We are ending testnet incentives for tunneling from Sepolia to Hemi starting Monday, October 7.

TL;DR: In the interests of good online citizenship, we are ending testnet incentives for tunneling from Sepolia to Hemi starting Monday, October 7. To perform one final more extreme load test before we move incentives to on-L2 activity, everyone can earn up to 25K points if they do 25 tunneling transactions (1k points/tx) on Sunday, October 6th. The asset size or type of the tunneling transaction does not matter.

Recently, we’ve seen an explosion in tunneling activity from Sepolia to Hemi as part of our incentivized testnet program. Tunnel transactions are currently consuming over 60% of all gas on Sepolia and have resulted in fees increasing by 20-50x to levels several times higher than ever before on Sepolia. Over the past 14 days, users have spent over 103K sepETH in tunneling fees.

This has been a fantastic pressure test on Hemi’s ETH tunneling system. The protocol’s tunneling mechanism handled this load well, and we’ve discovered an edge case in gas limit estimation from ETH L1 nodes which requires us to implement a UI workaround to ensure proper operation during times of high load once we go to mainnet.

Online Citizenship

We understand that this extreme load on the Sepolia network has interrupted others’ use of the network for testing their own applications. We want to minimize this negative impact while ensuring we adequately test our protocol. 

Program Planning and Next Steps

As there is limited additional benefit in continuing this load test as-is, we are modifying our incentives to create one final day of even more extreme load testing. Afterwards, we will move our incentives to load-testing our L2 directly. By Monday, we expect Sepolia to return to normal operation for the rest of the community.

During the load-testing “Open Season” day starting on Sunday, October 6th at 12:01am UTC, anyone will be able to earn points for up to 25 tunneling transactions (1K points per tx) before all tunneling incentives end at 11:59pm UTC. Each tunneling transaction will receive 1K points regardless of the size or type of asset tunneled; you can tunnel any amount of sepETH, USDT, USDC, or DAI. 

At maximum, tunneling transactions will grow by ~40% during this day, meaning the total points awarded for this “Open Season” day will not be significantly higher (and may actually be slightly lower) than we are currently awarding for tunneling on a daily basis, but each individual user has the opportunity to earn up to ~6 days worth of tunneling points if they are able to push the maximum number of tunneling transactions through, and they no longer have to acquire specific amounts of different assets like before.

We greatly appreciate everyone who has participated so far, and look forward to migrating to incentivizing load on our L2 directly in the near future.

[Edit: 2024-10-04-0936 ET — Further clarity in subhead.]