Let’s bring some Caos to Westend!
So far, Westend has been doing great as a Testnet to validate Polkadot latest features and releases. It’s perfect to test anything that can be done on Polkadot or Kusama. Newcomers, Validators, Nominators, Parachains can test any functionality available for the role before going live and commit the same actions on Polkadot or Kusama.
Although Westend is awesome as a testbed for their Mainnet cousins, by principle being a Testnet doesn’t have the same growth as their cousins. The volume of transactions, staking or account holders is astonishingly lower compared to Kusama or Polkadot. As of the time of this draft proposal below are some numbers to support it:
Westend (7618 Accounts; ~1127 Nominators; ~7% Total staked)
Kusama (144235 Accounts; ~5695 nominators; ~47% Total staked)
Polkadot (463206 Accounts; ~22k nominators; ~63% Total staked)
I think an even more realistic Testnet expanding on growth alongside Polkadot could be great for the Polkadot network and potentially help to foresee some future bottlenecks.
I think that a solution around the points presented below can lift up Westend for an even better support Network, where Kusama and Polkadot would only benefit from.
Let’s give Phragmén some hard time
How
Start by filling Westend with a heavy number of new accounts similar to the numbers currently available on Polkadot ~500K.
Distribute some westies through these new accounts and bond them until the ideal stake is achieved around 50%.
Create nominators out of these accounts and randomly assign validators.
Goal
Most likely by the end of this step all Validators are oversubscribed and expect sequential Phragmén to have a hard time at each election round.
Let’s give Westend some pace to keep up with their cousins
How
Subscribe to specific finalized Polkadot events e.g. NewAccount, KilledAccount, Bonded, Unbonded.
Select randomly accounts in Westend where respective extrinsics could be applied.
Goal
The goal here is to get Westend smoothly keeping up with Polkadot growth over time.
I’m proposing to develop a bot that could manage and automate all the work previously described.
Being this just a draft treasury proposal, I would like to thank Councillors and Community members for reading it and open a discussion about the idea of having a heavy loaded Testnet - Westend to better support Polkadot and Kusama.
Do you think that a heavy loaded Testnet is worth exploring and something that could help and be beneficial for the Polkadot community?
Also do you think that Treasury funds could be applied for a project around this topic?
Any feedback will be very welcome!