Season 1 snapshot has officially been taken, and Season 2 is now underway. A big congratulations, and a deep thank you to all those that participated in Season 1. You can find all the Season 1 conclusion details in our previous article, but if you’re ready to learn more about Season 2 keep reading.

Here is the timeline for Season 2:

• Start Date: Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 00:00 UTC

• End Date: Monday, December 16, 2024, 23:59 UTC

• Duration: 91 days, 13 weeks

The Rewards for Season 2 will be set to 6 million Taiko tokens:

• 5 million for participants

• 1 million for dApps

Now let’s dig into the new features we’re excited to introduce this Season…

We will be making a few key changes to the xp system:

1. Participants will no longer receive points for bridging any tokens into the Taiko ecosystem.

2. The formula that awards Transaction points has been modified to increase the xp for transactions that cost more. The new max xp per Transaction is 1000.

That means participants can earn points in three categories:

• Transaction - All transactions will earn xp based on the gas spent on them on whitelisted smart contracts.

• Transaction Value - Transactions can also earn points based on the Value being exchanged between users and smart contracts. This remains the same from Season 1.

• Proposed Blocks - Participants who are running our core infrastructure will also earn points for proposing new blocks.

As a thank you to all the participants in Season 1, we will be giving everyone a percentage of their Season 1 xp as a head start to their Season 2 xp. Additionally, participants will receive a flat boost to their Season 2 xp for holding a Taikoon and/or unique Season 1 Faction Badges (no duplicates, Ravers, Robots, Bouncers, Masters, Monk, Androids, Drummers, and Shinto). To keep it fair we have capped this boost to 150,000 xp. This means that if you qualify for the maximum boost, you will have just over a full-day advantage over new participants joining in Season 2.

You can calculate your Season 2 xp boost with the following formula:

• Taikoon: +50k

• Unique Faction Badges: +4k each (if the set is incomplete) -OR- Full set of Faction Badges: +50k

carryOverXP = baseXP ^ 0.7 + Taikoon boost + Badge boost

For example, if you have 6,000,000 xp and you have a Taikoon and 4 unique Faction Badges it would look like this:

carryOverXP = 6,000,000 ^ 0.7 + 50,000 + (4,000 * 4) carryOverXP = 121,552.79 xp

We will also be updating the leaderboard so that your NFT multipliers will be reflected throughout the Season, instead of applying them only at the end. This will have a couple of different effects:

• The points you receive for each action will be multiplied only by the NFTs you held when you performed that action.

• Multipliers will no longer be applied retroactively. If you obtain a new multiplier NFT later in the Season, it will only multiply points for actions taken after it arrives in your wallet.

• Likewise, if you sell or transfer an NFT it will cease to give you the corresponding multiplier

This means the sooner you get a multiplier NFT the better!

In Season 1 participants collected 8 unique Faction Badges (Ravers, Robots, Bouncers, Masters, Monk, Androids, Drummers, and Shinto). It turns out all those Badges belonged to the same “Team”; the Devs. In this season we will be introducing 2 new Teams; the Whales and the Minnows. The introduction of all three Teams will play a thematic role throughout the Season. Each Team will have a corresponding Faction edition, meaning there will be a Dev Raver, a Minnow Raver, and Whale Raver, etc. for all Factions. With this change also comes a revised multiplier system where each Faction Badge Team will provide a multiplier to specific point categories (Transaction/Transaction Value/Proposed Block).

The Devs (S1 Badges) are the OGs, the ones that build and make things possible. They will continue to get an overall points multiplier on all actions. To balance things out we have lowered the global multiplier to 1.4x max. However, the Devs will also gain a multiplier to the points they get for proposing Taiko blocks on top of the overall bonus.

The Whales are the big bagged ones, they make splashes in DeFi. So they will get a multiplier on all Transaction Value points they earn.

The Minnows are small but plenty, what they lack in funds they make up for with activity. So they will get a multiplier on all Transaction points they earn.

The new formula for all Faction Team bonuses will be 0.05 * n where n is the number of Badges the participant owns when performing any action. (See below for more details)

Note: Participants are not required to pick a single Team to collect Badges for, but rather they are encouraged to collect the ones that suit their style and needs the best. The multipliers do stack, so for the max multiplier, a participant would need to collect them all.

Here is how all of the Faction Badges interact with each other and with the other NFTs that give multipliers:

• Snaefel Multiplier = 0.1 (unchanged from S1)

• Taikoon Multiplier = 1 (unchanged from S1)

• Devs Global Multiplier = 0.05 * Num Of Dev NFTs (max 1.4x)

• Devs Proposer Multiplier = TBA but likely similar

• Minnows Multiplier = 0.05 * Num Of Minnow NFTs (max 1.4x)

• Whales Multiplier = 0.05 * Num Of Whale NFTs (max 1.4x)

• Global Multiplier = 1 + Devs Global Multiplier + Snaefel Multiplier + Taikoon Multiplier (new max 2.5x)

• Proposer Points = TBA but likely similar

• Transaction Points = Base Tx Points * Minnows Multiplier

• Transaction Value Points = Base Tx Value Points * Whales Multiplier

• Base Points = Transaction Points + Transaction Value Points + Proposer points

• Season Points = Base Points * Global Multiplier

Unlike Season 1 where you could only obtain Badges through Trails, there will be several options for participants to engage with to complete their collection of Badges (24 in total). Here is what we have planned for you so far (there may be some additional ones to come).

To kick things off, the Taikoon holders can get excited for the first airdrop coming their way. Participants who were holding a Taikoon during the Season 1 snapshot will be eligible to receive a random edition of either a member of the Minnow Team or the Whale Team. Date TBD

A core mechanic in Season 2 will be the ability for participants to migrate a Season 1 Badge into a Season 2 badge. The basic concept is that participants will be able to deposit a Season 1 Badge into the smart contract, and it will have a 50/50 chance of becoming the corresponding Whale or Minnow Team. However, participants will also have the ability to influence which one they get, through a mechanism called Tampering. More details on how this will work will be revealed once the mechanism is deployed.

There will be a progression system through which participants will unlock the ability to mint additional Season 2 badges. Again the details of this progression system will be announced alongside the launching of this feature.

There is one more way for participants to earn Season 2 badges and that is through the largest feature that we will be adding this Season; the Faction Battle Arena!!! This feature will likely need its own article to fully explain, but we will give you the high-level intro here.

Participants will be able to register their Faction Badges in a Tournament where they will battle it out for fame, glory, and of course additional prizes. The first edition of the Faction Battle Arena will feature an auto-battler system that aligns with the theme of the new Teams. It only seems fitting that the Whales would be able to overpower the Minnows, the Minnows would be able to swarm and overtake the Devs, but the Devs would be able to outsmart and maneuver the Whales (Whales > Minnows > Devs > Whales).

Each NFT will have its own stats that are partially determined by their metadata and partially by chance. It will be a round-robin style Tournament and prizes will be determined by the leaderboard at the end of each competition. We plan to hold several Tournaments throughout the season and have the ability to specialize them as they go on to keep things exciting.

Despite the long list of features we can reveal today, this is only a fraction of the ideas and plans we have in the pipeline being prepared for this and future Seasons. We anticipate you may have some clarifying questions, so we will hold an AMA on September 17, 2024, in our Discord. If we’ve missed anything, we will prepare FAQs and additional articles to provide more details on the features as they roll out.

We want to thank you all again for joining us on this journey into Trailblazers Season 2 and beyond!!! See you on the Trail.

(1) If the number of the same points exceeds the percentile, we reserve the right to divide up the total reward of that tier among all the people in that same tier (2) Taiko reserves the right to modify the above-mentioned conditions (3) Sybil detection will be applied throughout the season. Taiko reserves the right to blacklist any address from the Trailblazers program (4) Only transaction/contract interactions with the contracts in the dApp leaderboard will be considered to reduce spam

Explore open positions on our job board.

Get the latest from Taiko:

• Website: https://taiko.xyz.

• Discord: https://discord.gg/taikoxyz.

• GitHub: https://github.com/taikoxyz.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/taikoxyz.

• Community forum: https://community.taiko.xyz.

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@taikoxyz.

• Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/taikoxyz.

Contribute to Taiko on GitHub and earn a GitPOAP! You will also be featured as a contributor on our README. Get started with the contributing manual.