One-Year Testnet Anniversary Retrospective

Over the past year, Coda’s Testnet has grown from a small group of 65 community members to a cohort of over 850 hailing from all over the world. In fact, since launch the Coda testnet has experienced 1200% growth in cumulative members. Thanks to our active community, the Coda testnet is now one of the largest layer 1 testnets by peer count for non-ICO-ed protocols! The recently launched Genesis Token Program, to set up a strong community of block producers for Coda’s mainnet launch, has also seen robust activity. There are 850 Genesis token grants still available, for those who would like to get involved!

Global Community As a protocol that values decentralization and access, Coda currently has participants from all over the world making up our highly distributed and global community. The Coda community hails from over 180 different countries, with representation from countries like Russia, the UK, the US, China, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, India, and Germany – just to name a few.

For fun, we asked the community to send us music they like to listen to while participating in testnet, so we could create a global playlist of songs enjoyed by Coda members. The two playlists feature songs from a variety of countries; give them a listen!

• “Jam” Playlist
• “Focus” Playlist

To celebrate the 1-year testnet anniversary, we also asked the community, including Testnet participants and the o1Labs team, to share their favorite Coda testnet memories:

(For more of community members’ favorite Coda Testnet memories, click here.)

We even had a community member share his awesome journey – how he first discovered Coda, to learning the technology from scratch, to ranking highly on a testnet release, to ultimately being selected as a Genesis Founding Member:

“I came as a newbie and did not have any basic knowledge before about running Testnet, operating nodes, and producing blocks. I remember I was guarding my wife in the hospital alone, and that was when I discovered the Coda Protocol. Maybe the best things come when you’re at your worst times lol.

Then I studied all by myself. I registered and I remember that I was in the bottom 2 lines in the list of participants for Testnet 3.2b. I am thankful to have been given such a rare opportunity, so I vowed not to waste it. Then I joined Discord and tried to find someone who could help me. I remember I spent up to about 19 hours each day studying the Coda Protocol Testnet, for 3-5 days, until I got less sleep and headaches hahaha. Finally I managed to run Testnet 3.2b so well that I even became one of the members who got high points on the Testnet 3.2b Leaderboard. Yeppy!!!

The peak for me was being chosen to be a part of Coda’s Genesis Founding Member Cohort 2. I am very, very happy because of my hard work. I am very grateful and thankful to all the Coda Protocol team, especially to the o1Labs Team, @garethdavies and @Kunkomu. Because they have helped me to that point.

Lastly, Coda Protocol: Thank you for giving this opportunity. I will continue to help Coda Protocol to achieve success in the future in making tiny cryptographic proofs, enabling cryptocurrency as accessible as any other app or website, so that Coda Protocol technology will be used by all worldwide. Love Coda Protocol!!!”

• Coda Community Member aliefaisala

We loved hearing your story, aliefaisala, and are so glad to have you as a part of the Coda community and as a Genesis Founding Member! The second cohort of the Genesis token grant program has recently been onboarded, and so far, over 150 Genesis token grants have been offered to the community. To ensure the decentralization of the Coda network, we are allocating up to 1000 Genesis token grants for Coda block producers at mainnet launch, so there are still more than 800 Genesis token grants available!

Collaborations

In the past year, Coda has collaborated with many other leading tech firms to build the Coda ecosystem in preparation for mainnet launch. Recently, Coda has collaborated with partners like Figment Networks on their Data Hub and Hubble; Bison Trails; and DSRV Labs. Coda also contributed to the testing, feedback, and support for the new Coinbase Rosetta API.

Aaron Henshaw, Co-founder and CTO of Coda partner Bison Trails, said, “We’re thrilled to see Coda reach this milestone and to recognize the success of their testnet. Over the past year, Coda grew an active and technically-minded community and demonstrated scalability to support an impressive number of concurrent nodes without performance degradation. We’re looking forward to Genesis and mainnet launch!”

Andrew Cronk, Cofounder & Head of Product at Figment Networks, said, “Coda Protocol has succeeded in building a strong and diverse community around the open-source technology, a critical achievement in blockchain. We have invested resources to support Coda integrations on our Hubble and DataHub products in anticipation of their forthcoming mainnet launch and are looking forward to further supporting Coda validators, stakeholders, and developers as the community continues to grow.”

Products Shipped

Over the last year,the o1Labs engineering team has developed new products to improve the access, usability, and ease of building with Coda Protocol. This includes:

• GraphQL API – Send transactions, start and stop staking, and get information about the blockchain and your node from an easy to use API. It even comes with an explorer
• Coda Sandbox Docker Container – An easy to run private stand-alone environment for playing around with a chain where your block producer makes every block. This is very useful for application developers or anyone who wants to see what it’s like to be a block producer before actually acquiring stake.
• Coda Client Javascript SDK, with interfaces in Typescript, Javascript and ReasonML – A mechanism to produce and sign transactions programmatically without being connected to a live network. It works in the browser!
• Coda Accounts system
• Decimal-ed token amounts
• Version signaling
• Sending coinbase elsewhere
• Automated testnet leaderboard

And innumerable improvements to logging, performance, tooling, and usability “under the hood”. We’re an open-source project, so feel free to check out our progress on Github!

We have a long wish list of products in our future roadmap. As a sneak peek, here are a few things we are targeting for the upcoming Testnet Release 3.3:

• Tokens
• Postgres archive node
• Updated Leaderboard UI

Community Contributions

Through the past year, participants have been able to rack up millions of testnet points on the Leaderboard and counting. Community participation is at an all-time high and has also resulted in numerous robust community-driven initiatives. For example, translations of our documentation by community members have allowed Coda to rapidly expand into new geographies, such as those mentioned earlier. Below is a list of other existing community resources and events that happened and are thriving thanks to our supportive and active community members in the last year:

• Translated resources: 72 resources in 9 languages by a translation team of 20+ members; translations are located on the Coda Wiki
• Community-driven Coda wiki: 80 pages of useful guides, how-to’s and links to other resources created by community members

2 Coda block explorers:

• Built and maintained by community member and Genesis Founder garethtdavies: link
• Built by bitfly: link

Meetups:

• Osaka Devcon Meetup
• Seoul Trustless 2020 Meetup
• Seoul zk-SNARKs 2020 Meetup
• Community-led San Francisco Meetup
• Montreal DeFi Blockchain Group Virtual Meetup

Social/Communication platforms:

• Official Twitter account
• Official Discord server
• Official Telegram channel
• Official WeChat group (run by the community)
• Community-led Coda news-and-updates channel
• Community-led Russian Telegram channel
• Community-led German Telegram channel
• Community-led German Twitter account
• Community-led QQ group (866831258)

Technical guides/tutorials/articles:

• Garethtdavies for writing a guide on running Coda in docker.
• kenny for sharing helm charts for coda daemon, see github.
• harshjain for sharing a guide on how to use Coda on CentOS:
• Gordon Freeman and roger_rabbit for creating a guide on How to install a Coda node using VPS and make it secure: See Coda Wiki
• Dmitry D for creating a Telegram bot to monitor the Coda node.
• whataday2day for updating and sharing his snark stopper script with the community, see Github.
• zkpk for sharing a script to help testnet users randomize their SNARK fees.
• fible1 for creating guides for testnet users in 3.2b to complete technical challenges and monitor their nodes.
• gar for sharing his insights and tricks for the Coda sandbox with the community: See Github
• Russian testnet tutorials by Alexander :live demo and written tutorial

Blogs/AMAs:

• Official blog with testnet retrospective blog posts on each release
• Staking AMA by Figment Networks, Staking Hub
• Community: Niuniu | Bit Cat Guide how to monitor the Coda node (Chinese and English))
• Community: Yieldwallet | Gautam for sharing a blog post on Coda
• Community: fible1 for sharing a blog post on Coda
• Deep dive into Coda by Figment Networks

The team would like to wholeheartedly thank everyone for their participation and efforts over the last year in helping Coda grow. In the next few months, we plan to share with the community more of our roadmap and plans towards mainnet launch and beyond. Stay tuned!