Gravity DEX Testnet Competition Retrospective and Prizes

On May 4, we launched Gravity DEX, the most advanced interchain DEX in the world, to a historical incentivized testnet competition with a record registration number of over 21,000 people. Once the competition kicked off, more than ten thousand traders took part and started testing the platform to compete for their share of a $200,000+ prize pool, made up of ATOM and 12 other sponsor tokens from the Cosmos ecosystem.

On May 11, we wrapped up the competition and our testing period. We were extremely encouraged by the results and saw some incredible activity on the platform during the incentivized testnet. Here are some stats that particularly stood out:

• 11,324 active traders
• 715,030 transactions
• $189,730,297 as TLV (total locked value ) in pool investments
• $900,414,409 trading volume
• $2,701,243 trading fees paid

Even in the testnet environment, arbitrage bots and traders were incredibly active and we managed to reach a total trading volume of around 900 million. Competition participants were also very helpful in providing feedback, reporting bugs, and, above all, creating market efficiency on Gravity DEX, which is essential as we move closer to mainnet.

And the winners are…

3,598 highly active traders and 11 bug bounty winners will be receiving their share of the prize pool!

Depending on their ranking, the winners will receive prizes ranging from 0.55 ATOM to 62.35 ATOM from the main prize pool, as well as their share of the sponsor token prizes valued at $120,000.

Sponsored tokens from the Cosmos ecosystem include:

• TERRA (LUNA)
• REGEN (REGEN)
• BITSONG (BTSG)
• SENTINEL (DVPN)
• PERSISTENCE (XPRT)
• AKASH (AKT)
• E-MONEY (NGM)
• CYBER (GCYB)
• IRIS (IRIS)
• AGORIC (RUN)
• DESMOS (DSM)
• COMMERCIO (COM)

Note that CYBER (GCYB), AGORIC (RUN), COMMERCIO (COM) and DESMOS (DSM) will be paying their prizes in ATOM, while TERRA (LUNA), REGEN (REGEN), BITSONG (BTSG), SENTINEL (DVPN), PERSISTENCE (XPRT), AKASH (AKT), E-MONEY (NGM) and IRIS (IRIS) will be give out their prizes in their native tokens.

If you’re a winner, congratulations! You will have received an email notification sent to the email you provided at registration. It will contain more details on your rank, ATOM prize distribution, sponsor token prize distribution, and the action you need to take to receive your prizes.

If you believe you are one of the winners and haven’t received the notification email, here are few reasons this might have happened:

• The email could be in your spam; make sure you check it
• You might have unsubscribed from our communication (subscribing to our communication was a requirement for the registration process for these purposes)
• Your email bounced
• You entered an invalid email address in the initial system (this was the case for some)

Bug bounty winners

If you’re one of the 11 bug bounty winners, thank you for your valuable contribution! We will be contacting you via Github to advise you on how to claim your prize.

Incentivized testnet key findings

Beyond producing more than 3,500 deserving winners and helping us to uncover bugs and other related testnet issues, the Gravity DEX incentivized testnet competition revealed some further interesting findings, which you can read about below.

Pools converged around global price

The key element to test was market efficiency on Gravity DEX — and we’re more than satisfied with the results. Despite the testnet environment and purposeful liquidity and price distortion events we created for testing, the top 12 pools continued to converge around global prices.

Swaps were the most popular transaction

All transaction types increased steadily throughout the competition, with swaps having the highest volume.

ATOM / LUNA had the highest swap volume of any pool

We also saw swap volume among pools increase fairly steadily, with hikes corresponding to our price distortion and trading volume events. The ATOM/LUNA pool was the most popular, while other pools had fairly similar swap volume.

The top 20 winners were completing the most transactions at the highest volume

The highest ranked traders were very active on the platform during the competition. Across the top 20 traders, the median number of transactions was 40 and the median swap volume was $14.9k.

What’s next for Gravity DEX

The most advanced interchain DEX in the world will go live on Cosmos Hub at the beginning of July 2021, barring any unforeseen circumstances. Following the excellent feedback from the testnet competition, the many innovative and exciting features that make Gravity DEX unique, and the upcoming Gravity Bridge to Ethereum that’s being developed by the Althea team, we couldn’t be more excited.

You can read about Gravity DEX in more detail here, follow along on the Cosmos Twitter, and sign up for updates on gravitydex.io to make sure you’re the first to know when you can start using Gravity DEX.

Updates about the Gravity DEX Testnet Competition as of June 7th

_________________________________________________________________

Bug Bounty Prize Distribution

After the success of the Gravity DEX incentivized testnet competition, we’re pleased to say that all prizes have now been distributed. We received some questions about the reasoning behind the allocation of the Bug Bounty prizes, so we wanted to discuss this below. Based on community feedback, we decided to alter our original requirements to ensure a fair distribution of the 1,000 ATOM prize pool.

Bug Bounty Prize Distribution — Original Plan

When formulating the rules of the testnet competition, we had to decide on the purpose of the Bug Bounty prizes and the type of bug reports that would be helpful to us as we prepare Gravity DEX for mainnet. In our original plan, these were split into two categories: either critical technical vulnerabilities in the Liquidity Module or critical economic weak points.

We decided to allocate 1,000 ATOM for the most helpful bug reports and distribute the rewards based on an assessment of each report. The Bug Bounty section of the competition was not in place to uncover any issues in the UI or frontend, or errors or misinformation caused by operational problems of the testnet infrastructure.

Why not? Because the frontend we used for the Gravity DEX competition is not going to be used for production. Tendermint is developing a completely new interface for the Gravity DEX mainnet. Therefore, this type of bug report would not be helpful. The frontend codebase will be depreciated forever and not be updated in the future. This makes fixing errors here unnecessary.

Reported Bugs

We received tens of bug reports during the competition from participants, and we thank you all for your reports! However, all the bug reports were either frontend bugs or outdated data caused by testnet operation issues. Therefore, they were not part of the scope of Bug Bounty and did not fulfill the requirements of being critical or technical bugs.

In fact, throughout the duration of the competition, we did not find any vulnerabilities or bugs in the Liquidity Module, which speaks to the extremely high quality of the testnet and encourages us as we continue to improve Gravity DEX for mainnet release. However, this left us with a problem: community members who submitted bug reports were unable to be compensated.

Bug Bounty Prize Distribution — Final Decision

Although the bug reports were not in the scope of the Bug Bounty, we wanted to show our appreciation to those of you who took the time to send in reports and take an active role in the competition. We, therefore, decided to amend our original plan to fairly distribute the 1,000 ATOM prize pool.

We allocated 10 ATOM to each bug reporter who reported frontend bugs for the first time. This came to 11 Bug Bounty winners, taking the total prize to 110 ATOM and leaving a Bug Bounty prize pool of 890 ATOM.

We agreed that the fairest way to distribute the remaining ATOM would be as a special prize to the top 100 most active traders during the competition, as additional compensation for their enthusiasm during the incentivized testnet. The 890 ATOM were, therefore, distributed to the traders proportional to their total scores.

We hope that this clears up any doubts about the distribution of the Bug Bounty prizes. If you still have questions, be sure to let us know through any of our community channels. Once again, thank you to everyone who took part and we look forward to seeing you on the mainnet soon!