Congratulations to you, my dear crypto adepts! You've been waiting for this for so long and it has happened! The most popular phase of the third testnet in the Aleo project has been officially declared open! AleoHQ announced it a couple of days ago in this Twitter post, with the following text below:
The Aleo community certainly got very excited. Guys have been waiting for such a long time an opportunity to launch their nodes immediately got down to business and as one would expect, lots of technical questions and answers started pouring in on the discord chat, which I have to tell you, are a real eye opener! After all, this is what we love this project and its participants and the team! For help and development! But in this article, in addition to this terrific news, I would like to cover another important question, namely the basis for such a high popularity of phase 2 in Testnet3 of Aleo Project. Why so many people were waiting for it, and why it is so attractive even for not very tech-savvy cryptans?
The answer to that question is ACCESSIBILITY...
It's the accessibility and the real possibility of rewarding the Provers phase that is so attractive to the community compared to, say, Phase 1, which most of the developers were able to fully participate in.
Phase 2 is also a kind of springboard for work in the third phase of this testnet, where validators will try their hand, who will be able to earn their necessary steak of 1 million Aleo credits, just in time to solve "CoinBase puzzles" directly in Phase 2) That's why it's so interesting to the community! Also....
It is in the provers phase that we will be able to fully experience the new consensus mechanism called "AleoBFT"
AleoBFT combines the instant finality of new blocks from validators with the computing power of provers to bring coinbase offerings online. The AleoBFT design encourages validators to remain viable by building blocks, and encourages testers to scale proving capabilities to the Aleo ecosystem.
As Testnet 2 showed, blockchain production became highly centralized after a small number of testers developed specialized hardware for zero-disclosure cryptography. While ZPrize helps level the playing field, the fact remains that a handful of organizations will dominate the network, creating the risk of centralization and censorship for users.
Using AleoBFT, we can separate the role of blockchain production from coin base generation. Validators are now responsible for creating blocks, and provers can now compute proofs at the desired scale. AleoBFT is designed to encourage provers to become validators by placing at least 1 million Aleo credits online. This ensures that proving agents can maintain their resistance to censorship by being representative of all proving agents in the consensus.
With AleoBFT, provers solve and produce coinbase proofs on the network in exchange for a share of the coinbase reward in each block.
And at the end, a little bit about the fun part, i.e., the rewards...
As the moderators of the project say, the rewards will be added to the network in the next 4-8 weeks!