(8/5 1:00pm ET): Thank you for your interest in Hedera’s community testing program. The program is paused while we perform upgrades to the mainnet and our example applications. In the meantime, join our official telegram and sign-up for our newsletter to keep up-to-date on all things Hedera Hashgraph.
(5/23 12:30pm ET) Update: Thank you for your patience; Phase II of the community testing program has resumed. Our only change is a 24 hour waiting period between submitting KYC information and its subsequent acceptance or rejection.
(5/19 | 2:00pm ET) Update: The community testing program is currently paused. We are making updates to the earning program and on-boarding process and will update you as soon as soon as it is re-opened. Join our Telegram or follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.
We’re excited to announce that Community Testing Program has returned — after all of the positive feedback at the conclusion of phase I, Hedera has placed 200 ℏ million aside for phase II (and beyond) of its testing program.
Phase II of our program is an expansion on phase I, allowing up to 100,000 individual testers the opportunity to earn up to 250 ℏ each. At a high-level, testers will create a Hedera Portal Profile, set up the Hedera Wallet mobile app (iOS / Android), install the Hedera Chrome Browser Extension, and visit our blog website DailyTimestamp.com to test the network and earn hbars by making micropayments for viewing content.
Soon phase II will also include the opportunity to earn an additional 100 ℏ on top of their existing cap by testing Hedera’s smart contract functionality on the mainnet. In community partnership with Nik Siafakas, creator of https://hash-hash.info/, we’ll be adding the ability for testers to use the Hedera Browser Extension to “purchase a star” using hbars. Once the smart contract is called, an exchange of 5 hbars is made for the purchase of a unique star and the tester is rewarded with 100 ℏ.
To jump right into testing the Hedera mainnet and earning hbars, follow the detailed instructions outlined in our FAQ. Or keep reading to learn more about our take-aways from phase I, specifics around consumer and developer testing in phase II, and the example applications we’ve open sourced for our developer community.
Our team focuses on three core tenets while building our network, developer tools, and demo applications: security, stability and performance. As we’ve previously written, Phase I proved to be a wild success; quickly surpassing 5,000 mainnet accounts. The feedback from the users, developers, and partners that participated has aided us to better deliver on our tenets.
One great example was learning how node balancing can be optimized by applications — in this case, the Hedera Browser Extension — to achieve better performance and a simpler user experience.
We have also been learning and testing through the eyes of our users — both developers and consumers. Developers have been hammering away at our testnets, providing continuous feedback on things like the syntax of the SDKs, opportunities to simplify key generation, and how to provide what we now think is one of the most seamless testnet onboarding experiences in the market.
Consumer feedback has shown us how to improve the Hedera Wallet user experience, while also confirming our belief that there is a desire for micropayment-based alternative consumption models for industries like publishing and digital media. These improvements will be visible in our new software exposed in Phase II.
At the heart of the community testing program is our example media site, DailyTimestamp.com. When you visit the site with the Hedera Browser Extension installed, you’ll approve an amount of hbars to exchange for reading an article, listening to a podcast, or watching a video.
Each time you visit a piece of content, you’ll be signing a cryptocurrency transaction (micropayment) and sending it to the Hedera mainnet; in return, you’ll earn 5 ℏ per transaction. Testers in phase II can earn up to 250 ℏ total for this task.
To test, you’ll need to:
To get started, log in or create your Hedera Portal profile. You can also follow step-by-step directions here.
In addition to the Daily Timestamp we’ll also be releasing an opportunity to test Smart Contracts in the coming weeks, so be sure to keep an eye out.
Earning hbars isn’t limited to visiting the dailytimestamp.com. As a developer, you can join a testnet and use our SDK to help earn towards your 250 ℏ cap. For every 100 transactions on a testnet, you’ll earn 5 ℏ in your associated mainnet account.
As mentioned above, we’ve opened access to our testnets, and you can jump onto one by following these steps:
A step-by-step guide can be found here.
Once you’re up and running, you can use any of Hedera’s network services on a testnet to start earning hbar.
As a bonus, we’ve open sourced most components of the Community Testing Program, to provide plenty of new toys to play with (or at least copy and paste code from).
We’ve open sourced:
All of these tools bring unique models and methods to incorporate HBAR into web and mobile apps. You can find these tools in our github repo at https://www.github.com/hashgraph/
We’ve also updated the open source Hedera Java SDKfor an improved developer experience, with greater documentationcoverage. I think you’ll find, and early community testers have agreed, it has a much cleaner syntax that makes it easier to get up to speed. Let us know what you think; feedback, contributions, and forks are all welcome.
While the feedback and testing is invaluable for us to improve the Hedera network, we also took this opportunity to thoughtfully consider how to make this program as impactful as possible.
As Leemon covered in his recent talk, Hedera has a long-term vision and methodical plan to increase how decentralized it is and remain as decentralized as possible at scale. We think you’ll find we took care in creating a program that everyone can participate in, to encourage wide distribution with a great first experience using distributed ledger technology.
We hope you’re as excited as we are and can join us to work together to improve Hedera. I know I’ll be checking hash-hash.info to watch the growth of our network in action. Be sure to share your feedback with us on Telegram or tweet us @hashgraph.