Althea blockchain update and validator Olympics

• We launched the altheatest3 test blockchain
• We'll be having a series of collaborative challenges for the validators
• The first challenge will be to hard fork the blockchain to altheatest4 on August 19th.
• Sign up on the validator email list https://airtable.com/shrpjZDQYQa3Xd5oe to get some testnet tokens and get updates. However, the #althea-validators room on our Discord chat is still the main discussion forum.

Earlier this week, we launched the first public testnet of the Althea blockchain, known as altheatest3. We had some tense moments when it wouldn't start, but in the end we got everything up smoothly. You can see our block explorer and validator list here: https://althea.zone/#/staking/validators.

It's quite decentralized- there are 19 separate validators, and no validator controls more than 5.97% of the voting power. 4 of those validators are run by Althea team members, but altogether, they only control 19.4% of the voting power. All of them could go offline without affecting the system, and they may.

It's now time to start stress-testing the system. We're going to be organizing a series of semi-weekly challenges for the validators. They are going to start out fun and cooperative, but will get increasingly challenging as time goes on. At some point, Justin is going to try to take down the blockchain using only a single blue wifi router.

We got feedback that people liked the cadence we established when spinning up the altheatest3: announcement, full instructions a week later, then it's go time at the beginning of the next week.

For our first challenge, we wanted to start easy. Maybe a few light governance proposals, etc. But there's a hitch in the plan- when we made the genesis file for altheatest3, we kept the Cosmos default that people needed to deposit at least 512 tokens. However, altheatest3 has only about 2000 tokens total. So it's going to be really hard to make governance proposals.

So our first event is going to have to be a hard fork, to altheatest4. This will be the same process as when the Cosmos hub forked to enable transfers. altheatest4 will have a few changes:

• Reduce governance proposal deposit to 1 ALTG. This will let us do governance proposals.
• Reduce unbonding period to 1 day. This will make it easier to take your tokens out of delegation to send them around and stuff.
• Mint a bunch of new testnet tokens for anyone who signs up for our validator notifications email list! The sign up form for the email list is here: https://airtable.com/shrpjZDQYQa3Xd5oe. The newly minted tokens are to give people who weren't in altheatest3 a chance to get some tokens to start validating on altheatest4, and to give the old-timers a little extra worthless testnet pocket change.

We'll be releasing full instructions on how to do the hard fork on Wednesday, August 14th. On Monday, August 19th at 3pm PDT, we will hopefully be switching the chain over.