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.
goz.cosmosnetwork.dev 