From CASI to Mainnet Launch

On January 15th 2020, NuCypher officially announced its Incentivized Testnet and challenged the public to Come and Stake It (CASI) and rise against the Silicon Valley merchants of infrastructure.

CASI kicked off on January 20th and comprised of 3 (eventually 4) Phases designed to test various parts of the network and prepare Stakers/Node Operators for a seamless transition to mainnet. For their efforts, high performing participants would be rewarded with a mainnet allocation of  NU tokens.

As a team, we were extremely excited for CASI since it represented a culmination of years of hard work, dating back to the initial publication of our Technical Whitepaper in June 2017, and the final milestone before our mainnet launch.

The team enjoyed engaging with our staking community, both experienced stakers of other networks and rookies. With representatives across 29 countries, the participants did not disappoint and enabled us to execute one of the largest and most diverse testnet staking operations in the blockchain space.

CASI Statistics

• Over 1400 unique wallet addresses which staked over 3.1B Goerli NU in our StakingEscrow contract
• Phase 1 (Core Staking & Node Operations): 645 qualified participants
• Phase 2 (Advanced Staking & Node Operations): 598 qualified participants
• Phase 3 (WorkLock Token Distribution Mechanism): over 3,200 Goerli ETH contributed to WorkLock during the bidding phase (each bid was limited to 5-10 ETH) - 569 qualified participants
• Phase 4 (Updated WorkLock Token Distribution Mechanism (part 2) with learnings from Phase 3) - 554 qualified participants
• nucypher codebase
  • 174 new issues filed
  • 85 issues closed
  • 131 proposed PRs
  • 124 merged PRs
  • 14 upgraded versions

Such was the high level of engagement that we eventually decided to increase the allocation of NU tokens for the task-based Phase qualifiers from 0.5% mainnet NU tokens which would have funded at most 333 participants to 1% (or proportional to whatever the final number of qualifiers is) which will fund at most 666 qualifiers.

Contributor Phase

We were also impressed by the quality of technical contributions that included node management and monitoring tools, web staking UIs with Web3 wallet integrations, and major contributions directly to our core codebase. Keep an eye out for follow-up announcements highlighting some of these contributions!‌

Attention!

Please note that if you haven't already filled out the Incentivized Testnet Participant Form and signed the CoinList Participation Agreement, it is very important that you do so ASAP (May 20th deadline). Make sure to use the same email on both forms.

• Incentivized Testnet Participant Form
• CoinList Participation Agreement

NOTE: This is not the KYC step, which will happen once everyone has signed the participation agreements and we have a final determination on the number of qualifiers. All prize recipients will be required to complete KYC/AML checks as well as sign relevant tax forms, depending on their jurisdiction.

Finally...

Thanks to all of you who have contributed to CASI via running nodes, asking questions, reporting bugs,  submitting pull requests, building tooling, improving our documentation, commenting on research topics, and providing feedback.

We would like to especially congratulate all of the prize recipients!

The overall participation in CASI has exceeded our expectations and you all have been integral in fortifying the NuCypher Network as we push towards our mainnet launch!