Harmony Open Staking: Towards Launch
By: Li Jiang
Tags: Staking, Transparency, Mainnet, Github, Community

Friends & community:

We are excited to share our detailed roadmap to launching open staking on Harmony. Whether you are a validator, staking service, or delegator, we look forward to engaging you (get in touch: staking@harmony.one). After fully testing on our Pangaea testnet, we’ll launch open staking on mainnet.

Above all, we emphasize fast execution and delivery along with radical transparency. Our CEO Stephen regularly provides live Periscope updates and we share weekly videos on YouTube.

To launch on mainnet, we are working through several phases of security, performance and stress testing on our testnets. Rather than giving a general timeline or date, we openly track specific issues and fixes in our Github.

Here’s the summary of our Open Staking Testnet phases:

Pangaea 0: for close internal testing

P1: open for 100 outside collaborators with 90% uptime

P2: open to 200 external for attacks with bounty rewards

P3: identical to mainnet configuration with some testnet token to mainnet conversion

M1: mainnet launch to 1,000 nodes with 320 external initially

M2: future rolling upgrade of the mainnet as needed

✅ P0: Pangaea 0

We launched Pangaea 0 on February 5th with 3 shards and 60 total nodes. This network had 30 external slots for a close group of Pangaea Ops team members and ran for a month. It needed to achieve 1-day crash-free and served as the staging grounds for launching Pangaea 1.

✅ P1 (Pangaea 1): outside team, UX flow, keep data /p1

We launched Pangaea 1 on March 4th with 4 shards and 200 nodes (100 external). We onboarded over 110 Pangaea volunteers, foundational nodes, TGI friends, and our business team and remote team for testing.

Our exit criteria for p1 is to achieve 90% uptime (only 144 mins of downtime/day) with 100 people participating as validators with 200 delegators making 1,000 delegations.

Each day at 10am Pacific Time, we will push a rolling upgrade of the network with the goal of full upgrade in 2 hours while keeping the state.

Other p1 milestones are:

50% unit test coverage, 3 integration tests, 3 selenium tests

Monitoring all networks on /status and tracking user engagement on Google Analytics

at least 2-day crash-free while using a separate network for load tests (DNS nodes)

We share all Github issues in real time on harmony.one/p1

After p1 criteria are met, we will launch Pangaea 2 with 400 slots in 4 shards (200 external).

We will open the network to technical hacking and stress tests with bug bounties. During this phase, we will engage the full Pangaea community, staking service partners, hacker communities (i.e. Gitcoin, HackerOne), and non-crypto developers to fully attack and test the network.

Exit criteria are:

Data Features: APR, median stake amount, validator stake per key

Rolling upgrade in 30 mins, restart in 1 hour

Realistic allocation/economics, full shard recovery, hard fork simulation

95% uptime (only 72 mins downtime/day)

at least 2-day bug-free, same network stress tests

12 days of network exposure to malicious attacks

✅ P3 (Pangaea 3): incentivized delegator games, mainnet config /p3

In the last testing phase, Pangaea 3, we will set the network configuration to be the same as mainnet with 1,000 nodes on 4 shards, with 320 external seats.

We will continue to incentivize hacking and convert some of the block rewards (testnet tokens) into mainnet ONE tokens with real value. At this stage, we plan to resolve all security issues with our code audit partner Peckshield.

The network should achieve 99% uptime (14 mins downtime/day), no restart with 80% unit test coverage, 10 integration tests, 10 selenium tests. The network should run at least 3 days bug-free to move forward with the Mainnet Launch.

Once we finish the 3 phases of Pangaea testing, we’ll launch open staking on mainnet.

The initial mainnet launch will retain the current configuration of 4 shards x (170 internals + 80 externals) totalling 1000 slots with 320 external. After mainnet launch, we will continuously add features using rolling upgrades.