August Town Hall | Testnet Success

Missed the monthly town hall? Not to worry amigos, amigas, or anyone else, extra-terrestrial or not, who couldn't tune in this time. Sad you couldn't make it, but, unlike last time, we've actually got the full recording and transcript ready for you to digest at your own leisure. Next time, be sure to join us live in our Discord channel here.

Given the overwhelming success of the Testnet, this month's town hall saw us sitting down with Ada, the true mastermind behind our exciting 2.0+ upgrade and testnet, as well as our incredible, amazing, (some might even say) handsome, head of marketing, Alan Kong (he's my boss so what else can I say), to discuss all the Testnet takeaways, feedback, stats and next steps.  Let's get started.

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August Town Hall Recording - Testnet Success

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August Town Hall Transcript - Testnet Success

Introduction

Toby:  Jumping in. Hello and welcome everyone. This is the post testnet town hall. Thank you all so much for joining us. The test net has been a crazy success. We've really been overwhelmed by all your support. It's really more than what we expected. And we're so glad all of you could join us. Very exciting times. Today we've got our director of marketing Alan, an amazing guy, who’s going to talk us through the testnet post results. And then we've also got, as with last week, Ada from the development team, and she's going to tell us all about the development team and their takeaways and all that important stuff.

So it's gonna be a very juicy, juicy, nice episode. [00:07:00] We'll also be sharing some information on How the rewards process works, how to claim your rewards, remind you of a few important details, and yeah, that's it.

Testnet results - Overview with Alan

Toby: So, Alan, why don't you introduce yourself?

Alan: Hey everybody, so I joined Creditcoin earlier this year, and I joined because of the fact that I love the mission of what Creditcoin really stood for.

And it was very... obvious that in a world full of blockchain tech that struggles to find true utility in the real world and to make a real impact, Creditcoin really stood out. So that's actually why I ended up joining. And six, seven months later, we have the success of credit coin 2.0+ Testnet. And that's really thanks to this global community that we've been able to build up.

We're definitely been bigger on the Korean community side historically. But now through the success of the testnet, how everything went, it's quite clear that we are global, which is awesome, right? And just like Toby [00:08:00] said, today's a great opportunity for us to kind of share the results of it from both the business operational standpoint, as well as the development side.

And it's really also to say thanks to our community for those who have helped us really stress test our, our network, because as anyone knows, The strength and security and the decentralization of a network and the growth is really based on the fact that we can be global. [00:09:00]

[Town hall cuts out - technical issues]

Alan: [00:10:00] Sorry about that. But, we're here to share with you the results of it from a business operational standpoint. And then from there we can go into the, into the developer side of things. But, in total, we had over 9, 400 testnet applications. And that is an awesome way to be able to see the true interest of people around the world in helping to secure and grow the Creditcoin network. Now out of that, the active participants ended up being 286 validators. In terms of nominators, 2,882. And the coolest thing that we saw was that we were able to put together the number of participating countries.

And this ranged from the thousands of [00:11:00] people in the top five countries to, let's say, like, one or two individual ones. So this number is all encompassing, but we had 91 total participating countries globally. With the top 5 countries being India, Indonesia, the United States, South Korea, and then Pakistan. So, that was really awesome to see.

Even within our Twitter, our Discord, the forum that we have, we saw that there was much more active community participation than outside of the test net, right? People were interested in the real world asset narrative that we're running and how we've been steadily growing and building our infrastructure over the last few years.

So thank you to everyone who participated in the testnet because of the fact that without you, of course we wouldn’t have achieved all this. So next up would be some questions. [00:12:00] So Toby, want to lead the way?

How do I claim my rewards?

Toby: Yes, absolutely. So of course that leaves you all wondering what next? How do you claim your rewards? We've already shared everything on our social media pages. Just as a reminder, please go fill out the Reward application form before the deadline. We've got all the instructions on Twitter, etc. If you don't fill it in, then I'm sorry, but you won't get your rewards.

There's a few things to bear in mind. If you've run multiple nodes, or you were a nominator and a validator, remember that you need to submit two different forms for each one. That is very important.

If you can, please submit your substrate address also as your testnet address. This is not the same as your Polkadot wallet address. Creditcoin wallet addresses always begin with [00:13:00] a ‘5’, so please try and submit that one.

If you submitted the other one, it should be fine. Don't worry about it, but ideally it should begin with a ‘5’, just to put that out there so you guys all remember. And again, just make sure you do that for the deadline.

Why do we require a reward application form?

Toby: For you Alan, I know there's been some community questions about why we're doing this reward application form. Can you just explain what the sort of rationale behind that was? Because I know it might just look like another hoop that everyone needs to to jump through right?

Alan: Yeah, so I know it may feel like a hoop. But, the big picture is that within crypto, there are definitely individuals or groups of individuals that love to game the system purely for incentives.

And there's nothing negative about it, but then, the negative part for us as a network is that if we have individuals who come into our incentive programs in order to simply get the tokens and then [00:14:00] dump, that actually hurts our existing community members and token holders.

So we took it more in terms of a long term approach. While it may seem like a hoot for you - it’s also a pain in the butt for us to look at all of these submissions manually. It means more work for us filtering out people who are purely trying to game the system.

But ultimately, it’s still the right approach. Because we want to incentivize those who actually will transition from testnet to mainnet with us. By rewarding those people who came into testnet with the right intentions, then we'll have a greater level of stickiness when we launch mainnet, the real life version of it.

The people who come in as nominators to help us secure our network. Those are the people we truly want to incentivize. So yes, it does feel like it's a little bit of extra work. But it comes with the right intentions for the long [00:15:00] term vision of what Creditcoin is doing. Protecting our current as well as any new CTC token holders.

So that's the reason, and of course, thanks for everyone who’s jumping through that process for us.

Toby: Yeah, amazing. Thanks. So just to remind you for the final time, please make sure you submit that form before the deadline. If you were a validator and a nominator, please make two separate submissions.

And please also remember that, depending on when you applied and when you received your tokens as a nominator, you should make sure that you select the right option.

In terms of that manual verification process, we're looking slosely at everyone's activity. So it'll be very obvious if you [00:16:00] try to game the system. Say you applied as a validator and then used your tokens for the wrong purpose, then I'm afraid that we are very savvy and very alert to that. So that's that for the testnet.

What’s happening between now and the mainnet launch?

Toby: Which brings us onto going forwards, the mainnet is coming later in Q3. I know a lot of you guys have been asking about that, in terms of how that's going to work, Alan, can you share anything more about the next sort of steps?

Alan: Yeah, so within the reward application, what we did was that we embedded a small survey. And for those who participated, there was a section that asked how we can help essentially incentivize you to hop onto Mainnet with us.

So... Internally, we're working on the process of that incentive program. We want the transition to [00:17:00] to be as easy and smooth as possible. And we want it to be worthwhile for our mainnet CTC token holders.

The mainnet CTC one is the one that we are using to essentially secure the network. We're moving towards making that the sole token with CC3. Currently, we are looking at a number of different ways in which we can incentivize that fairly and effectively.

Please give us a few weeks to get that sorted and then we’ll share more info regarding the main incentive program, to help bring you all into the ecosystem and start growing and building with us.

Toby: Yep, amazing. So that kind of wraps up all the important notifications, announcements, everything you need to know about what's coming up next.

Ada - Testnet global community shoutout

Toby: Which then takes us back to [00:18:00] the testnet where we will very warmly welcome Ada. We've got some questions for you, your thoughts on the testnet, what we got from it, et cetera, et cetera. So, starting off just for anyone, could you quickly introduce yourself again.

Ada: yourself. Uh, yeah, sure I’m Ada, the lead in the blockchain engineering team and have helped organize, project manage and write some of the code myself for the upcoming Nominated Proof of Stake update and Testnet.

I originally joined Gluha much like Alan, because I saw the potential of what we were building here. It was my first time really entering the blockchain [00:19:00] space. Being in this environment has been incredible. And I just want to shout out the community.

One of the things that's so fascinating is how engaged everyone has been during this testnet. That blew me away from coming from other companies and industries where it's very faceless. This has been such a welcome change.

Toby: Yeah, completely. I mean, the test net really couldn't have been such a success without the incredible help of various community members from around the world.

I know Megumi made that wonderful Indonesia Validator guide. We’ve got the Turkish community pitching in, the Korean community too. We've had lots of global support and help, especially in chat as well. You know, we can't be online all the time and seeing all that help you guys have done to make it all such a success has been great. Just thanks again.

Why did we have a Testnet, and did we achieve our objectives?

Switching back to the testnet, [00:20:00] what was the fundamental idea behind holding the testnet, what were you planning to learn and did you achieve those objectives?

Ada: Yeah, so we had a long list of things we wanted to get out of the testnet, and really maximize that period of community engagement.

Obviously there’s a ton of changes with 2.0+. The core runtime, the core blockchain, proof of work to proof of stake, finalization mechanics, elections, nominating, all of those things that go into that.

So the testnet was really a big opportunity for us to test these things. We can do that in isolation, but having 10 people you're only going to learn so much. When you can expand that number out, you can see how things continue to function at scale, especially when you start physically locating nodes further from each other, right?

[00:21:00] Ping times go up and so you've got so many additional variables introduced which is something that just can't be tested effectively at a small scale. So this test gave us the opportunity to see if all of the features that we'd implemented, maintained their stability, and behaved exactly how we predicted when scaled under real-world conditions.

And I would say that it was a huge success. By having the opportunity to bring literally thousands of people into the network we gained a ton of confidence in the infrastructure itself. And then, we also continued to learn what users expected, and how to make that experience better, in terms of documentation, user guides, the tools that we provide - whether it's the staking dashboard or the command line interface - all of that was, was on the [00:22:00] list to be tested.

Documentation feedback - What did we learn?

Toby: So you mentioned a number of technical challenges there. Obviously once people start interacting with the protocol, people interact with it in various ways, which you can't always expect or foresee. So, concerning the documentation side and such, what was like a challenge that arose during the testnet and what was the outcome of that challenge?

Ada: Yeah, I think the documentation is actually a really good example. We had an idea of who the person on the other side of everything was like, who's going to actually be trying to execute these commands. And then when we got it in front of people, we had, you know, a lot of questions about… you needing to run Docker for example, but it doesn't explain where you should go to install it or if there's any particular version or anything [00:23:00] like that.

Those kinds of questions really led us back to understanding who the audience is and making sure that the user experience is improved, not just for this proof of stake upgrade, but also going forward into the future, helping us internally establish the tech level of where we expect our users to be.

That validators and nominators would be at different levels technically was one thing that we knew going into it, but seeing exactly where those differences and user challenges were, and and being able to find the sweet spot of, this is technical enough that validators have all the information that they need here, but it's also explained in a clear way.

Also that people who don't care to run nodes, and want to nominate instead, are also guided clearly through that process. Finding that sweet spot is something that we never could have done without a [00:24:00] large audience. And the feedback in there was definitely invaluable.

Technical tests - What did we learn?

Toby: Yeah, amazing. On the technical implementation side, I know also, with the large number of validators which joined the network, and then increasing the active set, how did those kinds of tests impact the performance and what sort of takeaways did we take from all that?

Ada: Yeah, so it's hard to predict exactly what the user count or what the validator count will be in mainnet. So we wanted to have a good idea of the kind of possible ranges we could run. So if we have 200 validators, is this the metric that we want, right? Do we want this many maximum nominators? How does it impact performance?

So one of the things that I and the whole team was [00:25:00] blown away by, was the user engagement. We were able to launch with 50 validators in the active set and see that we're consistently hitting a 15 second block time. That's the goal. We're constantly checking to see if fork reorganization is happening as expected and everything's still reaching consensus. Also testing throughput via loan transactions that we had running, to simulate real world performance.

Finally, being able to grow that number of active validators actively, and watch it correctly bring in a new set of validators, run new elections. That the nominated state is being allocated properly. We're seeing that all these counts are going up and still working. Rewards are being distributed etc.

That was ultimately the biggest benefit - being able to go all [00:26:00] the way up to 200 validators. For reference, Polkadot has 297 validators for their entire chain, including all their parachains and everything.

So being able to go up to 200 validators, have true elections where you are rotating nodes, and seeing it all working without running into a wall when we put it into real world production, that gave us a ton of confidence. We were able to kind of stretch our legs so to speak.

Community feedback - what did we learn?

Toby: Yeah, totally. Were there any areas where the community really picked up on something which we maybe wouldn't have seen by ourselves, which really helped us improve the protocol in time for the mainnet launch sometime later in this quarter?

Ada: Yeah, [00:27:00] definitely. Interaction with the command line interface has now vastly improved directly due to user feedback. Stuff like, “Hey, this command isn't explained well enough. This command needs more documentation. What are these different parameters requirements?” That sort of feedback has been very helpful.

And also the staking dashboard. It's a fairly complex interface with a lot of different ways that you could navigate through it. A lot of different user flows. So it's very difficult for an internal team to exercise every possible combination of inputs and outputs. Getting feedback on even, [00:28:00] even the smallest things, such as, “hey, when I type in a particular sequence of numbers, It goes into a state where it doesn't work as expected until I close it and reopen it.” helps us identify those small edge cases.

That feedback is key to delivering a really polished product, which is what we want to deliver and that's what people expect, so having the opportunity to get all that feedback and address it means we’re going to have a much better and smoother Mainnet release with better documentation etc. Just all around the feedback's been great

Toby: Totally, [00:29:00] I I can totally understand that and just like explaining stuff a bit more clearly. We'll basically be spending most of the next weeks, not revising fundamental things, but rather just making sure all the edges are nice and smooth, explaining stuff, making sure that we make the validation process as easy as possible.

Because at the end of the day, the more accessible it is, the more people can join, and the more decentralized the network is. That’s kind of the whole point of going to Nominated Proof of Stake anyway, having so many more participants in the network.Compare it to Proof of Work before, where you have to buy a GPU, you have to be technically literate, have some serious know how, etc.

By really simplifying it and making sure we make it nice and smooth, we can get as many people on board, secure the network, and help grow this real world asset protocol. Yep, absolutely. [00:30:00]

Testnet Bugs - what did we learn?

Toby: Were there also some bugs in the search which got identified which are now being resolved?

Ada: I mean, primarily, the things that we've seen were dashboard related. That's definitely been the primary feedback area, in addition to the docs.

What’s so cool, again going back to the community, is seeing not only bug reports come in, but pull requests coming in on different repositories. I recognize some of the usernames in the audience from various things that have happened. I won't call anyone out because I'm sure I'll miss somebody.

But, [00:31:00] that sense of community, that everyone is trying to achieve this great product together. That really encourages the dev team too. When we get a sense of the actual people on the other side of what we're building. It definitely encourages you to put in that extra 10%. To make sure that everything is super polished.

Toby: Totally. I can think of a couple members of the community who've kind of been super helpful to me as well. I know I mentioned it before but, yeah I just want to say thank you again.

Legal reminder, no token price discussions

Toby: [00:33:00] All right. Well, Alan, is there anything you want to add to the end of that?

Alan: Just closing out I want to say a couple of small things. I know there are talks in our Discord regarding the token price. Just wanted to reiterate and share again that we don't address questions about token pricing.

It's a free open market. So therefore, how the price kind of reacts, the best that we can do is continue to build and do our best. Build a great testnet, have a successful mainnet etc. But ultimately, we're not controlling the price per se so that's why we can’t address it.

QuestnN learn and earn launch

Another thing, we had a survey and a poll on twitter where we asked what our community wanted to learn more about and the answer was real [00:34:00] world assets. So tomorrow we will be launching a new quest on the QuestN platform where you get to read our latest blog article from Toby here himself. Learn it and absorb it and then there will be a few quiz questions where you can win some CTC prizes.

Toby: Yep exactly, we've got some quests where you can earn some treasure. All you need to do is learn and earn. It's amazing. And that will be dropping tomorrow at 5pm KST Which is, if I'm not mistaken Uh, 8am UTC.

Concluding remarks

We've also got another Town Hall coming next [00:35:00] month. We haven't decided the topic yet, but maybe we can get some amazing guests on. Maybe you have someone in mind you'd like to invite on. Maybe make a suggestion in the chat if you want anyone on. I will do my best to bring them.

Okay, can I just say a huge thank you once again to our amazing audience. Thank you to Ada for joining us. Thank you to Alan. That’s it for this month. Join us next time.

About Creditcoin

Creditcoin is the world’s leading real-world asset infrastructure chain, with over 3 million credit transactions recorded to-date. By matching borrowers, lenders and investors on-chain, the protocol is paving the way for a new generation of globally interoperable credit markets.

Having integrated with various fintech lenders and connecting them directly to global DeFi investors, the Creditcoin network has helped thousands of borrowers, businesses, and investors secure capital financing, build credit history, and make global RWA investments.

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