Farming Rewards Update - January 2024 [Closed]

#1

Hello everyone,

Here’s a quick update around the situation with minting and our plans for the future of the ThreeFold Grid.

We first would like to thank all of our farmers for supporting the project and helping us to improve technologies including the Farmerbot. After discussions among the team, we are planning to distribute additional farming rewards from the ThreeFold Foundation treasury to certain farmers who have been using the Farmerbot.

The additional rewards will be distributed as follows (for minting cycles from November until further notice):

  • For nodes that lost a month’s rewards for not waking up within 30 minutes, we will calculate the impact of deducting only the uptime since the last wake up event, rather than losing an entire month
  • Payment will be made for the difference between what the farmer received from minting and the amount calculated with the reduced slashing

TFT are only minted for nodes that meet the minting criteria as checked by the minting code. Since the current rules have been approved by a DAO vote for the relevant GEP and executed correctly, no immediate changes will be made to the minting code. As we recently announced, our plan is to stop the minting of new TFT at the end of Q1 and move to distributing farming rewards entirely from the treasury via a cooperative structure (equal to or greater than what farmers receive from minting currently). This shift will provide us with an opportunity to reevaluate how we check that nodes managed by Farmerbot are sufficiently available to contribute to the Grid.

With that in mind, we’ll be proposing one or more DAO votes soon to ask the community to approve the new approach. These will include provisions that nodes must meet certain quality requirements around uptime and bandwidth in order to receive rewards. This will help maintain a stable, reliable, and high-quality grid. The new requirements will be phased in along with the cooperative based rewards.

This shift will result in a more flexible system, where farmers are reachable and have a chance to respond to issues to avoid or reduce lost rewards. This can include notifications for farmers if their nodes fail to wake up, so they can resolve any issue and boot the nodes manually if needed. Ultimately the cooperative and the guardians will be tasked with the same goal as today’s minting rules: to make sure that nodes receiving rewards are available and able to run workloads.

We’ll share more soon for the timeline for distribution of additional rewards from the treasury. Since minting will continue under the existing rules for now, we will proceed with December’s minting as soon as possible.

5 Likes
Minting Update January 2024
Farmerbot Minting Bonus [Closed]
#2

Will this effect existing nodes?

2 Likes
#3

That’s the idea, yes. Uptime should be no surprise for existing farmers, as its always been part of the farming definitions, just the implementation has been deferred. As for bandwidth, this has also been suggested as a future requirement in the wiki pages on farming since at least v2 (more recently as something that can be added via GEP).

As I mentioned in the farmers chat, we don’t have any intention to propose that farmers be required to provide extra bandwidth for idle/standby nodes. Rather, farmers should be ready to scale up their connection as needed with growing utilization levels. Farmers who can’t or won’t should not continue to get paid for capacity their infrastructure can’t support.

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#4

I am quite concerned about this uptime requirement for farming rewards.
Mostly because in those areas where we need more Nodes often the Internet or Power TGrid goes offline for hours or even days.
Instead of creating incentives this change would create a high barrier for farmers in developing countries.

Some ideas:
Define (developing) countries that have power and/or internet outages higher than 0,5%
Put an extra rule for those countries to receive aliquote shares
Let famers create failover clusters themselves or make it a grid feature so famers can define a failover farm themselves.

1 Like
#5

Sorry to tag along with this conversation, but its weird that we are discussing this and suddenly I didn’t get my rewards for last month paid out in this January. Is that still going to happen or is it that I am not able to receive under the new criteria? My impression was that for me nothing changed and I still met all criteria. Do I need to connect with Farmerbot or not?
With the planned new way of distribution of rewards, will that be done on a consistent date?

#6

December’s minting (paid in Jan) is expected to take place anytime. There has been a delay, because the team have been addressing concerns from November’s payouts.

The new criteria should go into effect when minting stops at the end of Q1.

With the planned new way of distribution of rewards, will that be done on a consistent date?

Generally minting happens between the 5th-8th of the month, sometimes it’s occurred earlier as well. However, with the “new way of distribution of rewards”, it isn’t confirmed just yet if it will happen on a specific date. If a date is finalized, rest assured you can expect it to be announced to the community.

#7

This seems like a great idea! It could not only benefit areas with unstable power/internet but also farmers that rely on 100% intermittent power for their 3nodes (eg. Wind).

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#8
#9