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Bluzelle Announces Validator Program (Swarm of Duty II)

Thursday, 03 December 2020 08:00 AM

Bluzelle

SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / December 3, 2020 / As Bluzelle progresses on its March to Mainnet, we are launching our validator program for it. In May to July, we ran "Swarm of Duty", Bluzelle's first incentivized testnet program for developers, token holders and validators. The goal was for various stakeholders in the Bluzelle ecosystem to familiarize themselves with the token economics and learn about staking on the network through gamification. It was an outstanding success with more than 200 validators competing for highest uptime. With the help of our community validators, we were able to upgrade our testnet with 4 iterations, and identified a critical bug from Tendermint. In total 1.4 million BLZ was distributed to the participants.

As we approach production mainnet, we are launching Swarm of Duty II, a whole new episode to drive utility and storage capacity of the Bluzelle network. The more capacity we have the more customers we can support and the more BLZ fees earned by validators.

The Tiers

To accomplish this goal we have established a three tiered validator program that matches our army theme of Swarm of Duty and BLZ Soldiers. Each group has a different role and set of responsibilities. It's designed so we can have everyone participate from the token holder who wants to be more involved to those experienced technologists who can build for us. We will provide support and education so people can actually move up the ranks by proving themselves.

Special Forces (Tier 3)

This tier is for the elites. They are tech savvy, build products, have devops and developers. In addition to fees and commissions, this group is more locked into the BLZ network and does additional work for which they will earn more and get paid more from Bluzelle.

Armory (Tier 2)

Professional Validators who run operations, allow for many to delegate, and they earn fees and commissions.

Infantry (Tier 1)

This tier is for anyone to easily spin up a node with their own device or from the cloud. Tier 1 Validators do very little work for the network and only provide storage. This tier will launch later when we have enough Tier 2 and Tier 3 validators. Tier 1 validators are there to easily expand the network size of Bluzelle.

Delegations

Special Forces Call to Arms

  • Oracle Data Feeds: Provide consolidated data feeds for our oracle product. Specifically, act as a source of data for our oracle's feeders by consolidating data from various sources -- it is up to you as the consolidator to choose reliable sources. The oracles need access to reliable data using friendly API's. It is a huge benefit if important data feeds (sports, financial markets, weather, etc) can be consolidated into a consumable service that Bluzelle oracle feeders can use as one of their sources. Feeds can ultimately have an ongoing revenue stream, contingent on quality of service. Note that a data feed is not the same as an oracle feeder. Feeders (listed below) consumer a data feed, and are the middlemen, taking data from a data feed, and feeding it into the oracalized blockchain.
  • # of participants: Having as many of these data feeds as possible is ideal. Each such consolidator should aim to have at least 10 quality data points that they can supply to feeders.
  • Prize Range: Expect to pay between $200 to $2,000 a month for such services. We would make these sources available to both Bluzelle's own corporate feeders as well as feeders run by the public. Payment would depend on quality of data points offered, accuracy, scalability, support, and frequency of data updates.
  • Oracle Feeders: Run a feeder, consuming data from data feeds and feeding these data points into the oracalized blockchain. A feeder will run under the authority of a validator, making calls to the Bluzelle Oracle module to "feed" in data points the feeder has received from its data feeds. Each such data point fed in can be considered a vote on the behalf of the feeder and the weight of the vote is directly proportional to the validator's total delegated stake in the blockchain. Data points that are fed in and accepted by the oracle result in rewards for the validator and its delegates, while data points that are rejected (statistical outliers, for example) can result in the validator and its delegates being slashed. Running a feeder is optional but serves as a low-effort means for a validator to generate additional revenue for itself and is an effective "bonus" to attract delegators. Feeders are critical to the Bluzelle Oracle service.
    • # of participants: Having as many feeders as possible. There is almost no such thing as too many feeders. We want to crowdsource data as much as possible.
    • Prize Range: Micro-payments would be made on an ongoing basis to validators and their delegators for quality data fed into the oracle. On the other hand, poor or intentionally bad data can result in slashing against the validator and its delegators. The micro-payments will vary based on how many data points are fed in by the feeder, the frequency that data is fed in with, and the quality of the data being fed in.
  • Block Explorers: We have been using Big Dipper, but would like to open up the opportunity for other block explorers. There are many areas of improvement including the ability to see DB-specific data or oracalized data, on our chain, in a more elegant way. Having variety is also great for the customer. It is expected that if you participate in this, you provide Bluzelle with the source code and ability to deploy your block explorer. The IP would be open source to the Bluzelle community, free for anyone to deploy for the public chains or for their own private chains.
  • # of submissions: We would like to see 3-4 "competitors" to Big Dipper. These could be generalized in nature or some could be specifically about focus on our DB (whilst still being a block explorer).
  • Prize Range: Expect to pay from $5,000 to $20,000 and upwards. This is HIGHLY contingent on the quality and feature set of what is being built, and what value it brings to the community. Something like Big Dipper would earn a large prize, for example.
  • Monitoring tools: Critical so that the burden of running a validator is GREATLY reduced. Running a validator is hard work. We want this to be made super easy and streamlined. Not only should it be easy for someone to setup a validator (a separate challenge below), but for validators that are running, we seek services that validator groups could subscribe to or instantiate (like running on their own infrastructure), to keep automatic tabs on their validators. These could be paid web services that one logs into, provides information on your validator endpoints, and then allows the monitoring service to monitor your endpoints for downtime. Or it could be simple technologies a validator could deploy that monitor their own validator instances. Downtime can result in jailtime, and being jailed means being slashed, which is a costly penalty for any validator.
  • # of submissions: It is a pretty open category, but probably 5-10. This could change if people come up with submissions in areas that were not expected.
  • Prize Range: Expect to pay from $500 to $7,500 and upwards. Also, if the service is a paid one (where validators have to subscribe), the person who built the service can expect a revenue stream that is theirs to keep.
  • Deployment wizards: Make it super easy for us to "close the deal" with hot validator prospects, or to simply maximize the conversion rate from would-be validator to actual validator. Make it very simple to sign up to whatever cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc), pay, and get a validator, buy BLZ, and self-stake your BLZ to your own new validator. This is all a lengthy and complex process. Let's make it one click. Allow the user to select how many validators, how many sentries, what types of sentries, the types of pruning, peering, etc. The user should not have to do much with code or command lines - all wizards and control panels. Bonus for support for "blockchain load balancing". Using this new terminology loosely, we seek automated ways a validator could spin up (or down) new validators and sentries based on dynamic changes in the operating environment. So for example, if a blockchain needs more voting power to maintain decentralization (maybe some validators were lost), a validator group can seize this opportunity and spin up more nodes. If a new zone appears (once IBC is supported), a validator group could easily add new nodes to that new zone.
  • # of submissions: 2-3
  • Prize Range: $5,000 to $15,000
  • Delegation wizards: Wizards and front-ends that allow delegators to delegate with validators. Special forces validators possibly already have great tools to do that with their own validators. We can see that when we goto websites like https://www.cosmostation.io/. We want delegation tools so that any validator in our ecosystem has at their disposal, simple ways to onboard delegators. These tools could be landing pages and portal apps that allow laymen to quickly delegate. They could be tools that a validator can deploy to make it easy for them to get delegators. Bonus if people without even having BLZ can very easily (in one swoop) go from having USDT or ETH or BTC to converting to BLZ and staking... all in one step. Possibly even just start with USD, although fiat is contentious.
  • # of submissions: 3-4
  • Prize Range: $3,000 to $10,000
  • Kubernetes Ops: Bring up a test Bluzelle chain using Docker and Kubernetes. Demo being able to have a Master Node and Worker Nodes (essentially the validators) in Kubernetes and using the autoscale feature to add new worker nodes (validators) to the cluster. This could possibly be a whole new testnet deployed by special forces, or be a setup where special forces demonstrate their own ability to spin up and run their own validators and sentries on our networks (testnet and/or mainnet) with Kubernetes. Key is to have a sort of "one click to add validator or sentry" mechanism. Make scaling super simple.
  • # of submissions: 1. Maybe 2.
  • Prize Range: $4,000 to $8,000
  • Smart Contracts: Bring up a test Bluzelle chain that supports smart contracts via CosmWasm and/or Ethermint and demo being able to deploy a token smart contract or some other useful smart contract, on the chain. Bonus points if the Bluzelle DB is used. The idea here is a module that can be dropped into a Bluzelle zone and now, that zone supports smart contracts. This could be Ethermint (even off the shelf) or CosmWasm, or something else not mentioned here. Special forces could demo this on their private network, or as part of one of Bluzelle's own networks.
  • # of submissions: 1 Ethermint submission, 1 CosmWasm submission
  • Prize Range: $3,000 to $7,000
  • IBC: Implement an IBC version of the Bluzelle Network. IBC stands for Inter-Blockchain Communication, and allows blockchains to inter-operate. Bluzelle has launched with just one zone (blockchain). We need to be able to horizontally scale by adding zones at will. These zones talk to each other via IBC. We also want to be able to add special zones like perhaps an Ethermint Zone and other speciality zones. We also need to be able to connect with other Cosmos chains. We'd like to see Bluzelle testnets being run with multiple zones and possibly also talking to Ethermint zones. Bonus for the Bluzelle client libraries to be able to work with multiple zones.
  • # of submissions: 1
  • Prize Range: $6,000 - $12,000
  • Open: This is a general category that we have left open for special forces to get creative in areas that do not fit into the categories we have already mentioned. The community can share their ideas on tools and technologies, and get quick feedback from the Bluzelle team on the viability of their ideas. We have this category specifically because we do expect some excellent products and services that won't fit into the aforementioned categories.
    • # of submissions: No limit.
    • Prize Range: TBD, on a case by case basis, by the Bluzelle Team. The special forces team should get approval from our Bluzelle team prior to development.

Dan [email protected]+972-545-464-238

SOURCE: Bluzelle

Topic:
Product Announcements
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