The road to the Aptos mainnet passes through a series of incentivized testnets. During this journey, we look forward to the Aptos community coming together to build a secure, reliable, and decentralized network. Below we describe our timeline along this path, outlining both deliverables and goals. The exact goals and rewards will be published as the registration for the incentivized testnet opens. While this document aims to be exhaustive in the work remaining, we intend to maintain flexibility in the timeline due to new opportunities and challenges that are found along the way.

The primary goal for our incentivized testnets is simple: ensure that this community is ready to launch a production-grade Aptos mainnet. Node operators, developers, auditors, and ecosystem builders alike are all invited to participate and will be rewarded for their contributions toward this goal. Our community will engage in a number of evaluations and drills that validate the outcomes of core developer testing and also prepare us all for mainnet operation. We invite and welcome all feedback across the Aptos community during this exciting time and will host frequent community sessions to listen, iterate, and improve on these plans.

Overview

IT1 (Incentivized Testnet 1): Decentralized Startup

• Registration May 13
• Begins May 16
• Completes May 27
• Major Deliverables1. Registration and tracking website will be available prior to the start of IT12. Initially limited to 100 validator nodes (to be expanded in following later phases)3. Tooling for decentralized network startup using GitHub4. Documentation for running a production grade Validator
• Goals1. Perform decentralized network startup using GitHub / Genesis tooling2. Remain online and participate through the completion of the testnet as measured by Aptos

IT2: Staking

• Estimated start time: June
• Major Deliverables1. Staking and staking rewards support with test coins2. Decentralized faucet support3. Updated gas schedule, e.g., improved and well-documented cost for each operation within a transaction to make the cost of transactions predictable
• Goals1. Validate that staking, rewards, and delegation work as expected2. Motivate validators to offer tokens via faucets to support distribution of test coins, delegation to validators, and ecosystem engagement

IT3: Governance and upgrades

• Estimated start time: July
• Major Deliverables1. On-chain voting and governance2. Lightweight state synchronization through backup and restore technology
• Goals1. Perform a decentralized network upgrade via the on-chain governance2. Support new validators joining the network via backup and restore

IT4: Dynamic validator topology

• Estimated start time: August
• Major Deliverables1. Support as many validators as possible2. Validator DDoS protection
• Goals1. Final warm-up before moving to Mainnet2. Validator DDoS validation

Community Opportunities

To help build momentum toward a game-changing mainnet launch, we also plan to invite both technical and non-technical contributions across education, development, and growth. Our community of intrepid Aptonauts will coordinate missions to explore the Aptoverse. This way, everyone has opportunities to get involved and earn rewards from quality participation. We are openly discussing a few incentivized projects:

1. Aptoversity (education)
2. Bounties + Hackathons (development)
3. Creative Challenge (growth)

We will share more info about how to participate in this Aptos community program soon. Jump in our Discord channel to discuss, and keep an eye out for the new Aptos community forum.

FAQ

What behaviors will be rewarded?

• For every deliverable and goal, Aptos Labs with support from the Aptos community will determine the proper success criteria and incentives to understand our progress in the area. Some evaluations may have to be repeated, possibly with improved success criteria and with different incentives. We will provide a clear determination of both the success criteria and incentives prior to starting every evaluation with the community.

What will the registration process look like?

• We are still working through the requirements to join incentivized testnet and what the registration process will include.

When will there be more updates?

• We will share more details as we get closer to the launch of incentivized testnet. Many of these areas of ambiguity are noted in our roadmap outlined below.

When will you publish your tokenomics and white paper?

• We are actively evaluating different approaches to tokenomics and anticipate some form being published while we are running the incentivized testnets. Similarly, our white paper will encompass the work we believe will be ready by Mainnet, which will also be forthcoming.

Could you elaborate on the validator participation size?

• During IT1, we’ll start with 100 participants. We set this number cautiously as this is the first time the software stack will be run in the wild. Internally, we have evaluated much larger networks. We anticipate increasing the number of participants in each ensuing round as the community establishes an understanding of deploying and managing an Aptos node. By IT4, we anticipate allowing as many validators as possible.

Technical Roadmap

Between now and through the end of the incentivized testnets, we will be upgrading the Aptos blockchain with many technical contributions. Many of these are listed below, most of which can be tracked via issues in our GitHub repository:

Blockchain Core Stack

Networking

• On-chain discovery for fullnodes — no more need to advertise
• Improved network topology, e.g., differentiate upstream, downstream, and peer
• DDoS mitigations and evaluation for validators — both attacks from downstream fullnodes and validators
• Inline health checks to reduce unnecessary contention on the networking stack

Consensus

• Dynamic validator sets, subcommittees
• Removal of legacy consensus code
• Deep Safety Rules integration via a reference model to minimize copy overhead
• Key retrieved via environmental variables or configuration parameters
• Safety data storage within consensus DB (rocksdb)

Storage

• Fine-grained storage — current model leverages a blob store that limits the maximum storage capacity of a single account. Including native table extension.
• CRSN (Conflict resistant sequence numbers) — use windows of eligible sequence numbers rather than a sequential field
• Storage economics, anti- state explosion. Gas and state eviction.
• Performance benchmarking and improvements, including per-block instead of per-transaction state authentication structure maintenance.

State sync

• Synchronization using the latest state and state output deltas rather than transactions
• Backup and restore adapters for endpoints, e.g., AWS S3 buckets
• Intelligence between consensus and state sync, performance awareness, and role in consensus (validator set or follower)

Mempool

• Improved transaction serialization and stickiness, including parallelized support for transactions on the same account
• Eliminating or limiting validators broadcasting transactions

Executor

• Enabling parallel execution of transactions
• Reducing the granularity of merkle tree updates from transactions to blocks
• Removal of execution correctness trusted computing base

Virtual Machine (VM) / Framework

• Stricter enforcement on the mutability of modules, e.g., freezing versions for now and leaving open the ability for governance to enable it
• Error types or richer errors from non-core framework modules
• Modernized gas schedule that maps to actual usage — we’re still running on legacy gas schedule that offers little in terms of configurability down the road.
• Support for parallelizable sequence numbers allowing “out of order” transaction execution for a single account also known as conflict-resistant sequence numbers

Operational tooling

• Validator and fullnode creation and registration
• Key and Address rotation
• Backup and restore in collaboration with state synchronization
• Deep health checker
• Retrieve and print managed node information
• Retrieve and print on-chain information for a node
• Validate fullnode / validator deployment, e.g., run a standalone testnet

Smart contracts and frameworks

• Proof of stake, delegation, and rewards
• Governance / DAO upgrade framework replacing the root account
• DeFi or exchange app (community support desired!)

Performance tuning

• Evaluate waste using perf and apply valuable changes across validators and fullnodes
• Unified Tokio executors to reduce contention

Ecosystem

• Indexer to provide richer views of data, e.g., counts and lookup of distinct transaction types
• Incentivized testnet registration and monitoring website
• Wallet prototype/reference implementation Web extension and native1. Coin transferring2. NFT / Token publishing, viewing, transferring3. WalletConnect (2.0) support
• Visibility1. Collect metrics from the ecosystem on node and tools usage2. Validator and fullnode dashboard / scoreboard
• VS code plugin with support for Aptos local testnet / devnet
• Documentation for Aptos-core, Aptos’ Move, and Aptos’ Framework
• Aptos + Move CLI along with documentation
• Support node deployment with various tools. Provide deployment documentation (terraform, helm, kubernetes, docker)

Please Star us on GitHub and join us on Discord to follow along!