June 26th 2020 update: TestNet guidelines are live here.
Welcome to NEAR Stake Wars Episode II, Return of the Validators!
This page will guide you through three main aspects of this initiative:
- What is NEAR Stake Wars
- Your toolbox
- What you have to do
Create your BetaNet wallet, deploy your node, and correctly configure your staking pool. Once ready, NEAR team will delegate tokens to your pool, to have you take a seat as valdiator. See below for details.
Stake Wars is NEAR's incentivized testnet for professional validators.
NEAR’s MainNet recently launched into its first phase, called “POA” (see full roadmap). This means that a small handful of validating nodes are currently being run by the core team. In order to progress to the next phase, “MainNet: Restricted”, the operation of the network will be handed off to a large group of node operators called validators.
The goal of Stake Wars: Episode II is to onboard those validators, test the stability of the system, and begin introducing some of the unique aspects of NEAR’s delegation in preparation for the next phase of MainNet itself.
If you want to know more about this opportunity, read the Stake Wars Episode II blog post.
TL;DR:
Stake Wars Ep.II introduces NEAR's contract-based delegation, offering validators the opportunity to take part in the Open Finance ecosystem. There is a staking pool reference contract on Github, ready for experimenting with these principles. Deploying the staking pool and participating in the Stake Wars will give access to NEAR's MainNet Restricted. Rewards will include 10,000 NEAR tokens/month for every validator on MainNet Restricted, plus 1 Million NEAR tokens available for contributions and community challenges. To become validators on MainNet Restricted, participants will have to accomplish technical challenges and successfully run nodes on BetaNet and TestNet. Judgment criteria will be quantitative, such as number of blocks generated and uptime; and qualitative, such as reactivity to network updates and community participation. A Validator Advisory Board, with a selected group of professional validators, will become over time the voice of validators in the technical governance of the protocol
NEAR Protocol provides you multiple tools such as Github repositories, applications, documentation and web-based resources. As a Stake Wars participant you will use all of them.
NEAR is using two main accounts: github.com/nearprotocol and github.com/near. To join Stake Wars you will use:
- nearup, public scripts to launch NEAR Protocol devnet, betanet and testnet nodes
- nearcore, the reference client for NEAR Protocol
- near-shell, the general purpose command line tools for interacting with NEAR Protocol
- initial-contracts, where you can find the staking pool
Most of the technical documentation is available at docs.near.org. An entire section is dedicated to validators.
The website provides a block explorer and a web wallet:
- BetaNet web wallet: wallet.betanet.near.org
- BetaNet explorer: explorer.betanet.near.org
You will need a BetaNet wallet to deploy your staking pool and receive your first delegation.
You can also use the JSON RPC interface at the address https://rpc.betanet.near.org/status to quickly retrieve information about network, blocks, transactions and wallets. There's also a documentation section with the available endpoints.
As a final note, https://status.nearprotocol.com/ will give you feedback on the status of the network, and the most recent incidents.
Connect to other validators using the dedicated channel on Discord. You might join also NEAR Validators on Telegram.
Important: NEAR core team will use the prefix [CODE_RED] if a particular message requires technical attention by validators. Some examples are new releases, hard forks and critical issues.
Overall, if you want to successfully participate in the Stake Wars, you'll have to:
- Keep an eye to Validator Announcements on Discord (there's a dedicated channel). It will be used to inform you about technical releases and hard forks, community challenges, contribution opportunities and other initiatives that will be valuable for you.
- Give and receive technical help here on Github, in the issues section.
As you know, validators are responsible to generate new blocks to update the state of the network. NEAR Protocol uses proof-of-stake to secure its infrastruture, so you have to stake tokens to become a validator. The contract-based delegation, as explained in the Stake Wars Ep.II blog post, will provide you stake from users who don't want to run a node but are interested to secure the network - and earn rewards with you.
If you want to get your feet wet, and see if Stake Wars is for you, try this quickstart guide:
- Create a BetaNet account using our hosted wallet here.
- Spin up an Ubuntu/Debian VPS and run nearup.
- Deploy your staking pool using the Staking Pool Factory
- Submit up this form to enroll in the Stake Wars.
At the moment of writing (May 28) we received an exceptional interest by the community of validators (300+ applications, 200+ PRs). We are processing all of them, sending 75,000 BetaNet tokens as promised, while making sure the network runs with no issues. As explained in the docs, there are 100 seats per shard, so BetaNet is running at capacity with a cost per seat right above 75.000 tokens.
How to solve this? Activate your network, and ask other validators to delegate to your staking pool. There are many of them with 100k+ tokens who can delegate 5-10k from their stake to your pool.
The plan is to start transitioning the first batch of validators to TestNet. As soon as that happens, the seat price will go down, allowing more folks to join BetaNet.
In the meantime, give a look to the available contributions, and keep an eye on the seat price, using the command near validators current.
We will publish new challenges for validators on a regular basis. Every challenge will have a progressive number, with an increasing level of difficulty. The acceptance criteria will provide high-level indications, and some of these challenges may list previous challenges as a requirement.
List of community challenges:
- May 25th 2020, Challenge 001 Deploy your node and your staking pool
- May 25th 2020, Challenge 002 Become a validator and manage your seat
- June 8th 2020, Challenge 003 Monitor your node and setup automated alerts
- June 22nd 2020, Challenge 004 Dynamically adjust your stake