Review of Prover Incentive Plan for Aleo Testnet 3 Phase 2

February 9th, 2023

Aleo has completed Testnet 1 and Testnet 2, and the Prover incentive plan for the phase 2 of Testnet 3 also finished at 23:29 UTC on January 31 (07:59 on February 1, Beijing time). A total of 44,000 nodes joined the test network this time, submitting more than 5 billion proofs per second. At this stage, more than 3.1 million Aleo points have been mined in total.

In this Prover incentive phase, DamoMiner also achieved excellent results, and its results basically met the team’s expectations, and also won the favor and appreciation of most groups of miners. The following is our overall summary of this testnet.

SOLO mode launched

The original intention of DamoMiner is a simple and easy-to-use mining software tailored for Aleo miners. The Aleo mining service it provides does not require miners to build nodes, and the miners can directly run the software to achieve solo mining. At the end of November 2022, DamoMiner will be officially launched. As soon as it went online, it attracted the attention of the majority of miners, and its computing power increased rapidly, taking the leading position in the entire network. This is not only due to DamoMiner’s open and transparent charging method, but also due to efficient and professional technical services.

From idea to launch, always choose GPU mode

From conception to launch, DamoMiner always chooses GPU mode. Although GPU implementation is not a big test for us, its computing power advantage is incomparable to the combination of CPU/CPU+GPU. With the advancement of the test network, the market has begun to turn to GPU solutions, which undoubtedly affirms that our original choice was correct.

DamoMiner has the industry’s top GPU underlying algorithm acceleration engineering team, during which the solution is continuously optimized and upgraded. At the same time, the size of the team is also growing rapidly. It is believed that our comprehensive advantages will be further reflected in the subsequent incentive test network.

Added mining pool service mode

After technical precipitation and polishing, we chose to cooperate with the mining pool (AleoX) in the later stage of this testnet. It is composed of a group of senior blockchain Hong Kong stock team with million-level server management experience. The two mining modes better meet the needs of different user groups in the market. Joining a mining pool can allow smaller miners to obtain stable mining income, while larger miners can continue to choose the SOLO mode or choose to join the mining pool. Two modes, customers can choose according to their own needs.

Aleo network composition overview

The core of the network this time is composed of the official centralized Beacon node and 10 official Validators nodes. The nodes participating in the test cannot directly connect to the Beacon node, but can only connect to the Validator node, which means that if the communication between Validators and Beacon fails, the nodes participating in the test do not have effective means of recovery. The second-stage test of Testnet 3 mainly focuses on PosW algorithm, difficulty adjustment, and smart contract testing of Aleo Credits. Prover’s contribution to the chain is only recorded in Blocks, and does not include real transfers.

PoS+PoSW mechanism

PoS+PoSW is included in Aleo’s consensus mechanism design. PoSW is actually attached to PoS, similar to Ethereum’s PoS, Blocks are generated at constant time intervals. PoSW rewards are not necessarily included in the Block. Only when the CoinbasePuzzle of PoSW is calculated, the relevant information of the Coinbase Solution will be included in the Block, and the resulting Block will carry the PoSW reward. It can be considered that PoS is the carrier of the PoSW chain.

Network Trouble Review

1）Solutions cannot be packaged to get rewards

Directly connected to the Beacon node are 10 Validators nodes maintained by the government. The Prover participating in the test needs to connect the 10 Validators nodes to obtain Coinbase Puzzle, then run the PoSW algorithm, generate Solutions and send them to the Validators, after being verified by the Validators, send them to Beacon, and finally package these Solutions through Beacon to generate Blocks on the chain.

After the start of the second phase of Testnet 3 incentives, there was a large area of Prover that was able to generate Solutions and broadcast normally, but the final blocks were not packaged, that is, they did not receive any rewards. The Bodhidharma team quickly discovered the cause of the problem after an emergency investigation. The official Beacon node will kick out the node that repeatedly sends the same Solutions to it, that is, the Beacon node cannot maintain a stable connection with some Validators nodes, which eventually leads to the inability to be packaged.

2）The Prover node cannot connect to the official node

The Prover node cannot connect normally with the official Validators. The reason for this problem is that due to the wrong disconnection logic in the code, the Validators node will mistakenly think that a disconnected connection still exists, and does not allow a node to establish a connection repeatedly, resulting in the failure of the Prover node to connect to the Validators.

Aleo’s next development plan?

On January 24, Aleo officially announced the development plan for the first half of 2023. The following is a summary of the main information of ALEO’s development plan.

⭐ Execution and deployment will be enabled by the end of January. This will allow developers to start launching applications on-chain

⭐ Start staking in February (similar to the test phase before the official incentives in the second phase of the third test, no rewards)

⭐ The third stage of Testnet will start in March and provide an incentive plan, which is expected to end in May (the details of the three-stage rewards have not yet been clarified)

⭐ In June, the final preparations for the mainnet audit and emphasis on testing will be made

⭐ Mainnet launched in July

The specific details have also been announced on Twitter AMA on February 2. Aleo CEO Alex Pruden analyzed the roadmap for the development of the Aleo project in 2023.