ARPA Roadmap Update: TestNet Deployed on Ethereum, 1st 2023 Milestone Achieved

4 min readApr 12, 2023

Dear Arparians,

We are excited to announce that ARPA Network is making a significant stride with the successful launch of TestNet! With that, early developers can easily build DApp prototypes that leverage the power of the ARPA-BLS network via the API we provide by deploying smart contracts on the public Ethereum testnet.

If you are a developer building the following tools, we invite you to check out the ARPA TestNet:

Random Number Generator for projects of lotteries, gaming, or token distributions;
Multi-party computation tool that preserves privacy;
Decentralized voting systems, for DAO governance for example;
Decentralized access control tool for shared resources;
Decentralized and privacy-preserving identity management system;
Signature middleware for secure atomic swaps;

What Was Done Before TestNet

In late 2022, ARPA started building BLS Threshold Signature Schemes (BLS-TSS) and published the new Whitepaper.

The new ARPA Network is designed to serve as a blockchain-agnostic infrastructure that generates on-chain BLS threshold signatures for a variety of use cases, such as verifiable Random Number Generator (RNG), secure wallet, decentralized asset custody, cross-chain bridge, and more.

Our roadmap accounts for progress in cryptographic fundamentals, blockchain integration, application layer adaptation, and smart contract function development.

Since we published our roadmap, it took a little less than three months for us to complete the first two milestones — the cryptographic protocol prototype and DevNet. Now here comes the TestNet.

ARPA TestNet Development Updates

This section highlights the recent enhancements in our testing and deployment strategies since our previous DevNet release, including improvements in unit, integration, regression, and fault tolerance tests. We will also discuss the upcoming milestones, including the deployment of smart contracts to the Ethereum testnet and the opportunities this creates for early developers.

Expanded and refined testing strategies:

Enhanced unit tests: Strengthened our function-level testing, incorporating additional edge cases and test scenarios to ensure code reliability and consistency.
Improved integration tests: Optimized the evaluation of interactions between components, focusing on seamless interoperability and system-wide performance.
Advanced scenario tests: Building upon our previous DevNet release, we have developed more complex and realistic scenarios to assess the network’s behavior in various real-world situations.
Fault tolerance tests: Further tested the network’s robustness and recoverability to ensure its resilience against power loss, network congestion, and other potential disruptions.

Deployment and testing automation:

Utilized Anvil for deploying a long-running ARPA network and a standalone Ethereum chain forked from Mainnet, streamlining the testing process.
Implemented a continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to automatically build and test code changes against all test scenarios, increasing confidence in the codebase.

Enhanced Robot Framework integration:

Leveraged the flexibility and composability of the Robot syntax to define more comprehensive and sophisticated test scenarios, while maintaining readability with plain English descriptions.
Developed custom Python libraries within the Robot Framework to facilitate the entire build-deploy-test cycle, increasing efficiency and reducing manual intervention.

Real-world emulation in the test environment:

Deployed nodes onto AWS EC2 instances across different regions to simulate real-world computing and networking conditions.
Used the Fault Injection Simulator to emulate power loss, network congestion, and connectivity issues, further ensuring the network’s reliability under adverse conditions.

Performance benchmarking and optimization strategies:

Conducted extensive performance benchmarks to measure network load, latency, and other key metrics, providing valuable insights for potential optimizations.
Identified areas for improvement and implemented targeted strategies to enhance the overall efficiency and performance of the network.

Stay Tuned for What’s Next

As we continue to refine the TestNet and incorporate feedback from our vibrant community, we are also preparing a bug bounty as we promised in the Roadmap. The program is expected to take place in May. For developers interested in debugging and building with us, please stay tuned with our Twitter or sign up here.

Following the bounty program, ARPA Network’s integration into BNB Chain and an incentivized staking program are approaching. As scheduled in the Roadmap, in Q2 we will see MainNet release together with these two milestones. If you are interested in running nodes of ARPA Network and gaining BLS computation rewards, please join the waitlist. Institutional node operators can also reach out to us at contact@arpanetwork.io.

About ARPA

ARPA Network (ARPA) is a decentralized secure computation network built to improve the fairness, security, and privacy of blockchains. ARPA threshold BLS signature network serves as the infrastructure of verifiable Random Number Generator (RNG), secure wallet, cross-chain bridge, and decentralized custody across multiple blockchains.

ARPA was previously known as ARPA Chain, a privacy-preserving Multi-party Computation (MPC) network founded in 2018. ARPA Mainnet has completed over 224,000 computation tasks in the past years. Our experience in MPC and other cryptography laid the foundation for our innovative threshold BLS signature schemes (TSS-BLS) system design and led us to today’s ARPA Network.

Randcast, a verifiable Random Number Generator (RNG), is the first application that leverages ARPA as infrastructure. Randcast offers a cryptographically generated random source with superior security and low cost compared to other solutions. Metaverse, game, lottery, NFT minting and whitelisting, key generation, and blockchain validator task distribution can benefit from Randcast’s tamper-proof randomness.

For more information about ARPA or to join our team, please contact us at contact@arpanetwork.io.

Learn about ARPA’s recent official news：

Twitter: @arpaofficial

Medium: https://medium.com/@arpa

Discord: https://dsc.gg/arpa-network

Telegram (English): https://t.me/arpa_community

Telegram (Turkish): https://t.me/Arpa_Turkey

Telegram (Việt Nam): https://t.me/ARPAVietnam

Telegram (Russian): https://t.me/arpa_community_ru

Telegram (Indonesian): https://t.me/Arpa_Indonesia

Telegram(Sri Lanka):https://t.me/arpa_srilanka

Telegram(Africa):https://t.me/arpaafrica