The Race Begins
Earlier today we held a community call to start the Liftoff phase of our Mini Space Race. We had a packed agenda as usual and for those that prefer a written roundup, this is the forum post for you! You can watch the call in it’s entirety over on YouTube of course.
Fradique warmed the crowd up as usual before we bid an emotional farewell to Gemini 3g as Justin ran us through the peak numbers on the network.
- 9,000 nodes at it’s peak (this writer personally observed a shade under 10,000).
- 13PiB of space pledged.
Gemini 3g will always hold a special place in our hearts. We’ll look back fondly on the replotting during the earlier blocks - maybe even come to laugh about it when enough time has passed. And it was the first place we used Nova - our EVM compatible domain to test decoupled execution and staking at scale with our hugely successful and popular Stake Wars.
Moving on to Gemini 3h, the stats are just as impressive. Bearing in mind the network had not fully started at this point we saw 4,930 nodes online at the start of the call. That represents over half of the Gemini 3g nodes! The team really appreciate the dedication of our farmer community this speedy switchover demonstrates.
We were given a quick recap on the changes introduced that farmers need to be aware of between 3g and 3h by Emil. Not least of which were the change that dropped since our last call where we originally introduced the Gemini 3g → 3h migration guide. That change is that pruning defaults have been set meaning there is no longer any need to set these command line parameters on the node:
--blocks-pruning 256
--state-pruning archive-canonical
Jim delivered a recap on what the Mini Space Race is and its significance to the wider roadmap as we march towards mainnet. Another crowd pleaser it seems. But in all seriousness, the project would not be where it is today without every one of you joining us on this monumental journey.
Next up came the time for Nazar to mark the consensus block that we stop Gemini 3g incentivized testnet rewards on. The transaction went through without a hitch and reward pool accrual was paused at block 1,441,148.
We shifted into a more detailed explanation of the Liftoff phase where the precise mechanics of starting the Mini Space Race Liftoff were discussed. Specifically it required us to:
- Set a target space pledged.
- Set an initial solution range which sets initial farming reward difficulty.
- Enable solution range adjustment which scales the difficulty of farming based on the amount of space available on the network.
- Enable block authoring by any farmer.
- This means farmers will start to see
successfully signed reward hashlog messages. - But there will be no block or vote rewards and therefore no TSSC until we reach our goal.
- This means farmers will start to see
This phase is a necessary part of bootstrapping the network. We need to reach a certain amount of space pledged to ensure our consensus is secure and this mainnet launch dress rehearsal is how we aim to ensure that for real on the next network - Mainnet Beta!
A quick note on reaching Escape Velocity. We will be keeping a running commentary with the community on how we are progressing towards our goal. Our aim is to hold an asynchronous event in Discord as we cross the finish line and rewards are automatically enabled. This could happen at any time of day or night so we expect there to be a similar vibe to the Ethereum merge event last year.
Nazar did the honors again by submitting the necessary transactions to ignite our engines with these details:
- The Space Race target was revealed as being 8PiB.
- Initial solution range was set to 1PB.
- Block authorship and solution range adjustment was enabled at block 115,439.
With the main business now taken care of and our farmer’s boosters firing away we announced the winners of our recent community initiatives:
Some impressive knowledge and hardware were on display. Check out the linked forum posts for a full rundown. Zulkis romped home with their impressive trivia scavenging skills with wang following close behind. Amazing farming rigs from @Wezl, @Capybara and e1padr1no were judged as 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively. Honestly, we loved reading every single entry and are amazed at the kaleidoscope of RGB submitted. Honorable mentions have to go to @tradershort, @sparks60 and Douceur whose integrated plants make farming on Subspace even more eco-friendly! You can see them all for yourself in the #hardware channel on Discord.
Ryan was on hand to update us on the extended memes contest and how community members are able to engage through our Galxe and Zealy campaigns.
We rounded things out with a lengthy Q&A where all manner of great questions came from the audience. Far too many to list in this short roundup. Well, we have to leave you a reason to watch the video too don’t we?
Keep your eyes on that space pledged and we’ll see you soon on the next one, Subspacers.
