The highly-anticipated, industry first adversarial testnet was launched just minutes ago. As either a spectator or a “Tribute”, the public channel where games mechanics are discussed can be found on Riot.

TL;DR

There were close to 300 Tributes, all of whom are allowed to participate in the game.

This is hitting the upper limits of what Tendermint can handle and it is unknown how Tendermint starts to fail at this scale.

Timeouts are going to be increased but it is also unknown how they interact with 2X the anticipated validator set.

We expect < 300 validators to enter GoS at the start. Latecomers are simply “punished” by having less voting power relative to early starters who benefited from high inflationary stake .

Mission Statement

The game is meant to test the correctness and stability of the candidate software that the Cosmos Hub will be run on, i.e. Tendermint Core, Cosmos-SDK, and Gaia. The game is also meant to test the boundaries of cartel behavior and extract extra-protocol measures for detecting and mitigating unprescribed, Byzantine activities on the mainnet.

Exploring the Unknown-Unknowns

There are many unknowns to launching a BFT-based Proof-of-Stake blockchain in production. Arbitrary failures could occur, and Tendermint can account for up to a certain threshold of such failures. Less understood failure modes are the costs and effects of Byzantine attacks on a live PoS network. No decentralized BFT PoS protocol of this scale has been tested prior (and proven successful at being censorship-resistant).

Primary objectives for GoS