency in operating an on-chain lite client, that they became familiar with both the Relayer Software and packet sending interface, and that they would develop insights to inform visualization, observability and detection tools to protect the network. Throughout Game of Zones, participants shared their knowledge and developed numerous technical resources, with many, many teams delivering a strong performance all the way through the last minutes of the competition. Congratulations to the winners of Game of Zones!

🏆 Phase 1a Winners 🏆
Atomic Bombers, IRISnet, ResponsibleChain (P2P.org), and Sentinel will receive 1,250 ATOM.

🏆 Phase 1b Winner 🏆
Kiracore 
will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Phase 2 Winner 🏆
Sentinel
will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Phase 3 Winner 🏆
P2P.org
will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Most Packets Relayed 🏆
Stakefish
This reward was designed to provide an incentive for competitors to take a “big picture” approach and develop an evolving set of tactics to come out ahead of the competition, and they will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Best Custom Zone 🏆
Freeflix Media 
Seeing participants mint NFTs over Twitter to engage in some very complex zone interactions over IBC was amazing, and they will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Most Creative Zone 🏆
Stakefish
Who doesn’t love a Tamagotchi?! This zone was an incredible demonstration of how IBC allows for multiple zones to be composed together, and they will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Most Innovative/Deceptive State Machine 🏆
IRISnet 
The IRISnet Team built an impressive, complex 4 zone process that showed how deception might propagate among chains, and how byzantine and non-byzantine chains might interact with one another, and they will receive 6,250 ATOM.

🏆 Gaia Award 🏆
Agoric
The Agoric team delivered exceptional technical details in their Proof-of-Concept for a smart relayer, and demo video of their advanced set of dynamic relayer policies, and they will receive 6,250 ATOM.

GoZ Liveness Reward Winners 🚀🏅

Pending a final verification of registration data during the KYC process, the teams listed below are eligible to receive an equal share of 50,000 ATOM for maintaining a significant period of liveness throughout Phases 1a and 1b of the competition. We expect teams to receive at least 535 ATOM, though that amount may increase as we do a final accounting for individual competitors who registered with multiple teams.

Agoric
alpha_virtual
aneka
anonstake
armyids
astronomia
atomic_bombers
audit.one
aynelis
b-harvest
bigbeautifulsilverplate
bit_cat
bitple
bitsong
blockscape
bureksteak
capybara
cdos
certus_one
Chainapsis
chainflow
chainlayer
chorus_one
compass
cosmic_compass_(coco)
cosmoon
cyber~congress
cypher_core
datachain
dawns.world
defending.network
desmos

dunhill
everstake
fanprime
freeflix_media
genesis_lab
gruberx_crew
gunray
hashquark
huglester
interstation
irisnet
isillien
jokerthebond
joonzone
kira_core
kokuwa
melea
mia_//_lableet
mintonium
mr.k
muzamint
newroad_network
nibiru
node_a-team
node123
nodeasy.com
okchain/okex
ozone
p2p.org_-_p2p_validator
persistence
protofire
pupu

regen
responsiblechain
retz80
rvc_group
sentinel
simply_staking
snzpool
source
stake_capital
stakebird
staked
staked.sh 
stakefish
stakematic
stakesstone
stakezone
stakin
staking_fund
staking-defense
starcluster
stratus
supernova
taidi
Team Stoner
teddyrabbit
thetechtrap
validatorich
vgng
vipnamai
westaking
Wetez

Fostering Collaboration + Community 👩‍🚀👾👩‍🚀👽

In addition to the incredible performance we saw from GoZ winners, several validators and community members stepped up to help others prepare and put their best foot forward throughout the competition. The Game of Zones team would like to take this opportunity to thank Melea for the help he provided to the community in Telegram, and for writing up a set of amazing IBC onboarding documentation.

More than anything else, Game of Zones has surfaced a strong sense of pride in the work it takes to continue blazing the path of innovation that started when the network was launched in 2019, and we hope to see this continue as we make our way towards getting IBC production ready. The goal of the competition was to ensure that network operators gained a deep understanding of the intricacies of running an on-chain lite client, and the teams that participated in Game of Zones did that and more. To keep moving the Internet of Blockchains closer to reality, contribute to the Relayer software (or building one of your own!), hunt for bugs and surface vulnerabilities in the code that will power an IBC-enabled network, and continue to share solutions for improving Tendermint’s performance and throughput. 

Announcing the Winner of Phase 3 of Game of Zones

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

Since the end of Phase 3 of Game of Zones, the GoZ team has been evaluating technical details of the numerous attacks carried out to push the limits of the IBC security model.




During Phase 3 of the competition, the goal was for participants to adopt an attacker’s mindset and attack the network layer of the hub. This phase was designed to educate network operators about risk by surfacing security vulnerabilities and rooting out opportunistic attacks that might be possible if a node or zone is not monitored or configured to be safe by default. As expected, we saw a plethora of incredible attacks across the competition hub, and we were amazed by the creativity and persistence of participants.

 

The winner of Phase 3 of GoZ is P2P.org, who will receive 6,250 ATOM for their outstanding performance in creating a deceptive rootchain and a double spend via double sign attack for the third phase of the competition. Their approach to attacking an IBC-enabled network demonstrated that the best way to steal coins from a user is to do so subtly. Their subtle mechanism to steal coins implemented minted unredeemable coins, and their successful attack and technical Proof-of-Concept documents this well. 

There are countless incredible write ups and contributions that have gone a long way to expand what we know about protecting an IBC-enabled network, such as these:

The most important goal of Game of Zones is to prepare network operators for the entirely new set of abstractions that will come when IBC is production ready.  It has been incredible to see participants and the overall community rise to this challenge, especially since this phase will undoubtedly improve the security and shared knowledge around running a safe, secure hub.  Congratulations to everyone who successfully completed Phase 3 of Game of Zones!

Announcing the Phase 2 Winner of Game of Zones

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

Since the end of Phase 2 of Game of Zones, the GoZ team has been busy crunching endless gigabytes of performance data in order to name a winner.



During Phase 2 of the competition, the goal was to challenge teams to push the hub’s throughput capabilities to the limit, and beyond. We set this goal to ensure that network operators would become more familiar with how to achieve high throughput on an IBC-ready hub, and to test which teams would build the best automation to keep the network moving along.

As expected, the hub reached full capacity at the beginning of the phase, and as expected, a large volume of transactions plus an oversubscribed mempool slowed the network to a crawl. Throughout this period of network instability, several teams delivered a strong performance because they were quickly able to adapt and respond to adverse network conditions. 

The winner of Phase 2 of GoZ is Sentinel, who will receive 6,250 ATOM for their outstanding performance in the second phase of the competition. Competition between Sentinel, Source, Stakefish, Persistence, and the Ozone team was fierce, and the end result was close:

Team:Sentinel, Total Phase 2 Score 21266
Team:ozone, Total Phase 2 Score 19092

Scoring for Phase 2 used data collected by Sagan, and the data for the phase can be found here, here, here, and here. 

cargo run --release -- -c config.toml  start ~/phase2a.lb.log ~/phase2b.lb.log ~/events.ozone.log ~/events.persistence.log

The most important goal of Game of Zones is to prepare network operators for the entirely new set of abstractions that will come when IBC is production ready.  It has been incredible to see participants and the overall community rise to this challenge, and to watch teams become experts in automation and throughput during this part of the challenge. Congratulations to everyone who successfully completed Phase 2 of Game of Zones!

Announcing the Winners of the Game of Zones Liveness Reward

Posted on by Jessy Irwin


Throughout the week, GoZ Team has been busy querying and judging data from Phase 1a and Phase 1b of the competition to determine which teams are eligible for the GoZ Liveness Reward.  Today, we are excited to announce that teams who have won the GoZ Liveness Reward based on their contributions to Game of Zones will receive at least 537 ATOM for their achievements, though this amount is subject to fluctuate.

Agoric
alpha_virtual
aneka
anonstake
armyids
astronomia
atomic_bombers
audit.one
aynelis
b-harvest
bigbeautifulsilverplate
bit_cat
bitple
bitsong
blockscape
bureksteak
capybara
cdos
certus_one
chainapsis
chainlayer
chorus_one
compass
cosmic_compass_(coco)
cosmoon
cyber~congress
cypher_core
datachain
dawns.world
defending.network
desmos
dunhill
everstake
fanprime
freeflix_media
genesis_lab
gruberx_crew
gunray
hashquark
huglester
interstation
irisnet
isillien
jokerthebond
joonzone
kira_core
kokuwa
melea
mia_//_lableet
mintonium
mr.k
muzamint
newroad_network
nibiru
node_a-team
node123
nodeasy.com
okchain/okex
ozone
p2p.org_-_p2p_validator
persistence
protofire
pupu
regen
responsiblechain
retz80
rvc_group
sentinel
simply_staking
snzpool
source
stake_capital
stakebird
staked
staked.sh 
stakefish
stakematic
stakesstone
stakezone
stakin
staking_fund
staking-defense
starcluster
stratus
supernova
taidi
team stoner
teddyrabbit
thetechtrap
validatorich
vgng
vipnamai
westaking
wetez

The most important goal of Game of Zones is to prepare network operators for the entirely new set of abstractions that will come when IBC is production ready, and the liveness reward was designed to reward the significant investment of time and effort that this preparation requires. Congratulations to everyone who has participated in the challenges so far, and to the teams who have successfully completed Phase 1 of Game of Zones!

Announcing the Phase 1 Winners of Game of Zones

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

Since the end of Phase 1 of Game of Zones, GoZ team has been busy crunching the performance data.  Early on in this process, it became clear that naming a single winner for Phase 1a and Phase 1b would be a herculean task, and that this format would not allow us to recognize all of the teams who delivered an outstanding performance in spite of an immensely challenging, unstable environment. Today, we are excited to increase the prize pool for Phase 1* , and announce the winners for both Phase 1a and Phase 1b of Game of Zones. 

Phase 1a

During Phase 1a of the competition, a series of technical issues created conditions for an unreliable hub. While getting the competition up and running, the network halted due to an issue that required an emergency patch.  After a delayed launch, large transaction volumes and an oversubscribed mempool slowed the network to a crawl,  which required an increase in gas costs and RPC capacity to improve stability. 

Throughout a series of restarts and network congestion, however, several teams prevailed to maintain significant periods of liveness.  

The winners of Phase 1a of GoZ are ResponsibleChain, Atomic Bombers, IRISnet, and Sentinel.  

Each of these teams will receive a reward of 1250 ATOM for their outstanding performance in the first phase of the competition, in addition to the GoZ Liveness Reward.  All of the data from Phase 1a and the steps to reproduce the scoring process are available here .

Phase 1b 

After a brief intermission, Phase 1b launched with a series of tweaks that ensured a better experience for participants and increased network reliability. During this phase, an element of gambling with the lite client and trust period expiration truly kicked the challenge into high gear. In addition to a series of excellent network visualizers from participating teams, we saw phenomenal real-time feedback with beautiful graphs of client updates and trust periods. One of the most exciting outcomes of this phase was seeing gas optimizations in action as the GoZ Team crawled the data to see who sent the most efficient client updates.

The winner of Phase 1b is the Kiracore team, who will receive 6,250 ATOM in addition to the GoZ Liveness Reward. All of the data from Phase 1b and the steps to reproduce the scoring results are available here. 

The GoZ Liveness Reward

In addition to the Challenge Reward for Phase 1, each team that completed the first phase of the challenge will receive a reward distribution for their efforts and contributions to the competition.  For this reward, we will be following the same distribution formula that is published in the competition scope: 50,000 ATOM will be equally allocated to teams eligible for the reward. 

In light of the technical issues that surfaced during Phase 1a, we have adjusted our initial judging requirements to be more inclusive, and we will be rewarding teams who have made a good faith effort to participate in the competition by either maintaining a connection for at least 12 hours during Phase 1a, or team who configured a connection that lasted the entire phase 1b time period. Tomorrow, we will be announcing the full list of teams who will be receiving the Liveness Reward. 

The most important goal of Game of Zones is to prepare network operators for the entirely new set of abstractions that will come when IBC is production ready.  It has been incredible to see participants and the overall community rise to this challenge, and to watch teams become experts in operating an on-chain lite client.  Congratulations to everyone who successfully completed Phase 1 of Game of Zones — and best of luck in Phases 2 and 3!

________

* To ensure that the GoZ Team could reward strong performance without taking funds away from the original 100,000 ATOM prize pool, Zaki Manian has generously provided the additional 5,000 ATOM for the Phase 1a prize pool.

Updates for Phase 2 of GoZ: Visualizers, Hub Relaunch, and Scoring

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

Phase 1b of Game of Zones has drawn to a close, and in this week’s live stream we covered several important updates about scoring, judging, and the overall competition. 

Phase 1b Recap

Overall, the GoZ Team was thrilled to see Phase 1b achieve our initial competition goals and to see participants thoroughly enjoying the challenge. After we have completed our review of Phase 1a and Phase 1b data, we will announce the winner in a blog post during the first half of next week. 

In addition to the Spam Reflection Attack that raised the stakes during this abbreviated phase of the competition, we have been in awe of the visibility tools and explorers being developed by the community to support the competition.  Here are a few we’ve noticed, in no particular order:

Tools like these will be invaluable when IBC is mainnet-ready, and we hope to see more products like them available to help make sense of what the network is doing.

Getting Ready for Phase 2

Today, a new version of Gaia will be released that patches a bug reported by the IRIS Team. This new release requires that we relaunch the GoZ hub, and will include data validation improvements from the Interchain Berlin team that should protect the stability of the hub.  Within the next few hours, we will be updating the GoZ repo to include connection details and tagged software releases for this relaunch, and we expect that the hub will reach over 48 hours of stability before scoring for Phase 2 begins.

During Phase 2, we again expect Tendermint to be at full capacity. The Hub will likely see an explosion of packets, and will become unreliable and overloaded with traffic. Throughout this, we expect participants to adjust their tactics and overall strategy to perform well against these adverse network conditions. We also expect to see participants connecting to each other and finding other creative ways to relay packets.

Scoring + Judging for Phase 2

Phase 2 of Game of Zones will officially begin Monday, May 25th at 12am PST  7am UTC. 

The main focus of the second phase of Game of Zones is throughput, and the winning team will be the team that relays the most packets on the GoZ Hub and in the wider Game of Zones network.  All teams will be given 1 billion doubloons for Phase 2. 

In terms of scoring, 

  • Packets relayed to the hub by your relayer key are the most important metric to judge winning. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 1 point.
  • Packets relayed from the hub are the second most important metric for the week. If we were scoring these packets using a point system, they would be worth 0.5 points. 
  • Packets relayed among other chains are less important to your team’s performance than the first two metrics mentioned above. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 0.1 points.

From a judging perspective, we will only be able to count packets relayed with the Relayer key that is included in the GoZ roster (to be updated soon). For Phase 2:

  •  All teams should append -2 to their chain ID for Phase 2 of the competition.This will help us work through the immense amount of data we expect to analyze to choose a winner, and will ensure that there is no delay in announcing a winner.  An updated roster with the chain IDs we expect to see will be available soon in the GoZ Github repo.
  • If your team is relaying packets with a different address than the one that is listed in the GoZ Roster, we will be unable to see or count your performance for the week. Over the weekend, we will be confirming that we can communicate with endpoints. If we cannot reach your team’s endpoint, we will contact you via email to resolve this before Phase 2 begins.
  • A new scoring dashboard that will shows real-time packets being relayed will be available on Monday, May 25th a few hours after Phase 2 begins. The GoZ Team will be monitoring connections made over the websocket, and will count packets on your chain regardless of where they come from.  
  • In light of previous issues with RPC, we recommend that all teams run a full node as increasing the number of operational sentry nodes will help improve overall stability.

The GoZ team is looking forward to another exciting week of competition, and will be updating the participant roster and list of software versions to relaunch the hub by the end of the day today. Be sure to keep an eye on the official GoZ repo, and to mark your calendar for next week’s Live Stream on Friday at 12am PST// 7pm UTC on Twitch! 

Restarting Game of Zones: New Competition Schedule, Phase 1b Updates, and Hub Software for Launch

Posted on by Zaki Manian

Recently, the Game of Zones Team shared that we would be pausing the competition to achieve code and network stability for teams to reach their full potential while stress-testing IBC. Today, we would like to share several updates about the competition, including a revised timeline, revised challenge objectives, and the scoring for Phase 1b.

Competition Timeline

  • Phase 1b will begin Monday, May 18th at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Thursday, May 21st at 6:59am UTC.
  • Phase 2 will begin Monday, May 25th at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Friday, May 29th at 6:59am UTC. 
  • Phase 3 will begin on Monday, June 1st at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Friday, June 5th at 6:59am UTC. 

On Wednesday, June 10th at 7:00pm UTC, the GoZ Team will host Closing Ceremonies where we will recognize each phase challenge winner, and all of the outstanding contest challenge winners who have won prizes for their overall performance. 

New Challenge Objectives for Phase 1b

To recapture the original spirit of Phase 1a, the objectives for Phase 1b will be different than the initial challenge.  During Phase 1b, we will be limiting the number of tokens given to each team to improve the stability of the hub, removing restrictions on trust periods in the software, and disqualifying any team that pools their genesis allocated doubloons for additional gas.

For the all-new Phase 1b: 

  • Every team should append -1b to their chain ID. An official Team Roster that maps chain IDs and Relayer addresses to team names will be published on the GoZ Github repository on May 14th at 7pm UTC. 
  • Trust periods will be unrestricted on the software. 
  • Players will be restricted to 1.25 million doubloons.  
    • This amount should provide enough tokens for a minimum trust period of 10 minutes.  
  • Gas prices will be fixed at 0.0025doubloons/gas.
    • A client update should cost approximately 2500 doubloons.

Before the phase begins, the GoZ Team will provide detailed documentation that shows participants how to adjust the trust period in the Relayer, how to optimize gas, how to deal with errors and recovery, and how to ensure that a client is kept alive. 

The winning team for Phase 1b will have the smallest trust period on their client while maintaining the longest period of liveness. If Team A were to achieve a client trust period of 11 minutes, and Team B were to achieve a trust period of 15 minutes and both teams keep their clients alive for 72 hours, Team A would score higher. If no team is able to maintain a connection for the full 4320 minutes of Phase 1b, the winner will be decided by scoring the length of the longest lived connection over the trust period. 

In terms of judging, we will combine the data from Phase 1a and Phase 1b to declare a challenge winner. During this phase of the competition, we expect to provide an overview of the active clients published to the Game of Zones GitHub repo multiple times a day.

Software to Launch the Game of Zones Hub

The Game of Zones Team will begin the launch process for the hub on Thursday, May 14th at 6pm PST. In order to connect to the hub, you will need to be using the following versions of software: 

And for custom zone operators, please be sure to update to the following Cosmos SDK version:

The Chain ID for the hub will be gameofzoneshub-1b. For each phase of the competition, teams should be prepared to append the phase number to their chain ID before phase launch.

While the GoZ Team is taking several actions to improve stability for the competition, there continues to be a risk that the battle testing of the IBC implementation will uncover new bugs in the software. Any new bugs that surface may result in a hub chain halt or other breakdowns in the use of the IBC protocol. If new software issues impact the competition, we will wait on a new release from the Interchain Berlin team and then announce a restart of the phase. Additionally, there is a possibility that the outcomes of Phase 2 might influence how Phase 3 is structured. If adjustments to Phase 3 are required, teams can expect ongoing communication from us on the objectives and protocol interactions that would be exciting to see.

We can’t thank the Cosmos community enough for the patience and understanding that we have received since our initial announcement about changing up Game of Zones to improve stability and the overall participant experience in the competition. To ensure that you’re getting the most up-to-date information about the competition, follow us on Twitter and keep an eye on the official GoZ repo. 

Improving Network and Software Stability for a better Game of Zones

Posted on by Zaki Manian

Throughout Phase 1 of Game of Zones, we saw many teams demonstrate extraordinary skill by finding clever strategies for working around network and software instability. These skills have been resilient against aborted upgrades, potential transaction spam attacks and the other adversities of running decentralized systems. Unfortunately, our best laid plans for Phase 1 did not come to fruition, and several technical issues made it difficult to achieve the necessary network stability that the competition requires. In light of this, and considering the feedback we have received from the community, Phase 2 launch will be postponed to address these issues. On Wednesday, the Game of Zones Team will publish a new timeline for the remaining phases of the competition and the stable versions of software for the remainder of the competition. 

Improving Network Stability 

One of our most important priorities moving forward in the competition is providing stability to the network and the software that it runs on. To that end, we will not be releasing new versions of software and standing up a new Hub during the remaining weeks of the competition. All upcoming phases of Game of Zones will run on the same version of software, and moving forward, we will not need to change this policy unless bug fixes are required.

Launching a Stable GoZ Hub

To give all participants the opportunity to compete in a stable hub environment, we will be relaunching Phase 1 of the competition in the coming days. In terms of scoring, we will use the data from the original Phase 1 and the data from Phase 1b to ensure that all teams eligible for the GoZ Liveness Reward receive it, and that no team’s contributions are overlooked or forgotten. 

We will rerun Phase 1b of the challenge on a more reliable network. To ensure network stability during this phase, we will be limiting the amount of tokens allocated to each team. This adjustment will alleviate some of the load on the network by reducing the risk of network saturation due to high transaction volume.

During Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the competition, we expect that the network will be at capacity. It is highly likely that the network conditions that surfaced in the last week will return once teams have a large number of tokens, and participants should be prepared to handle and respond to this class of issues as they arise.

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in Phase 1 of Game of Zones for their time, effort, and dedication to the competition, it has gone a long way toward ensuring a stable IBC. Additionally, we want to thank the Interchain Berlin team for their quick turn around on the issues we have encountered. We look forward to seeing a root cause analysis for technical issues that impacted the launch of Phase 2 in the near future. 

3 Must Read Updates about Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Game of Zones

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

Phase 1 of Game of Zones is almost over, and in this week’s live stream we covered several important updates about scoring, judging, and the overall competition. 

Phase 1 Scoring

Per the Competition Scope that was updated earlier this week, Phase 1 ends at 11:59am PST on 5/10. 

Since standing up the scoreboard on Wednesday, we have collected an immense amount of queryable data about the GoZ Hub. The Datadog dashboards we have shared with the community have a live representation of data to represent activity on the network, and a dataset that will be regenerated to score and judge the first phase of the competition. As the competition continues, the dataset representing Hub activity will continue to improve as gaps in the data are filled in.

  • In most cases, team performance is accurately reflected in the datasets we have shared with the community.
  • Some teams who have not been visible in the dataset are now visible because of changes we are able to make to the Datadog backend. 
  • Several teams are visible in the data, but we are unable to credit their performance because the data does not match the Relayer keys and Chain IDs shared during registration. 

If your team’s performance is not registering on the scoreboard, please send us an email at gameofzones@cosmosnetwork.dev confirming your Chain ID and Cosmos address (aka Relayer key). Once we have analyzed the data, we will be announcing the winner of Phase 1 before the end of next week. 

Phase 2 Scoring + Judging Updates

Phase 2 of Game of Zones will begin Monday, May 11th at 12am PST // 7am UTC. 

The main goal of the second phase 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. In terms of scoring, 

  • Packets relayed to the hub by your relayer key are the most important metric to judge winning. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 1 point.
  • Packets relayed from the hub are the second most important metric for the week. If we were scoring these packets using a point system, they would be worth 0.5 points. 
  • Packets relayed among other chains are less important to your team’s performance than the first two metrics mentioned above. If we were using a point system for scoring, these packets would be worth 0.1 points.

From a judging perspective, we will only be able to count packets relayed with the Relayer key that was given to us during registration. For Phase 2:

  • All teams should append -2 to their chain ID for Phase 2 of the competition. This will help us work through the immense amount of data we expect to analyze to choose a winner, and will ensure that there is no delay in announcing a winner. 
  • Throughout the competition, we expect participants to respond to network issues to ensure the stability of the GoZ Hub. Given current issues with RPC, we recommend that all teams run a full node as increasing the number of operational sentry nodes will help improve overall stability.
  • If your team is relaying packets with a different address than the one that was shared with us for registration, we will be unable to see or count your performance for the week. 
    • To confirm your Relayer key, aka the Cosmos address for the GoZ testnet, you can search your team’s inbox for the GoZ Confirmation email sent on 4/27.
    • If your team changed your Cosmos address before 5/1, double check the address that you provided the GoZ team. 

Standing up GoZ Hub 2

Over the next day, we will begin launching the next version of the GoZ hub in preparation for Phase 2. We expect that the hub will be active before scoring for Phase 2 begins, judging and scoring timelines may be adjusted if technical issues arise.

GoZ Hub 2 will run on: 

  • Cosmos SDK v0.34.4-0.20200507135526-b3cada10017d 
  • Gaia v0.0.1-0.20200507172327-bde5e9c00325 m
  • And the latest version of the Relayer available here.

The GoZ team is looking forward to another exciting week of competition, and will be working to open source all of the competition data as quickly as we can. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest news about the competition, and join us for next week’s Live Stream on Friday at 12am PST// 7pm UTC on Twitch! 

3 Updates on Phase 1 of Game of Zones: the Scoreboard, Hub Capacity Issues, and Judging Criteria

Posted on by Jessy Irwin

It’s official! Phase 1 of Game of Zones has begun, and the GoZ Dashboard is available to all. Here are a few of the latest updates competition, scoring, technical issues, and judging criteria. 

The Competition Scoreboard

The GoZ Scoreboard has finally arrived! This tool, which relies on Sagan and the Relayer for visibility into participant performance, will be an important source of truth throughout Game of Zones. While the dashboard is integral for judging the first two phases of the competition, it is important to note that the data and metrics being displayed are not ranked by performance. 

The Scoreboard data represents events that we are using to analyze performance— i.e. which team is relaying packets — and it primarily runs on the addresses shared with the GoZ Team during registration. In some cases, chain_ID and RPC endpoint data are visible but they are not linked to a team. If your team name is not associated with your performance metrics, please send us an email at gameofzones@cosmosnetwork.dev and we’ll update your information as quickly as we are able. Additionally, we are working to provide observability for teams with multiple connections to the hub.

Throughout the competition, we will be releasing several scoring dashboards to represent the events we’re using to analyze participation. Follow us on Twitter or check out our Github repos to get access to new dashboards as they are released.

GoZ Hub Capacity 

Overnight, several capacity issues impacted the GoZ Hub.  

  • The Tendermint mempool almost reached full capacity, and transaction time on the networker is higher than expected as a result.
  • Sentry node congestion has made it difficult for teams to connect to the hub.  
  • Relayer error messages are leading to misdiagnosis of issues. 

In response to these issues, the GoZ and Iqlusion Teams have used the toolset built into the distributed network to alleviate some the congestion we anticipated during contingency planning. So far, we have:

  • Tripled the number of sentry nodes supporting the Hub, 
  • Increased transaction fees to make it less practical to spam the network,
  • Noted issues with error messages coming from the Relayer, which will inform the gradual process of improving the information provided when errors arise. 

Phase 1 Judging Criteria 

One of the main goals of Game of Zones is to stress test multiple components of the IBC Network and the software that it runs on.  To honor the spirit of the rewards of the competition, the GoZ team has committed to adjusting the scoring criteria when necessary to correct for technical issues that arise on the hub. In terms of performance, however, it is important to note that anticipating network issues and having a plan to respond and adjust your team’s performance is critical to your success in the Game of Zones challenge. 

Since our initial efforts to launch the hub began last week, the teams participating in Game of Zones have done incredible work setting up notes and helping one another with technical details about the Relayer and IBC Module in our community channels. It has been incredible to see the community rise to the challenge of preparing the IBC Module for launch. In light of these contributions, we will be updating the GoZ Liveness Reward criteria to be as inclusive as possible in assessing competition contributions and performance, and we will provide an update on the specifics of the judging criteria for this reward as soon as we can.

To learn more about the technical details of Phase 1 and ask any questions you have about the competition, join us for our Phase 1 Livestream on Friday at 12pm PST / 7pm UTC on Twitch!