Game of Stakes Closing Ceremonies
Game of Stakes was in my opinion an enormous success. It was a first of it’s kind incentivized testnet for a distributed community.
While the year of testnets helped form the validator community, Game of Stakes solidified the community into a group of operators who can dynamically adapt to network conditions.
Game of Stakes was everything I hoped it would be. One thing that really exceeded my expectations was the clear breakdown between validators that demonstrated true excellence and the rest of the herd. I know first hand from battling it out in the first few rounds with iqlusion just how difficult this was. Ultimately this led me to be a bit less broad in the proposed distribution of winners. I think it’s clearly in the best interests of the network to clearly identify who made the biggest contributions here.
I was a little bit disappointed that mutually assured destruction games with validator censorship didn’t really play out but I heard that it was hard to convince validators to run modified software.
Let’s talk about winners.
First I want to particularly celebrate two players in Game of Stakes.
Certus One and Bitfish.
Certus One’s accomplishments are incredibly impressive. They had the most precommits, flawless uptime, led the GoS 6 hard fork. They helped out in validating the genesis transactions and provided a fix for the state machine bug in the first Game of Stakes network. They clearly dominated Game of Stakes and cemented their reputation as one of the best validators.
I’d also like to celebrate BitFish and their cartel/sybil attack on the network. The signs of a sybil attack on registration were detected early. We saw a pretty unexpected number of passports from Southeast Asia in the registration process and then a massive batch of gentxs from Digital Ocean IPs. Getting the opportunity to see how a large cartel would affect the network was incredibly valuable. They didn’t do any of the really interesting attacks at > 1/3rd of stake that I was hoping to see but I think they clearly appreciated that this would just speed up defensive reactions.
Certus One and Bitfish are big winners in my allocation recommendations for Game of Stakes.
Let’s talk about how I scored the remaining participants. I recommended a total of 50 winners receive an Atom allocation.
I also need to give my enormous thanks to the Castlenode Validator. They were a top 10 Game of Stakes participant and as an affiliate of Tendermint Inc they aren’t eligible to receive a recommendation. But they also did an enormous amount of data analysis for me. I used their sql database, the block explorers and some of my own tools to make these recommendations.
Checkout their data.
Broadly I would break players into some different categories.
First is Never Jailed crew. Based on the scoring criteria these players stayed in the validator set for the entire game. They demonstrated enormous skill at adapting to the adversarial network conditions and uncertainty about how to correctly configure nodes.
Never Jailed
Stake.Id
Chorus One
Censorship Attackers
The next special category are the censorship attackers:
Validatorich — The story I head from the operator was that he inadvertently misconfigured his timeouts but then stumbled into a censorship strategy that they deployed with a modified version of Tendermint.
Uptime Leaders
Total precommit/ uptime leaders also got rewarded in the recommendation
Umbrella
Atom Guide
sebytza05
Finally I made some small allocations to users who suffered a small hiccup but otherwise did really well or made it into the top 50 for total stake but weren’t in the other categories.
