Update (Apr 7, 5pm PT) - Since the original update, the Light Client challenge has absolutely blown up. Within a few hours of the original post, the DevOps team was able to bring new RPC infrastructure online, at which point we saw over 130k light clients join the network. The faucet has still been presenting issues for some users - we’re re-upping the faucet every few hours to make sure there are enough funds to mint NFTs. We’re also aware of cases of Sign In with Twitter failing for some users, and are working to push updates that will enable everyone to complete all stages of the Light Client challenge as soon as possible.
Hello, I wanted to share the latest update around Avail’s current Light Client challenge.
Our goal with this challenge was to bring in as many light clients as possible to stress test the network. As a result, we’ve seen over 200k+ unique wallet logins in the past 3 days. At peak times, we’ve had 50k light client operators on the network at once, and 350k online in the last 12 hours.
Our infrastructure has been pushed to its limits - in addition to the thousands of participants, our RPC endpoints were also slammed yesterday as over 1.5 billion requests hit our infra. That said, outside of the DDoS, the demand has been welcome. We’ve been wanting to push our light client network to the limits for some time now (we teased the Light Client challenge for months before finally launching). And we’ve learned a lot in the past few days as we’ve dealt with the enormous network usage.
Thanks to this unprecedented demand, we’ll be able to leverage this learning into our final testnet. We’re planning to deploy this final Testnet with all the learnings we’ve gathered from the Clash of Nodes, and from this Light Client challenge in particular.
The heavy traffic is resulting in degraded performance on Goldberg. We’re currently working to optimize the performance of the testnet, and we’ll have a full post-mortem and breakdown of the learnings later.
A note that we will make sure that everyone that participated is entered in the drawing to win rewards and their progress so far remains valid. We’ll be fully accounting for the downtime light clients have faced when it comes time to issue rewards, and draw challenge winners as we had planned to.
So thank you for joining our community and helping us optimize Avail. This campaign has turned into the largest in Avail’s history, and we appreciate everyone’s support. We’re excited to share more reward details as the challenge comes to a close.
Best,
Jake and the rest of the Avail team
