Testnet description

Validators

Waterfall uses the Beacon chain for validator control. There is a statement “epoch” in the Beacon chain that includes 32 slots, and a committee is created in each slot for each shard.

At the beginning of each epoch, validators are evenly distributed among 32 committees. Supposing we need a minimum of 8 validators per committee, we would need 256 cross-node validators. To deploy a smaller number of nodes, we have reduced the number of slots from 32 to 8, meaning we only need 64 nodes.

A slot in each epoch is the time interval within which the blocks are created in the slot. On testnet, we have set up 10 seconds as the time slot. Thus, each epoch will last 80 seconds (8 slots x 10 seconds).

If each slot lasts 10 seconds, finalization occurs in about 20 seconds.

For now we are using only a single committee per slot and sorting the committee validators. Based on the amount of transactions in the pool, we will select the number of blocks to be created. Using the sorted list, each block will take the transactions from its group. The transaction group is formed by the last number in transaction hash, as described in the specifications.

Metamask integration

Waterfall uses Metamask, a user-friendly tool that enables users to test the network’s functionality and send transactions within the Waterfall network. You can use this guide to set up MetaMask.

Server parameters

We are using 64 2+Cores / 4 GB RAM Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. At the time of writing the price was about $30 USD per month.