I am pleased to announce that Decred testnet is going live today, Wednesday, January 27th. Decred testnet is intended to be used as a sandbox for testing the various features and behavior of Decred. Interested parties are now free to experiment on testnet with:

Sending and receiving transactions

PoW mining software, e.g. cgminer

PoS mining with dcrwallet

Writing or porting software for Decred

dcrd – the chain daemon

dcrwallet – the wallet daemon

dcrctl – the command line RPC tool

cgminer – mining software

We are releasing the following binaries:

The dcrd, dcrwallet and dcrctl binaries are provided for both 32 and 64-bit versions of the following OSes: Windows, OS X, Linux, DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. CGminer is provided as a binary for 32 and 64-bit Windows and Linux.

Source code for cgminer has already been released. Binaries for CGminer are provided as a matter of convenience.

Additional documentation has been added to the wiki on the following topics:

Block header specification

Solo stake/PoS mining

GPU mining

Verifying binaries

The block header specification will allow for integration with mining and other software. Solo stake mining information is provided so that users can get setup to mine PoS on testnet before mining PoS on mainnet, and GPU mining documentation is provided for users interested in PoW mining with GPUs. We encourage everyone who is capable to mine PoS at launch of mainnet since it will increase the security of the network, so it is best to try this process out on testnet prior to mainnet launch.

SECURITY NOTICE: The hashes (SHA256) of the zips/tarballs are listed here, and this file is signed with the Decred release key. We encourage you to verify the hash of your zip/tarball matches the one shown in the file and check the signature on the file using GPG/PGP. For the security-conscious, we recommend these binaries be run in a VM or on a VPS.

If any bugs are encountered when running the various binaries, we ask that you create an issue for them under the corresponding project on GitHub. In the event that no serious bugs are found during the next several days of testnet operation, we will be turning Decred mainnet on 1 week from today, Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016.

Happy testnet-ing!