Hey, Wonderful Communi’tea!

We hope this message finds you well and buzzing with excitement for what's ahead. As we navigate the waters of our incentivized testnet (ITN), the surge in user engagement has exceeded our wildest expectations, filling our teapot with joy! But rest assured, every challenge is an opportunity for growth, and we're embracing this chance to enhance our ITN challenges even further.

To ensure our platform is as robust and user-friendly as possible, we're introducing Brew Brigades for our ITN challenges. This proactive step will allow us to identify any sneaky bugs and make necessary improvements with the help of a subset of our amazing users — that's you!

Here’s how it’s going to roll out:

• teapot 1 (Early Grey Group): The top 50k of our most active users by ITN points, shining stars who joined the ITN early and remained active will get access to test the new waters.
• teapot 2 (Chai Chargers Group): Then, it’s full sail ahead with a general release to all our users, bringing everyone into the fold.

We’re thrilled to bring an extra layer of personalization to your journey! Upon visiting the homepage of app.tea.xyz, you’ll be greeted by a banner at the top, clearly indicating if you have early access or not. It’s our way of ensuring you’re always in the know and maximizing every moment of your experience with us. 

Please note, these phased releases are a tool to detect bugs earlier — it's not about A/B testing. Our aim is to make the tea Protocol not just good, but great, with a platform that reflects our community's needs and aspirations.

Updated ITN Roadmap

As challenge 1 comes to an end, we’ve noticed a significant increase in traffic associated with the registration of freshly created low teaRank projects. This increase in traffic has put a significant strain on our integration with third-party providers forcing us to re-evaluate the protocol’s user onboarding and project registration flows to reduce system abuse, while we identify abusers.

Specifically, we’ll soon rollout the following changes:

• New users will only be able to sign up with tea using a custom username. As opposed to a GitHub username. 
• To allow developers to match their custom tea username with their Github name, no username that corresponds to an existing GitHub account will be allowed. This will ensure that developers’ GitHub usernames are reserved and can be claimed once this functionality is restored.

Existing users who have already matched their tea username with their GitHub account will remain unaffected.

In light of our adaptive approach, we’ll be hosting 5 challenges instead of 6. This streamlined path ensures that each challenge gives you more opportunities to generate points and gives us the room to apply your invaluable feedback directly. You’ve asked us for more quests, and we’ll deliver more quests in less challenges. Here are the adjustments to our roadmap to ensure we’re delivering the best possible experience:

• Challenge 2: Kicking off soon, we’re polishing every detail for perfection. A short wait for a flawless experience. Stay tuned! 
• Challenge 3: Soon after, you can continue to steep your tea with a new set of challenges.
• Challenge 4: As we continue to gather steam we’ll roll out challenge four shortly after challenge 3. 
• Challenge 5: Our grand finale starts in May with the final curtain closing by mid-month. 

Rest assured; your hard work won’t go unnoticed! You’ll continue to earn points and have ample time to shine, as quests will seamlessly roll over into the next challenge. This ensures everyone gets a fair shot at participating and making their mark.

We're incredibly grateful for your support and participation. Your feedback during this process is invaluable and will help shape the tea Protocol into a tool we all love and trust. Let’s continue to build, grow, and innovate together!

With gratitude,

The tea’m 

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