PHASE 1 Update

Game of Chains✨

Dear Cosmonauts,
Phase 1 of Game of Chains is officially COMPLETE!

Read on for an update on how it went:

Game of Chains will be running for the rest of the month of November. In our first week of running the public incentivized testnet, we experienced some delays with launching consumer chains, however those bugs have been fixed! Validators, read on for more information on when to expect those governance proposals during Game of Chains!

HIGHLIGHTS 🎉

We started Game of Chains on November 7th by launching two “dummy” consumer chains — Apollo and Sputnik. While we had over 150+ validators sign up, we currently have about 90 validators in the active set. You can check out the group of validators here.

We’ve also launched a public leaderboard that anyone can follow to see which validators are in contention for WINNING Game of Chains! This leaderboard is a running tally and we will try to update it on a regular basis as tasks are submitted and evidence is confirmed. You can check out how the judges will be evaluating validator participation here.

Bugs, bugs, bugs! 🐜🐜🐜

During the testnet a bug was discovered in Gaia (Cosmos Hub) with ICS v0.2.0. The result of the bug was that multiple consumer chains were unable to start. This bug was fixed, and validators were able to successfully upgrade the network to the version of ICS v0.2.1 on Friday November 11 (morning EST), following which validators successfully launched two consumer chains!

Additionally, relayer operators found that validator set updates were not being propagated. This was investigated by Hermes and Interchain Security teams (thank you to the Informal Systems team!) and a patch for Hermes is now available

Memes, memes, memes! 😂

We have testnet awards for the best memes generated by the community and we’ve already seen some great memes by Stakecito and Jabbey in Discord and on Twitter! Stakecito contemplates what sabotage might look like in Game of Chains and Chainapsis asks us to let that sink in!

Public Goods 💗

Thank you to all the validators that are supporting this testnet through block explorers, RPC end points and more. Some highlights of the public goods that we’ve seen so far include:

• Polkachu offering a variety of community tools and services
• PingPub added the ConsumerAdditionProposal to their dashboard and also offered RPC endpoints including this one for the provider chain (Cosmos Hub)!
• Thank you to Chainapsis for supporting Game of Chains through the Keplr wallet!

Auditing 🔐

CrowdControl, Virtual Hive, and CryptoCrew have been investigating an issue where validator set updates seem to be inconsistent between provider and consumer chains. Plus, CryptoCrew published their script for auditing the validator set changes between consumer and provider sets (check it out here).

Next Steps 👇👇👇

Over the next week, we will continue running Game of Chains, this time with consumer chains that are planning to launch in production once Interchain Security goes live! This includes the Generic Asset Issuance Chain (or GAH for short). This chain will host USDC when deployed, and hopefully other blue-chip assets in the future. We will also be running Duality, a novel DEX/AMM coming to Cosmos. You can read more about them here.

Following these proposals, validators will run Stride and Neutron — two additional consumer chains coming to Cosmos!

Last, but not least, thank you to the entire validators for your incredible support throughout Game of Chains. Interchain Security would not be what it is without the dedication of the Cosmos validator community. Cheers to you and stay tuned for updates on the next phase of Game of Chains!

About the Author:
Jelena Djuric works at Informal Systems as product Marketing Manager.
Jelena is on Twitter.