Celo's incentivized testnet had several goals including building a validator community, cultivating operational expertise, and distributing rewards. Key design choices included a manual faucet process, step function for rewards over multiple phases, and challenges to encourage participation. Lessons learned included the need for around the clock support, security audits as a useful tool, establishing fair adjudication processes, keeping players engaged even if behind, and having contingency plans for failures.

1. Always Have a Fire Extinguisher
and Other Lessons from
The Celo Incentivized Testnet

2. Build a financial system
that creates the conditions
for prosperity - for everyone.
Celo’s Mission

4. Agenda 1. Goals of an Incentivized Testnet
2. Key Design Choices
3. Lessons Learned

5. Timeline
Feb 26Oct 29 Jan 14Dec 4 Dec 11 Feb 10
Phase 1.1
Phase 1.0
Stake Off
Begins
Phase 2.0 Phase 3.0
Warm-up Attestation Challenge
Master Validator
Challenge
Announce
Buddy Program
Competition
Starts
Competition
Ends
Jan 10
Network
Reset

6. Goals of Celo’s Incentivized Testnet
Build a Validator
community
Cultivate operational
expertise
Distribute Celo Gold to
the community
Improve Celo’s design
and discover issues

7. Non-Goals of Celo’s Incentivized Testnet
Stress-test under
malicious validator
conditions
Simulate realistic
crypto-economics

8. Key Design Choices
- Manual faucet process for sybil resistance
- Step function for rewards
- Three distinct phases
- Warmup
- Operational
- Audit
- A number of extra challenges
- Attestations challenge
- Master validator challenge
- Mentorship bonus
- Community prizes
- Security audits

9. People are Generous
- Even in a competition, people want to
help each other out and build bonds
- Provide a forum for participants to gather
and discuss issues, solutions, and ideas
- Encourage and reward active community
members
- Possibly participants to nominate each
other for rewards

10. celomap.io by WarFollowsMe

11. Testnets Don’t Sleep
- Our participants came from around the
world, with a large portion in Russia and
East Asia
- Supporting the network and community at
all hours is challenging
- On-call rotation is needed for both
engineers and communication teams

12. Audits are a Useful Tool
- Security audits were a well-received feature
- Great way to cultivate security
best-practices in newer validators
- Provided a way to reward operational
security expertise
- Choosing a list of criteria is hard

13. Being the Referee is Hard
- Enforcing the rules fairly and in a way that
benefits the objectives is hard
- Balance is needed between detail and
flexibility when writing and enforcing rules
- Someone will always be unhappy
- Establish a clear process for adjudication
before the competition begins
- A slow response creates additional issues

14. Keep Players in the Game
- In the Stake Off, many players were
effectively eliminated by the end of Phase 2
- Creating a game design that keeps players in
the game, even when they are behind, will
get a better result

15. Have a Fire Extinguisher
- Doom will come for your testnet
- Including a warm-up phase can help shake
out the first round of bugs
- Have a plan for what to do in the event of
catastrophic failure, including network stalls
- Make sure to have monitoring that doesn’t
go down with your network

16. @polychainlabs on Twitter

17. Thanks for joining
@CeloOrg | @CeloDevs
Build — celo.org/build
Discuss — chat.celo.org