The Infrastructure Guarantee: Node Availability During the Event and What Happens If It Fails

The commitment

From the plan: the core team guarantees availability of the testnet node during the 48 hours of the event. In case of incident, the incident-response playbook applies and participants are notified in the announcements channel.

What it means on this network

Two validators, both operated by the team, both in one data centre. GRANDPA needs both for finality. If one restarts, blocks keep coming (Aura) but nothing finalizes until it is back — participants see included without finalized. If the hosting provider has an incident, both go down together.

The guarantee is therefore: someone is awake, watching empoorio_finalized_head_age_seconds, for 48 hours, with the playbook open. It is not a guarantee of no downtime; on this topology nobody could make one.

What participants should do

1. Run your own full node for anything beyond a wallet — a build, an indexer, a test loop. The public RPC bans an IP at ~10 requests/s for an hour, and a hackathon is a burst of exactly that. A full node syncs in minutes from the repository's chainspec.raw.json.
2. Design for the three states. Show included; act on finalized. If finality pauses, your demo still shows correct behaviour.
3. Watch the announcements channel. Runtime upgrades are frozen during the event; any incident is posted there with the playbook step in progress.
4. Keep your own record of transaction hashes. If the explorer's indexer lags, chain_getBlock on any node still proves your submission.

What the playbook covers

Validator compromise (stop, leave the set, rotate keys, move funds, preserve logs, redeploy clean); finality stall (identify the silent validator, restart, watch the lag collapse); bad runtime upgrade (rollback per manifest — not applicable during a freeze); RPC abuse (the ban rule; a second endpoint at rpc2).

What it cannot cover

A provider outage taking both nodes. Until the validator set has a second geography — a decentralization-gate item — that risk is accepted and stated. The plan's guarantee is a staffing commitment, and this page says exactly how far it reaches.

Based on TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md §5, INCIDENT_RESPONSE_PLAYBOOKS.md and DECENTRALIZATION_REPORT.md.