🧪 Testnet Phase #1 Recap – Integration, Load, and Engine Expansion

Phase #1 was the first structured Testnet week where we focused on one thing: break the pipeline, harden the pipeline, and prove the system scales under real usage across both Testnet-0 (Arbitrum Sepolia) and Testnet-1 (COR #L3).

🔹 Incentivized Manual Testing (E2E + Payments)
- Daily manual testing by community testers across different models and task types
- End-to-end validation: routing → miner execution → validator checks → results
- Exercised both Pay-to-Use (pay per task) and Stake-to-Use (stake-based access / rate-limits)
- General stress-testing across components to surface edge cases early

🔹 Automated Load Testing – 130K+ Tasks Executed
- Automated task jobs ran continuously during Phase #1
- 130,000+ tasks executed, validating stability and throughput under sustained traffic

🔹 Dashboard UI Refinement
- Multiple rounds of UI polish across session/task views
- Improved navigation and usability during high-volume sessions

🔹 #Ollama Engine Support + 65+ Models Live
- Added #Ollama LLM engine support across Testnet-0 and Testnet-1
- 65+ models are now supported (Q1 target: 100+)
- Current limitation is disk footprint: nodes need many models stored to serve on request
- Next up: network-driven model auto-assignment + model-usage-aware routing
- Also added additional embedding models via Ollama to support Validator v2/v3 tuning, since the current embedding stack shows GPU-specific issues on some setups

🔹 SessionQueue Scaling – Read Throughput & Pagination
- Phase #1 load exposed a read bottleneck at high task volumes
- Added missing foundations: precomputed task stats per session + scalable pagination
- Dashboard + Router can now handle large query/read workloads under single sessions

🔹 Corgent Experimental – /delegate + /validate
- First iterations to validate rough E2E behavior and clarify exact requirements
- Established what needs to be strict vs flexible for agent-facing flows

🔹 Router Experiments: #MCP + #x402 + #ERC8004
- #MCP, #x402 and #ERC8004 components are functional inside Router Node today
- Still require refinement and full integration
- These will be re-iterated during Phase #3–#4 to land as router-native primitives

🔹 Roadmap 2026 Docs Ready (Cortensor Network + Corgent)
- Roadmap documentation is now published and aligned for 2026 planning

Phase #1 proved the pipeline can survive both real usage and sustained automated load. Next phases will build on this foundation toward SLA-driven routing, tighter payment flows, and deeper agentic integrations.

https://x.com/cortensor/status/2005225713801277648

https://farcaster.xyz/cortensor/0xc94e762e

🧪 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

🧪 Testnet Phase #2 - Recap

Phase #2 delivered a stable baseline, real traction on the self-managed L3 track, and measurable progress on the trust layer (PoI/PoUW) + observability - plus the groundwork for more agent-ready router surfaces going into Phase #3.

✅ What We Completed in Phase #2

🔹 Network stability held as a usable baseline
- Background/network tasks stayed stable enough that Phase #2 stats became real signal (good enough to drive routing decisions)

🔹 Self-managed COR L3 is now live as a real track (Testnet-1a / @Arbitrum Orbit)
- Completed the apple-to-apple L3 comparison and stood up Testnet-1a as the self-managed $COR L3 environment
- Migration + load-testing momentum shifted toward self-managed L3 so results aren’t theoretical

🔹 Routing filters upgraded
- Added QuantitativeStats + QualitativeStats as secondary filters to improve reliability/behavior/consistency weighting (not just uptime)

🔹 Validator engine experiments shipped and rolling out (#Ollama + embeddings)
- Started rolling out Ollama judge models + multiple embedding variants
- Reduced environment-specific issues while improving scoring consistency + throughput across mixed CPU/GPU setups

🔹 Router Node surfaces expanded for agent workflows
- Live + exercised: /delegate v1/v2, /validate v1/v2, and /factcheck
- @BardielTech dashboard now includes mock/example datasets to validate delegation/validation UX end-to-end (more iteration next phases)

🔹 #ERC8004 mainnet presence established (Corgent + Bardiel registered)
- Corgent + Bardiel are now registered as #ERC8004 mainnet agents backed by the Router Node MCP/prototype stack

🔹 L3 ops hardening + playbooks completed
- Built an ops playbook for self-managed L3 including backups, snapshots, and disk space estimates (plus recovery-oriented runbooks)

🔹 Pre-mainnet environments progressed
- Pre-mainnet setups/environments are now in place (deeper dry-run experiments next)

📌 What Phase #3 Will Focus On

🔹 More agent-ready Router Node iteration
Phase #3 shifts more toward agentic readiness - tightening and expanding the router surface so agents have better primitives to build on (more iteration on /delegate, /validate, factcheck, and likely additional endpoints needed for agent workflows).

🔹 Commit to the self-managed L3 path
We’re now aligning around the self-managed $COR #L3 @Arbitrum Orbit track as the forward path. Phase #3 will treat this as the primary environment for deeper testing.

🔹 Pre-mainnet experiments (mainnet-identical setup)
During Phase #3, we’ll run pre-mainnet experiments designed to be identical to mainnet configuration, so we can validate costs, ops, reliability, and agent-facing flows under realistic conditions before going live.

https://x.com/cortensor/status/2026924572700774613