🧪 Testnet Phase #2 Starts Now

Phase #2 is live - this round is about validation refinement + infrastructure hardening, so Cortensor’s trust layer becomes more deterministic, more redundant, and cheaper to run.

All environments are now active and wired for Phase #2 testing:
- Testnet-0 — #Arbitrum #Sepolia (L2)
- Testnet-1 — $COR #L3 via RaaS
- Testnet-1a — Self-managed $COR #L3 (comparison target)
- Testnet-1b — Self-managed $COR #L3 (internal dev environment)

🔹 Focus – Validation Refinement (PoI + PoUW)
- Tighten Validator v2/v3 scoring so outputs are more deterministic, less “flaky,” and better rubric-aligned.
- Expand redundancy + aggregation testing so trust stays stable under disagreement and partial failures.

🔹 Validator Engine Experiments – #Ollama + Embeddings
- Trial Ollama judge models and multiple embedding variants so validators run reliably across mixed CPU/GPU hardware.
- Reduce validator environment-specific issues while improving scoring consistency and throughput.

🔹 /delegate & /validate Surface Hardening
- Exercise agent-facing flows: policy hints, multi-run delegation, retries/fallbacks, and validation-heavy workloads.
- Confirm response structure stability for downstream apps/agents.

🔹 Infra + Service Reliability
Verify router APIs, indexers, and dashboard feeds stay fresh and consistent under sustained load and recovery scenarios.
Add and test RPC redundancy, failover, and validator backups so the network survives infra hiccups gracefully.

🔹 Gas Optimization & Runtime Tuning
- Profile cortensord + L2 execution paths.
- Optimize SessionQueueValidation, SessionPayment, and validator storage to trim gas + runtime overhead.

🔹 Dashboard – Trust Observability
- Expand real-time PoI/PoUW analytics, validator health views, and endpoint status so operators can actually see trust behavior evolving.

🔹 #L3 Comparison – Self-Managed vs RaaS
- Run apple-to-apple tests on Testnet-1 (RaaS) vs Testnet-1a (self-managed) to measure performance, reliability, and ops tradeoffs.
(Testnet-1b is internal-only for parallel dev validation.)

🔹 Light #MCP Integration (Nice-to-Have)
- Experiment with MCP-style component assignment so the router starts behaving like an agent execution surface (without full protocol rollout yet).

📌 Docs / Plan
- Phase #2 overview & testing focus: https://docs.cortensor.network/community-and-ecosystem/community-testing/testnet-phase-2#testing-focus
- Phase #2 rewards: https://docs.cortensor.network/community-and-ecosystem/community-testing/testnet-phase-2#rewards

Phase #2 is about turning validation into a redundant, cost-efficient, fully instrumented trust layer - the foundation we need before deeper SLA pricing + agentic integrations land in Phase #3 / #4.

https://x.com/cortensor/status/2012497464256033216

https://farcaster.xyz/cortensor/0x1fb7c7c2