Season 1 · Retrospective
What We Proved, What We Learned, and What Comes Next
Season 1 Beta is officially complete. Thank you to everyone who participated.
Whether you ran a mobile node, tested apps, joined townhalls, submitted feedback, built an app, voted on changes, or helped others in Discord — you helped shape the first real version of this network.
We started Season 1 with a simple but ambitious question: can everyday people run a network from their phones?
But over the course of the season, it became more than that. With the launch of app layer, we have our first early full-stack version of the platform: people building apps, using them, improving them, voting on changes, running the network, and earning recognition for their contributions.
Now the job is to make it feel simple, reliable, and seamless.
The good
Season 1 gave us a lot to be proud of:
Just as important, the community showed up: 95% of participants completed at least one point-worthy activity. The network also held up longer than originally planned, and many mobile operators were able to run nodes successfully while letting the app sleep as intended. That was one of the most important proof points of Season 1.
We also expanded what user ownership can mean. In this new wave of AI, creating apps is becoming easier than ever — but most apps are still shaped by one person, one team, or one company. Our app layer changes that by letting users suggest changes, improve what gets shipped, vote on updates, and earn points for the value they contribute.
That user-contribution loop is what we’re most excited to keep testing in Season 2.
What the team worked on
Season 1 was not quiet behind the scenes. The core Usernode Labs team shipped 50+ builds over 4 months, shared daily updates, and kept improving the system while the testnet was live.
A few areas we focused on:
- Mobile node stability & monitoring: improving reliability across devices and building robust node monitoring systems.
- Identity and onboarding: supporting zkPassport flows and account-related edge cases.
- App layer: shipping the first version of community app-building, and supporting builders during the hackathon with PRs, broken previews, staging issues, and more.
What the community told us
Our end-of-season survey gave us a useful read on what’s working and what needs to improve. Out of 75 responses, 81% found app-building highly useful, 72% loved the vibe-coding atmosphere, and 71% said they plan to keep using the platform.
People like the direction. Now we need to make the experience smoother. The feedback gave us a clear roadmap for where to focus next.
For more detail, you can read the full community survey summary here.
What needs to get better
The survey, app-building sessions, node testing, and feedback throughout Season 1 made the next priorities clear:
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Mobile node operation needs to feel simple and sustainable.
Some devices ran well in the background, while others struggled with battery, data usage, sync, or aggressive background process limits. We also saw some users keeping the app active in the foreground to try to produce more blocks, which is not the intended way to participate. Our goal is to make background block production more reliable and better explained, so users do not feel like they need to keep their phones awake, drain battery, or push their devices to the limit.
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iOS and device support need more work.
Android generally performed better for mobile block production, but the wide range of Android models and manufacturer settings still creates complexity. iOS has stricter limitations, so we need to keep improving the iOS experience and explore delegation for users whose devices cannot reliably produce blocks in the background.
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Points and challenges need to feel easier to trust.
The rewards system motivated participation, but it also needs to avoid encouraging unhealthy device behavior. Users also wanted clearer progress, better sync, simpler breakdowns, and one source of truth for what counted.
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The app-building loop needs to be easier to debug and trust.
Builders hit agent errors, credit limits, broken previews, staging / deploy issues, wallet / on-chain friction, and unclear PR or merge status. When something breaks, people should know what failed, where it failed, and what to do next.
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Common app features should become part of the framework.
We saw the same patterns across many teams: 13 teams struggled with environment variables, secrets, and staging configuration, 10 rebuilt wallet connection and signature flows, and 8 recreated transaction lifecycle and demo-mode logic. When multiple teams keep solving the same plumbing, it should become part of the framework — not something every builder has to recreate.
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Builders need clearer docs, templates, and examples.
Builders and agents need clearer examples for wallets, transactions, explorer, bridge, identity, environment variables, secrets, and mock-vs-real setup so they do not fall back to generic patterns that do not fit our network.
Season 2 is intended to open the network to more people, so we’re prioritizing the fixes that make the experience simpler, clearer, and more reliable. All tasks have been created, prioritized, and are being tracked here for transparency.
Thank you.
We’re deeply grateful to everyone who showed up early, stayed active, and helped shape Season One.
Because of your contributions, we’re proud to welcome 123 Founding Members to the network. Read more here.
You proved mobile block production can work, tested the first version of the app layer, and showed us what needs to be clearer, smoother, and stronger.
Now we take everything we learned and make it better.
Season 2 coming soon.