Skywire Reward Eligibility Rules

We have transitioned to a new system with daily reward distribution

• • The rules in this article may change at any time, depending on if there are problems
• • We will attempt to address any issues reported via @skywire Telegram channel
• • Reward corrections are not possible after the rewards for a day have been distributed.

The required minimum Skywire version will be incremented periodically.

Introduction

All information about rewards will be published here. Please ask for clarification in the @skywire Telegram channel if some things appear to not be covered.

Please join @SkywirePSA for public service announcements (PSA) regarding the skywire network, update notices, changes to this article, etc.

Reward distribution notifications are on telegram @skywire_reward.

Information about reward distribution as well as other metrics for the skywire network can be found at fiber.skywire.dev

Uptime Reward Pools

816000 Skycoin are distributed annually to those visors which meet the mimimum uptime and the other requirements listed below, in two equally sized reward pools.

The reward amount for a day is evenly divided among those eligible participants for a given reward pool on the basis of having met uptime and other requirements, for the previous day.

A total of up to ~1117.808 Skycoin per pool are distributed daily in non leap-years.

A total of up to ~1114.754 Skycoin per pool are distributed daily in leap-years.

The two reward pools are differentiated by architecture ; one pool for ARM / RISC / MIPS architectures, the other pool for AMD64 / x86_64 / i686 architecture machines. The requirements are otherwise identical for reward eligibility in these pools.

Rules & Requirements

To receive Skycoin rewards for running skywire, the following requirements must be met:

• 1) Minimum skywire version v1.3.28 - Cutoff February 1st 2024

• 2) 75% uptime per day minimum is required to be eligible to receive rewards

• 3) The visor must be an ARM or RISC architecture SBC running on approved hardware

• 4) Visors must be running on the skywire production deployment with a config that is updated on every version. No default keys or addresses of this configuration may be removed - but you can add keys where applicable.

• 5) Only 1 (one) visor per machine - virtual machines are ineligible

• 6) Up to 8 (eight) visors may each receive 1 (one) reward share per location (ip address) - with 8 shares divided between all visors at that ip address which achieved the minimum uptime.

• 7) A valid skycoin address must be set for the visor

• 8) The visor must be connected to the DMSG network

• 9) Transports can be established to the visor

• 10) The visor responds to Transport Setup-Node requests

• 11) The visor responds to pings - needed for latency-based rewards

• 12) The visor produces transport bandwidth logs - needed for bandwidth-based rewards

• 13) The visor produces a survey when queried over dmsg by any keys in the survey_whitelist array by default

Exceptions for Deployment Changes with dmsghttp-config (Chinese users)

All the production deployment services may be accessed by the visor over the dmsg network when the visor runs with a dmsghttp config.

This type of config is generated automatically based on region via:

to circumvent ISP blocking of http requests.

In order to bootstrap the visor’s to connection to the dmsg network (via TCP connection to an individual dmsg server) the dmsghttp-config.json is provided with the skywire binary release.

In the instance that the skywire production deployment changes - specifically the dmsg servers:

• • it will be necessary to update to the next version or package release which fixes the dmsg servers. OR
• • it will be necessary to manually update the dmsghttp-config.json which is provided by your skywire installation.

Currently, there is no mechanism for updating the dmsghttp-config.json which does not require an http request ; a request which may be blocked depending on region.

In this instance, the visor will not connect to any service because it is not connected to the dmsg network, so it will not be possible for the visor to accumulate uptime or for the reward system to collect the survey, which are prerequisites for reward eligibility.

As a consequence of this; any visors running a dmsghttp-config, and hence any visors running in regions such as China, the minimum version requirement for obtaining rewards is not only the latest available version, but the latest release of the package unless the dmsghttp-config.json is updated manually within your installation.

Verifying Requirements & Eligibility

1) Version

View the version of skywire you are running with:

NOTE: the uptime tracker and other services consider the visor’s config version - not the actual binary version. It is expected that the visor’s config is re-generated on every update in order to include any config changes which may have been introduced

The update deadlines specify the version of software required as of (i.e. on or before) the specified date in order to maintain reward eligibility:

Reward eligibility after 10-01-2024 requires Skywire v1.3.26

Requirement established 09-24-2024

Rewards Cutoff date for updating 10-01-2024

Reward eligibility after 02-01-2025 requires Skywire v1.3.28

Requirement established 01-09-2025

Rewards Cutoff date for updating 02-01-2025

Uptime

Daily uptime statistics for all visors may be accessed via the

• • uptime tracker

or using skywire cli

For example with a locally running visor:

The uptime for all visors are tracked via the visor connecting to the uptime tracker at regular intervals (currently, every 5 minutes).

It’s possible to check uptime for a given visor’s public key in the following ways:

• • Directly in the browser

• • Using an http client such as curl with an appropriate json parser such as jq - for exaple:

• • Using skywire cli ut is the recommended approach, as it avoids rate-limiting of requests by caching the data which is fetched from the uptime tracker

Architecture

We are pleased to state as of November 1, 2024 Rewards are open to all architectures, with a reward pool added for non-ARM architectures (amd64 & i386)

Deployment

The deployment your visor is running on can be verified by comparing the services configured in the visor’s .json config against conf.skywire.skycoin.com

The service configuration will be automatically updated any time a config is generated or regenerated.

For those visors in china or those running a dmsghttp-config, compare the dmsghttp-config of your current installation with the dmsghttp-config on the develop branch of github.com/skycoin/skywire

The same data in a different format should be displayed in the dmsg-discovery all_servers page. Ensure that the dmsghttp-config.json in your installation has the same ip addresses and ports for the dmsg server keys.

The data from the dmsg discovery should be considered authoritative or current.

Per Machine Limit

Virtual machines are not eligible for rewards, as there is no way to limit the number of instances of skywire running on the same machine if they are running in virtual machines.

The visor is determined to be running on a virtual machine if a hypervisor is listed in it’s survey such as kvm, xenhvm, or hyperv - (not to be confused with a skywire hypervisor)

Multiple instances of skywire which are otherwise determined to be running on the same machine (via their mac address) will have one reward share divided between all the skycoin reward addresses which are set for those visors.

Per IP Limit

A maximum of 8 reward shares per ip address is divided between all visors which made uptime at a given ip address.

For example, if 9 visors at a given ip address meet the minimum uptime requirement, the reward share for each visor will be 8/9ths of a share (~0.8888) which sum to a total of ~7.99999 shares.

Skycoin Address

The skycoin address to be rewarded can be set from the cli:

or via the hypervisor UI.

the example above shows the genesis address for the skycoin blockchain. Please do not use the genesis address.

It is highly recommended to set the reward address in the file ‘/etc/skywire.conf’ by adding this line to the file:

PLEASE DO NOT USE THE GENESIS ADDRESS!

Add your skycoin address there and run:

on linux (assumes you have installed the package)

If this file does not exist for you, it can be created with

If you do this, YOU MUST UNCOMMENT THE FOLLOWING LINES OF THE FILE:

you can open the file in an editor to make that change, for instance nano

Connection To DMSG Network

For any given visor, the system hardware survey, transport setup-node survey, and transport bandwidth logs are collected hourly by the reward system over dmsg.

This can be verified by examining the visor’s logging:

The collected surveys and transport bandwidth log files should be visible in the survey index here:

fiber.skywire.dev/log-collection/tree

An example of one such entry:

Note: the transport bandwidth logging CSV files will only exist if it was generated; i.e. if there were transports to that visor which handled traffic.

Note: the system survey (node-info.json) will only exist if the reward address is set.

If your visor is not generating such logging or errors are indicated, please reach out to us on telegram @skywire for assistance

Transportability

It is not required that a visor run any service, such as a vpn or socks5 proxy server, which permits direct access to the internet from your ip address. However, it is required that the visor is able to act as a hop along a route. A module is active at runtime which checks that transports may be established to that visor - the visor creates a dmsg transport to itself every few minutes to ensure transportability. If it’s not possible to create a dmsg transport to the same visor after three attempts,the visor will shut down automatically. It is expected that the visor will be restarted by a process control mechanism if the visor shuts down for any reason. In the officially supported linux packages, systemd will restart the visor if it stops; regardless of the exit status of the process.

Transport Setup Node

Previously, the transport setup node was run continuously as part of the reward system to ensure that visors were responding as expected to transport setup-node requests. However, there were intermittent issues with reliability of the results ; because there is no caching mechanism for responsiveness to transport setup-node requests as there exists for uptime.

Currently, the transport setup-nodes which are configured for the visor are included in the survey and verified as an eligibility requirement for rewards by the reward system.

Ping Latency metric

Not yet implemented

Transport Bandwidth Logs

The visor will only produce transport bandwidth logs in response to transports being established to them. These are collected, along with the system survey, and are displayed on the reward system here

In the future, it is anticipated that the transport bandwidth logs and ping metric will be collected by the transport discovery automatically.

Survey

On setting the skycoin reward address, the visor will generate and serve a system survey over dmsg.

Only keys which are whitelisted in the survey_whitelist array of the visor’s config will have access to collect the survey.

To print the survey (approximately) as it would be served, one can use:

The purpose of the survey is strictly for checking eligibility requirements numbers 3 through 7.

Setting a skycoin address is considered as consent for collecting the survey ; the survey is not generated unless you set a skycoin address

We respect your privacy.

Verifying Other Requirements

If the visor is not able to meet the eligibility requirements numbers 8 through 13, that is usually not the fault of the user - nor is it something the user is expected to troubleshoot on their own at this time. Please ask for assistance on telegram @skywire

Reward System Overview

The skycoin reward address may be set for each visor using skywire cli or for all visors connected to a hypervisor from the hypervisor UI

The skycoin reward address is in a text file contained in the “local” folder (local_path in the skywire config file) i.e local/reward.txt.

The skycoin reward address is also included with the system hardware survey and served, along with transport logs, via dmsghttp.

The system survey (‘local/node-info.json’) is fetched hourly by the reward system via

along with transport bandwidth logs.

The index of the collected files may be viewed at fiber.skywire.dev/log-collection/tree

Once collected from the nodes, the surveys for those visors which met uptime are checked to verify hardware and other requirements, etc.

The system survey is only made available to those keys which are whitelisted for survey collection, but is additionally available to any hypervisor or dmsgpty_whitelist keys set in the config for a given visor.

Setting a skycoin address is considered as consent for collecting the survey.

The public keys which require to be whitelisted in order to collect the surveys, for the purpose of reward eligibility verification, should populate in the visor’s config automatically when the config is generated.

Reward System Funding & Distributions

The reward system is funded on a monthly basis. Sometimes there are unexpected or unavoidable delays in the funding. In these instances, rewards will be distributed based on the data generated when the system is funded. In some instances, it’s necessary to discard previous reward data and do multiple distributions to handle backlog of reward system funds.

We do our best to ensure fair reward distribution - but the system itself is not infinitely flexible. If there is no good way to rectify historical or undistributed rewards backlog, it will be distributed going forward as multiple distributions on the same day to those current active participants in the network.

Deployment Outages

While we do our best to maintain the skywire production deployment, there have been instances of issues or outages in the past. We attempt to correct these outages as soon as possible and avoid recurrent disruptions.

The policy for handling rewards in the instance of a deployment outage is to repeat the distribution for the last day where uptime was unaffected by the outage; for the duration of the outage.

Hardware

As of November 2024, skywire rewards are open to all computer hardware and architectures.

If there is not a release for your desired architecture, we can attempt to add it, on request.