Announcing SAO Testnet 1 Launch & SAO Testnet 0 Recap

3 min readMar 15, 2023

March 15, 2023

Since SAO Testnet 0 launched on March 1, we have achieved the primary goal of Testnet 0 that involved hundreds of SAO DIDs, Validators and Storage Nodes actively in the network. Also, we have tested Notater collaboratively with the community, a demo application built on SAO Network adopting its dStorage infrastructure. We would like to express our greatest gratitude to the Validators, Storage Nodes, and the community that made SAO Testnet 0 a successful start 🎉

After careful consideration and thorough testing, SAO Network team made the decision to pause the Testnet 0 testing program, closely followed by a new and improved version of testnet. We name it SAO Testnet 1, that provides much better experience to all the users and developers.

Testnet 0 Stats and Learnings

Total Validators: 133
Total SAO DID: 349
Total Storage Nodes: 4

Each phase of testnet is a meaningful opportunity for program debugging, issue fixing and mitigating in a testing environment. The team is capturing, monitoring and analyzing network data throughout the testnet. Some issues and incidents inevitably arose in Testnet 0, and the most notably are:

The consensus process of 100 Validators to reach consensus is relatively slow. So, the team cut down the total quota for Validators from 100 to 20; and adjusted the SAO Network block time from 1 second to 2 seconds.
The inconsistencies of consensus nodes version lead to election exceptions. The team uploaded pre-compiled execution files onto GitHub that’s available to the community.
When running a storage node in Testnet 0, a stable Public IP address is required and that comes with a cost. Also, storage node configuration is not as feasible for storage providers. And the technical documentation for storage nodes is not clear enough. We have made improvements in the next testnet. In the new testnet, we optimize p2p connection and allow gateway to relay order that means public IP is not mandatory.

Feedback

We have collected 95 feedback responses from the SAO community, which are instrumental in the development of the new testnet. Our team will select valuable feedback, and announce the finalists of SAO Early Access by the end of this week.

We look forward to continuously working with our community as we strive to build the best intuitive decentralized storage infrastructure and platform for Web3 users and dApps.

Testnet 1 is live!

With SAO Testnet 0 coming to an end, the SAO community took its first move to officially building a healthy and feasible decentralized storage network. This effort makes way for newly improved version Testnet 1. It will focus more on storage nodes and consensus protocol.

Testnet 1 Updates

Storage Node:

add AnnouncementAddress to configuration file to expose public connection information.
introduce retry mechanism for storage processing in SPs.
optimize p2p connection, allow gateway to relay order proposals.
refine order store process: commit model completes once data is staged and storage will continue in background.

Consensus Protocol:

Fix the problem of underestimation of multi-copy storage gas.

Blockchain Explorer:

Release the testnet explorer: https://testnet.sao.network/.

We will make our efforts to grow and refine the subsequent testnets along with the SAO community to ensure stable operation at Mainnet.

Visit our website and feel free to reach our support team in Discord.

About SAO Network

SAO Network is a decentralized storage infrastructure for Web3 powered by Hedra Labs. It provides a decentralized storage protocol based on Cosmos SDK and IPFS to increase the adoption of Web3 content storage and facilitate its ecosystem applications.

Hedra Labs, the core developer team of SAO Network, was established in Singapore in 2021 and teamed by industry pioneers, senior architects and developers from both FinTech and blockchain fields.

Join us and become SAO early adopters!

Contact: contact@sao.network
Website: https://www.sao.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SAONetwork
Blog: https://medium.com/@saonetwork
Github: https://github.com/SaoNetwork
Discord: https://discord.gg/q58XsnQqQF