Get Ready for Stake Wars!

Hey Stake Warriors,

We’ve been getting ramped up on our side for an epic space opera of a validator competition. We hope your excited! Many of you have sent some questions from and wanted to clarify in one place some of the details of the competition. 

Here’s the biggest one so far:

WE ARE ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH DATE AT SFBW. (You can’t accrue points for submitting issues before this date!)

Other points of importance:

1. In order to get points, you will need to submit an issue on GitHub for each problem you find and each test you run. (https://github.com/nearprotocol/stakewars)
   1. GET STARTED: You can all get the basic points for running a node (or nodes) and running an interesting benchmark. 
   2. Since we hope all of you will do this, we’ve created an issue for this in the main repo: https://github.com/nearprotocol/stakewars/issues/4
2. In addition, you will have to sign a program and token agreement for the reward of tokens based on points. This will happen at some point during the competition. Stay tuned.
3. You CAN get multiple rewards for running multiple nodes, BUT only for giving us valuable information about problems in our system. It’s still dependent on the severity of the bug or the value of the test you’ve created.
   For example…
   1. If you create a bunch of nodes and then just leave them up. No points.
   2. If you create a bunch of nodes to test a delegation contract you created, very valuable. Much points. Very wow.
4. We’re not making it public what the translation from points to tokens is. This is mainly because we don’t want to commit to specific numbers up front and be wrong. The point system allows us to create weights for bugs and tests. Our goal is to do this fairly and equitably. No funny business.
   Here’s how points work: 
   1. You submit issues based on what you run into while attempting to run nodes to the GitHub repo identified above
   2. We (a rotating panel of reviewers) assign points to whoever submitted based on the severity of bugs
   3. The identity of the submitter must be associated with the submission by the end of the comp to be valid. Otherwise no points.
   4. We update the leaderboard at least every week, but it may be more frequently based on submissions.
5. Here are our goals for this competition. We want…
   1. You to break our system in a way that we can permanently fix it!
   2. You to build things that solve your own problems as future validators on the network
   3. To put the last year or so of hard work in front of our community to try it out
   4. To find glaring flaws in our systems, designs and code
      

In short, we’re relying on you! Please spend your time trying to break our system, not the rules.  Welcome to NEAR, we’re listening. 🙂

The NEAR Protocol Team