The tea Protocol is fast approaching a major milestone—the launch of its Incentivized Testnet. By participating in the tea Incentivized Testnet, you’ll get a chance to contribute to the tea Protocol’s roadmap and earn points, which may become redeemable for blockchain tokens in the future. Onboarding before the protocol’s general release is how your projects can begin earning rewards on day one.

You may be brimming with questions about the tea Incentivized Testnet, or perhaps you’re wondering how to participate. Keep reading to learn everything that you need to know about tea’s Incentivized Testnet, and get the tea on testnet challenges and quests.

What is the tea Incentivized Testnet? 

The tea Incentivized Testnet is the precursor to the tea Protocol. tea’s Incentivized Testnet is launching before the protocol’s general release, or “Mainnet,” to enable OSS developers and maintainers, software users, and other stakeholders to experiment with tea.

The tea Incentivized Testnet supports nearly all the functionality that will be available from tea’s Mainnet. The testnet aims to encourage participants to earn virtual, non-transferable “points” by completing various quests, actively engaging with the protocol, and learning its operations. 

Let’s check out some of the key features that are supported by tea’s Incentivized Testnet:  

• Account creation: Users can create a tea account, which includes establishing a new or linking an existing digital wallet. 
• Registering a software project: Users can register any software projects distributed via a supported package manager to begin receiving rewards commensurate with the project’s contribution to OSS.
• Earning testnet TEA tokens: Maintainers of registered software projects can earn testnet TEA tokens for their contributions to open-source software. Rewards known as teaRank rewards are distributed daily to registered projects by the protocol’s teaRank rewards system.
• Staking tokens to a software project: Project maintainers and protocol users can contribute to the security of the open-source software ecosystem and receive rewards by staking testnet TEA to software projects registered with the tea Protocol.
• Vulnerability reporting: Security researchers may identify and report vulnerabilities associated with the tea Protocol or registered software projects. Valid reports are rewarded and invalid reports are penalized.
• Participate in teaDAO governance: Anyone who stakes testnet TEA tokens is empowered to participate in decentralized governance activities, which are supported by the teaDAO Forum in the tea web app. Users can propose protocol changes and vote on proposals submitted by other governance participants.

Creating a tea account or registering a software project during the tea Incentivized Testnet phase will enable you to seamlessly transition to the tea Mainnet at its launch. All qualifying open-source projects registered during the Incentivized Testnet phase should begin to receive rewards immediately when the protocol’s Mainnet launches, without the need for users to take any actions.

The tea Incentivized Testnet is planned to launch on February 21^st, 2024, and tea‘s Mainnet is expected to follow Q4 2024. Mainnet launch will coincide with tea’s Token Generation Event.

How does the tea Incentivized Testnet support the development roadmap?

tea’s Incentivized Testnet phase is an important step toward the successful launch of the tea Protocol. Widespread participation will enable the protocol to be “battle tested” and strengthened prior to its general release.

Let’s explore the key objectives for tea’s Incentivized Testnet phase:

• Validate the tea Protocol’s approach to solving the OSS rewards problem and “battle test” its implementation;
• Ensure that the tea Protocol’s limitations are identified and appropriate fixes are included in the protocol’s roadmap;
• Enable anyone to experiment with the protocol functionality and provide constructive feedback to improve the tea Protocol;
• Simulate token events using testnet TEA tokens; and
• Acid-test all tea Protocol capabilities ahead of its general release.

These important objectives cannot be attained without your help—that’s why the tea Incentivized Testnet includes many opportunities for all users, whether technical or not, to earn points for their participation.

A major focus during the tea Incentivized Testnet phase is collecting and incorporating feedback from participants. The tea development roadmap is flexible specifically to ensure that the needs and priorities of tea users can be accommodated. After the tea Incentivized Testnet phase concludes and critical issues are addressed, the updated tea Protocol will become the foundation for tea’s general release, and backlogged feedback will inform the tea development roadmap. 

What are tea Incentivized Testnet challenges?

Challenges during tea’s Incentivized Testnet phase are time-bound events designed to encourage participation. Challenges are composed of quests—specific actions that testnet participants can complete to earn points. 

Each tea Incentivized Testnet challenge will last for two weeks and follow this targeted schedule—all dates are in 2024:

• Challenge 1: February 21 through March 06

• Challenge 2: March 06 through March 20

• Challenge 3: March 20 through April 03

• Challenge 4: April 03 through April 17

• Challenge 5: April 17 through May 1

• Challenge 6: May 1 through May 15

What are tea Incentivized Testnet quests?

Quests, the core of tea Incentivized Testnet challenges, are actions that tea users can complete within the tea Protocol to earn points. These points have no immediate value but may become redeemable for blockchain tokens in the future.

Anyone—including OSS project contributors, security researchers, and software users, whether experts or not—can participate in tea’s Incentivized Testnet and complete quests. Quests are organized around specific features of the tea Protocol, to incentivize participants to experiment with every aspect of the technology framework.

Some quests occur only during specific challenges, while other quests span multiple challenge periods. By completing specific quests during specific challenges, testnet participants can boost their rewards and earn a multiple of the points typically awarded for completing that action.

31 quests during the tea Incentivized Testnet

Let’s dig into all of the quests that are planned for tea’s testnet phase.

1. Sign up for tea: This is where everything begins! Users can create a tea account and associate it with a new or existing digital wallet.

2. Connect your GitHub account: Testnet users can link their GitHub accounts with tea, either during the sign-up process or when registering a software project. Linking your GitHub account at sign-up simplifies the registration of software projects.

3. Verify your email address: Adding your email address enables tea to send general updates and notifications about your account activity. This is one of the many easy quests happening during tea’s testnet phase! 

4. Register a software project: Open-source software developers are encouraged to register their projects distributed via supported package managers. Registering a project with the tea Protocol involves committing and merging a “constitution” file to your project repo, and enables your project to receive its share of the daily rewards distributed by the teaRank rewards system.

5. Stake tokens to your software project: Registered projects are required to stake 25% of their teaRank rewards into a bounty pool to maintain a minimum “reward-to-bounty” ratio. Maintaining this minimum ratio is required for a registered project to continue receiving its daily share of the tea Protocol’s teaRank rewards, as the bounty pool is used to reward security researchers who report vulnerabilities against the project. Ensuring that your registered project meets this requirement is a quest during tea’s testnet phase.

6. Claim and immediately stake token rewards: Software maintainers of registered software projects receiving daily teaRank rewards can experiment with claiming and staking those rewards.

7. Reduce your project’s reward-to-bounty ratio: Another quest for signing contributors is to break protocol rules by intentionally reducing a project’s reward-to-bounty ratio to below 25% for at least 48 hours. This action should result in the project no longer receiving its daily teaRank rewards. 

8. Restore your project’s reward-to-bounty ratio: A complementary quest to reducing a project’s reward-to-bounty ratio is to restore that ratio back to at least 25%, causing distribution of teaRank rewards to the project to resume.

9. Stake another project from your project treasury: Maintainers of registered projects are encouraged to test the process of staking tokens to another project from their project’s treasury. This functionality enables registered projects to support other projects across the OSS ecosystem.

10. Stake a software project as an individual: Users participating in the protocol during tea’s testnet phase can show their support for a project and contribute to the security of the OSS supply chain by staking testnet TEA tokens to any registered software project.

11. Claim staking rewards as an individual: Users who stake testnet TEA to a registered project can experiment with claiming their staking rewards.

12. Stake a specific software project to lower its yield: Staking contributes to the reputations of open-source software projects. To reduce the risk of a small number of projects collecting the most staking rewards, heavily staked OSS projects may produce lower staking yields for individual stakers. Testnet participants can experiment with this functionality and coordinate their actions to attempt to reduce a specific OSS project’s staking yield.

13. Increase your teaRank: teaRank is the dynamic impact score assigned to each OSS project by the tea Protocol’s Proof of Contribution consensus mechanism. Contributors to registered software projects can attempt to increase their project’s teaRank score, such as by attracting new software projects to use their project as a dependency.

14. Attempt to break teaRank: Another way that tea users can experiment with the Incentivized Testnet is by trying to compromise the protocol’s dynamic impact scoring algorithm, which ranks OSS projects by their contributions to the software ecosystem. During the testnet phase, users are incentivized to register software that yields maximum token rewards with minimal effort or value created by the code.

15. Create a proposal for the teaDAO: Governance is foundational to the tea Protocol and the engagement among builders, users, and all community members—that’s why no testnet would be complete without quests involving governance. The first teaDAO quest is to create and submit a proposal to the teaDAO—the decentralized autonomous organization that supports user-driven governance of tea. This quest is complete when a community moderator posts your proposal for a formal vote.

16. Create the teaDAO proposal that receives the most votes: Another governance quest is to create a proposal that has the greatest voter participation during tea’s testnet phase. This quest, happening near the tea Incentivized Testnet’s conclusion, will have only one winner and requires participants to coordinate with the entire tea community to secure the maximum number of votes.

17. Vote on a teaDAO proposal as a software project: Users and registered projects can contribute to governance of the tea Protocol. This quest will encourage all software maintainers of registered software projects to vote on a teaDAO proposal using the voting power of their project’s treasury.

18. Vote on a teaDAO proposal as an individual: Any tea Incentivized Testnet user with staked testnet tokens will be encouraged to vote on a teaDAO proposal to accept or reject a potential change.

19. Create an accepted vulnerability report for tea: Security researchers are essential contributors to the security of the software supply chain—and the tea Protocol is designed to incentivize security researchers to embrace responsible disclosure processes. Security researchers can participate in this quest by identifying vulnerabilities in the tea Protocol, submitting vulnerability reports for verification, and accumulating rewards. Your quest is complete when your vulnerability report is accepted.

‍20. Create an accepted vulnerability report for a software project: Another similar quest for security researchers is to use protocol-native tools to identify and report vulnerabilities in software projects registered with the tea Protocol. Valid reports are rewarded; invalid reports are penalized. This quest is complete when your vulnerability report is accepted.

21. Donate testnet TEA tokens to a project: Testnet users can donate testnet TEA tokens as a way to support registered software projects.

22. Donate a test stablecoin to a project: During tea’s testnet phase, users may also experiment with making donations using a mock stablecoin, which has no redeemable value and is available only for testing purposes within the tea Incentivized Testnet.

23. Transfer testnet TEA tokens to another user: All digital wallets linked to tea are given their own custom domain from the Ethereum Name Service, enabling every protocol participant to transfer tokens using their registered name rather than a complex sequence of letters and numbers. Using the tea web app, Incentivized Testnet users may experience the simple process of token transfer on the tea Protocol by sending testnet TEA tokens to other Incentivized Testnet participants.

24. Request a grant from a project: The tea Protocol’s mission is to enhance the sustainability and integrity of the software supply chain by enabling open-source software developers to capture the value that they create. Grants are one tool that enable value capture. To foster collaboration between OSS developers and registered projects, the tea Incentivized Testnet includes a quest for project contributors to test the process of requesting a grant from a registered project.

25. Award a grant to a contributor: To complement the quest of requesting a grant from a project, OSS project maintainers can test the process of awarding and disbursing a grant to a project contributor.

26. Add a signing contributor to your project: OSS project teams evolve over time—that’s why the tea Protocol makes it easy to accommodate change. During the tea Incentivized Testnet phase, project maintainers may experiment with adding signing contributors to their registered OSS projects.

27. Change the quorum of your project: As project maintainers transition, maintaining proper governance is important for each project. Maintainers of registered projects can change the number of approvals required for any treasury transaction to complete.

28. Tweet about a token burn: Token burns are integral to the tea Protocol’s incentive mechanisms. Registered projects and users that don’t follow the rules of the protocol will have a portion of their tokens transferred to an escrow account for burning. Tokens are burnt automatically and on a schedule. tea Incentivized Testnet participants can tweet about any token-burning events that may occur during the Incentivized Testnet phase.

29. Refer OSS developers to tea: Let’s spread the word! More projects registered on the tea Protocol means a stronger, more resilient open-source software supply chain. Any participant in the tea Incentivized Testnet can refer new users to tea. Users may access a referral link, which is easily shared, via the tea web app. 

30. Share the tea whitepaper: tea community members can complete another non-technical quest by sharing the tea whitepaper—just follow the instructions in the tea web app.

31. Tell us about yourself: Understanding the communi’tea is vital to the development of the tea Protocol. This fun and easy quest involves completing a survey, open to all tea Incentivized Testnet participants, to tell us about themselves! Anyone can visit the relevant section of the tea web platform to access the survey. 

Complete testnet quests = earn points 

Sign in to the tea dashboard to find out how many points are associated with each quest and determine if a points multiplier is available. Check out the challenge leaderboard and learn more about each quest happening during tea’s Incentivized Testnet. 

The tea Protocol needs you. Get involved starting with tea’s Incentivized Testnet phase to contribute to the tea roadmap and earn points, which may become redeemable for blockchain tokens in the future. Onboard before the tea Protocol’s Mainnet launch to ensure that your registered projects earn TEA rewards starting on day one!

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