Stake Wars is back to help decentralize the NEAR network and help the community with cool new challenges and rewards to members who want to become validators. In Stake Wars: Episode III, NEAR is focusing on Chunk-Only Producers—NEAR’s next step toward a fully-sharded protocol.

By introducing this new type of validator, NEAR can increase the total number of validator seats. Stake Wars is helping Chunk-Only Producers to prepare for this moment. It’s an opportunity to gain confidence and learn how to work with contract-based delegation.

With Stake Wars III set for July 13, here’s a brief rundown of the new Chunk-Only Producer role, and what to expect from the Stake Wars program.

Chunk-Only Producers help decentralize and secure NEAR

The NEAR Network is currently secured by 100 validators. NEAR’s roadmap will allow the protocol to become fully-sharded. This will help reach the ambitious goal to decentralize NEAR while keeping the network secure. Chunk-Only Producers are an important milestone along this path.

Chunk-Only Producers are solely responsible for producing chunks in a single shard (a network partition). A chunk, of course, is a shard block (see Nightshade for more detail). What’s cool for Chunk-Only Producers is that they can run their validator node on a less demanding machine, such as a 4-Core CPU, with 8GB of RAM and 200GB SSD of storage.

Once the Chunk-Only Producer is available on NEAR mainnet at the end of Q3, NEAR plans to onboard an additional 200-300 validators. This, combined with a lower barrier to entry (minimum stake) for validators, is a win for the NEAR network as it moves toward a more scalable future. By increasing the total number of validators, NEAR will become more decentralized and more secure.

How Stake Wars III works

Chunk-Only Producers can deploy the open-source Staking Pool smart contract from Github, to test their systems and gain confidence with contract-based delegation. Validators are also free to customize their delegation contract, build their web applications, and integrate the Staking Pool into their existing systems.

Stake Wars is community-operated, and community members such as Metapool, Everstake, LiNEAR and Open Shards Alliance (OSA) will offer their support to the program. NEAR plans to use more than 4M $NEAR tokens as delegation rewards for the participants who complete the challenges. These rewards help put participants in a position to become a mainnet validators by Q4 of 2022. 

The Stake Wars: Episode III incentivized testnet for Chunk-Only Producers will launch on July 13th and run until early September. Any potential validators should join the Stake Wars community on Telegram and Discord to coordinate with other Validators, and follow @PagodaPlatform on twitter. 

The full Stake Wars III page is launching soon. So stay tuned.

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