Elrond Will Pay You $60,000 to Break Its Blockchain

Can construct a greater blockchain by paying individuals to burn one down?

Beniamin Mincu, Transylvanian chief govt and founding father of the Elrond Community, is within the midst of a 15-day marketing campaign to do exactly that. Almost two years after first revealing his “safe proof-of-stake” sharding protocol in a technical white paper, Mincu and Elrond’s now 24-person developer staff will provide as much as $60,000 to node-runners who can efficiently wreak havoc upon their code. 

Mincu’s aim with the so-called “Battle of the Nodes: Unchained” marketing campaign is, after all, to have white hats expose each bug, assault vector, vulnerability and demanding breakpoint on Elrond earlier than unsanctioned hackers achieve this themselves. This testnet trial-by-fire will show if the community is prepared for mainnet launch, he stated.

“When we’ve got 15 days with out interruption of the community regardless of this type of assaults and stress testing, at that time we all know Elrond is lastly ready and good – sturdy sufficient to go stay,” Mincu instructed CoinDesk.

Elrond’s 15-day clock resets when the “interrupters” handle to take the community down. No one has but: Elrond’s protocol has foiled three assaults to date. Underminers have however uncovered loads of lower-level bugs value fixing, and that’s sufficient to maintain nodes in rivalry for a slice of the $60,000 plunder, paid out within the ERD token.

“We’re each day discovering some issues that we are able to enhance from the validators,” stated Mincu. “We often do one or two releases per day,” patching the bugs, readability points and different ache factors that the battle’s 1,700 node contributors dredge up.

However the effort is not only in regards to the cash and the bugs, Mincu stated – it’s additionally a contest for mainnet validator slots. Some 34% of Elrond’s preliminary 1,500 nodes (500 for every sharding pool and a further 500 for the metachain) will go partially to “trusted” events who helped the hunt for flaws. 

It additionally provides Elrond an opportunity to flex its community specs. By Tuesday, the blockchain – which has a “divide and conquer” consensus mechanism that randomly assigns validator work to members of the 2 sharding teams – was posting a peak transactions-per-second (TPS) price of 712. Mincu claimed Elrond can deal with 10,000 TPS at full tilt. 

The 1,700 nodes far outstrips Mincu’s unique projection of 700-800 contributors when he introduced the bug bounty battle with hardly per week’s discover. All these keen blockchain breakers are potential builders who can contribute to the challenge over time, Mincu stated.