Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond Network, wants to improve his blockchain by paying the people who will manage to destroy it.
The Battle of the Knots has already begun
Mincu, who founded the Transylvanian network, is conducting a campaign to find developers who can respond to his request. Nearly two years after first revealing its proof-of-stake security sharding protocol in a technical white paper, Elrond's 24-person developer team will offer up to $ 60.000 to successful node-runners to wreak havoc in their code.
Mincu's goal with the so-called "Battle of the Nodes: Onchained" campaign is, of course, for well-intentioned experts to expose any bugs, attack vectors, vulnerabilities and critical breakpoints on Elrond before unauthorized hackers arrive.
This exciting testnet will demonstrate if the network is ready for mainnet launch, he said. "When we would have spent 15 days without interruption of the network despite this type of attack and stress test, at that point we will know that Elrond is finally ready and efficient - robust enough to go live, ”said Mincu.
Elrond's 15-day timer will reset when someone manages to tamper with the network. Nobody has done it yet: Elrond's protocol has so far thwarted three attacks. The computer scientists who applied in this mission have however discovered many lower-level bugs that deserve to be solved, and this is enough to keep the knots in conflict for a slice of the $ 60.000 loot, paid in the ERD token.
"Every day we discover some things that we can improve by validators," said Mincu. "We usually do one or two outings a day," patching up the bugs, transparency issues and other sore spots that the 1.700 knots participating in the size competition manage to reveal.
Not just money and bugs
But the effort isn't just about the money and the bugs, Mincu said - it's also a competition for mainnet validation slots. About 34% of Elrond's 1.500 initial nodes (500 for each fragment of execution and another 500 for metachain) will go in part to Investors "Trust" who contributed in the hunt for defects.
This also gives Elrond the ability to flex its network specifications. Until last Tuesday, the blockchain - which has a "divide and conquer" sharding mechanism with a consensus that randomly assigns validation work to members of the two sharding groups - was publishing a transaction rate per second (TPS) of 712 .
Mincu claimed that Elrond can manage 10.000 TPS at full capacity. The 1.700 knots far surpass Mincu's original showing of 700-800 participants when it announced the knot battle to get the bounty, with just one week's notice.
All these enthusiastic blockchain breakers are potential developers who can contribute to the project over time, said Mincu.
