In the Free TON community, a large-scale Rust Cup tournament to test a new validator node has begun. The main prize fund is 60.7 million TON Crystal tokens (about $36.4 million at the time of writing).
As described on the description of the tournament, Rust Cup is a competition among Free TON validators who, over the course of a month, will perform their duties in a stress-test mode, withstanding network restarts, node failures, errors, protocol changes and other adverse conditions laid out by the organizers.
With Rust Cup, the Free TON community aims to test a new validator node written in Rust. The new version will increase speed and make the Free TON blockchain more stable compared with the original C++-based client.
In the Free TON ecosystem, validators operate DePools — smart contracts in which staking tokens are locked. Validators configure and manage DePools, earning a fee — a small share of the new coins that are automatically added to the DePool as a reward for validating the network. The bulk of rewards goes to independent token holders who join a validator’s DePool to earn income from staking. DePools are used to verify the registry and to produce new blocks of the Free TON network.
At the same time, via the “slashing” function, the Free TON network automatically disciplines validators for violations of operating conditions (for example, a short offline period of the validator node), taking a portion of staking rewards or tokens from the DePool. The extreme conditions of Rustnet will pose a real slashing threat to Rust Cup participants.
At the start of Rust Cup, each participant will receive 4 million testnet tokens in the DePool smart contract of the Rustnet version. Winners will be determined by the number of coins remaining in participants’ DePools at the end of the tournament. It is expected that there will be 200 winners: prizes for each place ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 TON Crystal tokens.
The prize place depends on the number of coins in the validator’s DePool on the testnet Rustnet remaining at the end of the competition. Prize tokens will be credited to the DePools of the winning validators on the main Free TON network. They will be locked for 2 years, but all this time they will participate in staking, i.e., providing validators with a regular income.
In addition to the prize fund, the DePools of Rust Cup winners will offer higher returns — for both external investors and the validators themselves compared with the other DePools in the main Free TON network.
Thus, DePool investors will receive from 2% to 20% annualised yield on their contributions in the DePool. The level of return will depend on the term for which they lock their coins in the DePool (from 6 to 48 months). For validators, there will be a progressive management-fee schedule, paid for managing the DePool (from 5.29% to 20% per year) depending on the management term (also from 6 to 48 months). For a detailed calculation see the tournament description page.
In addition, at the end of the competition participants will attempt to set a new world record for the throughput of layer-1 blockchain protocols under operating conditions.
As noted, in the Free TON network, launched in May 2020, a meritocratic model for issuing native Crystal tokens is used — through regular competitions that also aim to solve development tasks for the project. Recently, a competition was held to develop a blockchain service for auditing elections in Guatemala.
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