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Vota Incentivized Testnet

Incentivized Testnet Guide (vota-bobtail)

This document is to provide a guide for participants of Dora Vota’s third incentivized testnet (vota-bobtail, a.k.a. Japanese Bobtail).

Japanese Bobtail (opens in a new tab)

The purpose of vota-bobtail is to prepare for an expansion of vota-ash network’s validator set which currently has 14 validators. There is no specific quota for this round, the goal of this round is to engage network validators that understand Dora Vota's mission and products. Other than validating the appchain itself, our validators will be required to support our applications (such as aMACI operator) and provide important infrastructure support.

New validators will be able to stake their own DORA tokens, or obtain Dora Factory foundation’s delegation. In order for any validator provider to obtain delegation, it has to go through the Delegation Program, run a validator for the incentivized testnet vota-bobtail, and demonstrate good performance.

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To register as a vota-bobtail incentivized testnet validator, please fill out the application form (opens in a new tab).

Join Vota delegation program

The delegation program will invite interested parties to run validator nodes for vota-bobtail network. You’ll validate blocks for vota-bobtail, vote for governance proposals, and get gas distributions.

This program includes 3 steps:

Application form (opens in a new tab) submission

April 24 - May 8, 2025.

Run vota-bobtail testnet validators and aMACI operator services

May 9 - June 9, 2025.

  1. If you have already been invited to our Telegram channel, you can immediately start to run your node and sync block data. For instructions on launching the incentivized testnet, please refer to “Run a Validator”. It is important to pay special attention to several parameters of the incentivized testnet that are different from vota-ash network, such as chain ID, RPC, and so on. Please also note that we use the dorad binary file with version 0.4.2 in the incentivized testnet. Relevant network configurations can be found in “Public Resources”.
  2. Ask for airdrop to activate your validator in our Telegram channel.
  3. Once your validator is up, add a firewall rule to allow our monitor server to access port 26660 of your server. Enable prometheus metrics in config.toml. Send your moniker name and public IP to us.

Performance evaluation phase

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This evaluation will include the validator and amaci operator service.

June 10–25, 2025.

During this phase, you will be responsible for running a reliable vota-bobtail testnet validator under various performance tests from the Dora Vota DevOps team. Some of these tests will be notified in advance, others will not.

Onboarding vota-ash network

Based on your performance from the previous phase, together with additional services and value you are able to add to Dora Vota, we will make a final decision on a list of validators that could join the third delegation program of the vota-ash network.

Please note that you will also be required to run a validator on Dora Vota’s long-term testnet if you are selected into the third delegation program.

Please note that if you are selected into the delegation program and start to run vota-ash network validators, you will be expected to spin up additional services to support the appchain’s applications.

Run aMACI Operator ServiceQRNG Faucet