The Moonbase Alpha TestNet¶

Updated December 9th, 2021

Note

With the release of Moonbase Alpha v8, the minimum gas price has been set to 1 GDEV (similar to GWei on Ethereum). This might be a breaking change if you've previously specified a gas price of 0 for your deployment.

Goal¶

The first Moonbeam TestNet, named Moonbase Alpha, aims to provide developers with a place to start experimenting and building on Moonbeam in a shared environment. Since Moonbeam will be deployed as a parachain on Kusama and Polkadot, we want our TestNet to reflect our production configuration. For this reason, we decided that it needed to be a parachain-based configuration rather than a Substrate development setup.

In order to collect as much feedback as possible and provide fast issue resolution, we have set up a Discord with a dedicated Moonbase AlphaNet channel.

Initial Configuration¶

Moonbase Alpha has the following configuration:

Moonbase Alpha runs as a parachain connected to a relay chain
The parachain has two collators (hosted by PureStake) that are collating blocks. External collators can join the network. Only the top 60 collator nodes by stake are chosen in the active set
The relay chain hosts three validators (hosted by PureStake) to finalize relay chain blocks. One of them is selected to finalize each block collated by Moonbeam's collators. This setup provides room to expand to a two-parachain configuration in the future
There are two RPC endpoints (hosted by PureStake). People can run full nodes to access their own private RPC endpoints

TestNet Diagram

Features¶

The following features are available:

September 2020

Fully-emulated Ethereum block production in Substrate (Ethereum pallet)
Dispatchable functions to interact with the Rust EVM implementation (EVM pallet)
Native Ethereum RPC support (Web3) in Substrate (Frontier). This provides compatibility with Ethereum developer tools such as MetaMask, Remix, and Truffle

October 2020

Event subscription support (pub/sub), which is a missing component on the Web3 RPC side and commonly used by DApp developers. You can find a tutorial on how to subscribe to events here
Support for the following precompile contracts: ecrecover, sha256, ripemd160 and the identity function (or datacopy)

November 2020

Unification of Substrate and Ethereum accounts under the H160 format, an effort we are calling Unified Accounts. Consequently, there will be only one kind of account in the system represented by a single address
Upgrades to the event subscription support, adding the possibility of using wildcards and conditional formatting for topics. You can find more information here
Polkadot.js Apps now natively supports H160 addresses and ECDSA keys. You can use your Ethereum-style address for Substrate functions (when available) like staking, balances, and governance. You can find more information here

December 2020

Updated to the newest version of the Polkadot parachain protocol (Parachains V1), which fixed several issues with node syncing, paving the way to have multiple collators to sync in the same parachain
Multiple improvements to our Etheruem Compatibility features:
- Event subscription ID now returns an Ethereum-styled subscription ID
- Fixed gas estimation issues for specific usecases
- Added support for revert reason message
- Support for Ethereum transactions without ChainId

January 2021

Added a custom version of the Staking pallet (for testing and development purposes only)
Added support for querying pending transactions while they are in the pool
Fixed some issues when retrieving past events and other minor fixes related to smart contract events
Multiple under-the-hood improvements that include an optimization of the EVM execution time, making it 15-50 times faster
Support for the modexp precompile contracts

February 2021

Public release of the custom Staking pallet. Now token holders can delegate candidates and earn rewards
Added the Democracy pallet. Token holders can now submit proposals and vote on them
Updated to the latest version of Frontier RPC, which increases EVM execution efficiency by a factor of 5
The gas limit has been bump to 15M per block, with a 13M per transaction limit

April 2021

Added support for Ethereum debug/tracing modules. These are turned off by default, to use them you need to spin up a full-node and turn on the feature
Fixed block propagation issues so that is no longer limited to collator candidates, improving network stability
Added Councils and Technical Committee, expanding governance features
Staking module has been refactored, with new names to improve the end-user experience
Added three new precompiles: Bn128Add, Bn128Mul and Bn128Pairing

May 2021

Added the Treasury pallet, to bring Treasury functionalities to Moonbase Alpha. Two separate treasuries were set up: one receiving 20% of the transaction fees and governed by democracy/councils, and the other receiving 30% of the block rewards that will serve to secure future parachain slots
Added the Proxy pallet, which enables the use of Proxy accounts on Moonbase Alpha
Introduced a new consensus mechanism, called Nimbus. Nimbus provides different filters to choose a random subset of the current active collator pool to produce the next block. Furthermore, block authors now sign blocks using session keys, which are mapped via an extrinsic to an H160 address for rewards payment. You can read more about Nimbus here
Added a Staking precompiled contract contract at address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000800. An interface to interact with the contract can be found on this link
Added preliminary logs bloom filtering to match user requests through Frontier. This feature was further optmized to achieve faster response times and a more predictable performance
Added the parachain Crowdloan pallet to test the distribution of rewards
Many improvements that aim to enhance network stability
Minimum gas price has been increased to 1 GDEV (analog to GWei on Ethereum)

Release Notes¶

For more details regarding the updates of Moonbase Alpha, please refer to the following release notes:

Connect to Moonbase Alpha¶

Network Endpoints¶

Moonbase Alpha has two types of endpoints available for users to connect to: one for HTTPS and one for WSS.

If you're looking for your own endpoints suitable for production use, you can check out the Endpoint Providers section of our documentation. Otherwise, to get started quickly you can use one of the following public HTTPS or WSS endpoints:

HTTPS¶

OnFinality

https://moonbeam-alpha.api.onfinality.io/public

PureStake

https://rpc.api.moonbase.moonbeam.network

WSS¶

OnFinality

wss://moonbeam-alpha.api.onfinality.io/public-ws

PureStake

wss://wss.api.moonbase.moonbeam.network

To connect to the Moonbase Alpha relay chain, you can use the following WS Endpoint:

PureStake

wss://frag-moonbase-relay-rpc-ws.g.moonbase.moonbeam.network

Quick Start¶

For the web3.js library, you can create a local Web3 instance and set the provider to connect to Moonbase Alpha (both HTTP and WS are supported):

const Web3 = require('web3'); //Load Web3 library
.
.
.
//Create local Web3 instance - set Moonbase Alpha as provider
const web3 = new Web3('https://rpc.api.moonbase.moonbeam.network');

For the ethers.js library, define the provider by using ethers.providers.StaticJsonRpcProvider(providerURL, {object}) and setting the provider URL to Moonbase Alpha:

const ethers = require('ethers');

const providerURL = 'https://rpc.api.moonbase.moonbeam.network';
// Define Provider
const provider = new ethers.providers.StaticJsonRpcProvider(providerURL, {
    chainId: 1287,
    name: 'moonbase-alphanet'
});

Any Ethereum wallet should be able to generate a valid address for Moonbeam (for example, MetaMask).

Chain ID¶

Moonbase Alpha TestNet chain ID is: 1287, which is 0x507 in hex.

Relay Chain¶

To connect to the Moonbase Alpha relay chain, you can use the following WS Endpoint:

PureStake

wss://frag-moonbase-relay-rpc-ws.g.moonbase.moonbeam.network

Telemetry¶

You can see current Moonbase Alpha telemetry information visiting this link.

Tokens¶

Tokens on Moonbase Alpha, named DEV, will be issued on demand. DEV tokens hold no value and can be freely acquired. Currently, there are two ways you can get access to this token: through a Discord bot, or manually.

Discord - Mission Control¶

To request tokens automatically, we've created a Discord bot (named Mission Control ) that will automatically send a maximum of 5 DEV tokens every 24 hours (per Discord user) when you enter your address. You can check it out on our Discord channel. For more information, please visit this site.

Under the category "Miscellaneous", you will find our AlphaNet bot channel. Enter the following message, replacing <enter-address-here-> with your H160 address:

!faucet send <enter-address-here->

Manual Procedure¶

For token requests of more than the limited account allowed by our Discord bot, contact a moderator directly via our Discord channel. We are happy to provide the tokens needed to test your applications.

Proof of Stake¶

The Moonbase Alpha TestNet is a fully decentralized Delegated Proof of Stake network where users of the network can delegate collator candidates to produce blocks and "earn rewards" for testing purposes. Please note, that the Moonbase Alpha DEV tokens have no real value. The number of candidates in the active set will be subject to governance. The active set will consist of the top candidates by stake, including delegations.

Limitations¶

This is the first TestNet for Moonbeam, so there are some limitations.

Some precompiles are yet to be included. You can check a list of supported precompiles here. However, all built-in functions are available.

Since the release of Moonbase Alpha v6, the maximum gas limit per block has been set to 15M, with a maximum gas limit per transaction of 12.995M.

Users only have access to the Moonbeam parachain. In future networks, we will add access to the relay chain so users can test transferring tokens.