[MRC-5] Increase Validator Set to 75

Proposals MRC (Mars Request for Comment)
1

Summary

This proposal is to increase the number of active validators from 50 to 75.
Authored by: @traianoverse

Abstract

This will provide opportunities for smaller or new validators to get on board and gain support from the community. The Hub has the authority to manage its Outposts and it is crucial for the growth of Mars to have a higher number of active validators who are committed to educating the community and being active participants.

Motivation

The launch of Mars Hub has been stable and incident-free and we feel that the purpose of having a limited and partial genesis set has accomplished its objectives.

Keeping this path could lead to centralized voting power among those who started validating Mars Hub in its early days.

Risks

As with all validator expansions, it is possible that expanding the set could have a small effect on the overall block times taking longer, as more validators are required to achieve consensus.

Implementation

This can be done by changing the MaxValidator parameter of the staking module.

8 Likes
2

Totally in favor of this Proposal.

Many Validators are interested in Validating this Network (including us). If the set gets expanded it will have multiple advantages:

  • the Community of the Validators will check $MARS
  • the floor is raising rapidly. Validators have to fight to stay in which means they wasting resources and can’t focus on providing services.
  • current blocktime is at 5.85s according to Mintscan. It will barely have an impact, also because the set will gets expanded with many high quality & trusted Validators.
  • current set of 50 Vals was good to launch the chain but it needs to expand to get even more decentralized, this should be early on to avoid a top heavy val set.

Wookie over and out :sloth:

2 Likes
3

Here are the top 15 inactive validators. Before I continue, just to be upfront I am one of these in the list.

image
image1030Ă—727 71.4 KB

The Validators that I know of/about and also feel like they are good for the network are:

  • Forbole
  • Cros-nest
  • NodeStake
  • Cosmos Spaces

I’ve excluded myself due to bias.

Validators not in the top 15 that would be good to help encourage from adding 15 slots:

  • Frens
  • Zenith Station

I’m pretty sure the above two would place in capital to come up on top of the current 15 in the list.

That gives roughly 7 top notch validators being added that do add and contribute to the community AFAIK.
Forbole developed the Big Dipper Explorer, which is what Mars Explorer uses.
I’ve been helping with Ping.pub and a few other side projects.
A couple of these validators add RPC/API endpoints as well as extra Relaying. I find this to be in our benefit.

One risk I see is Classy being able to join. He uses a VaaS, Allnodes, which recently was discovered to hold validator private keys and node keys. I believe this is something we don’t want on chain as it is a security compromise.

I have a bias, but I do support the expansion of the Validator list. Vote power currently is not balanced well. Even amongst the top 25 validators.
4.87% drops to 2.8% then 1.35% and after that, no validator is above 1% starting from rank 20. I understand this is greatly due to founding delegations and to my current understanding will go away after the 1st month.

Assuming that the 15 will get to 30k staked over a couple of days, in catchup prior to the addition, they would all be around a 0.05% VP.
This would change significantly if and when the large founding delegations are removed and/or more evenly spread amongst the set.

The downside I do see is a thiner spread. The bottom 15-25 aren’t really going to be gaining rewards/commission that help to cover the cost of a validator. But this is also something that those validators are aware of and are taking that risk on their own accord.

I personally think from what the Expedition Mars has listed as pros for allowing the expansion plus what I have mentioned, I think the pro’s out weigh the cons.
New validators will bring positive price action to Mars, as they will need to buy in to stay in and compete with other validators trying to re-make it back into the set.

4 Likes
4

I’m in support of an expanded valset.

3 Likes
5

Forbole is in favour of this proposal. Increasing the number of validator set will involve more participation from validators with different culture and experience. The increase of block time won’t be affected immediately as the commit timeout starts counting after consensus is made. If we would like to speed up the block time in the future, we can have an offline consensus to update the config and make the network commit blocks faster.

1 Like
6

Thank you for your kind words! :grinning:

2 Likes
7

Cros Nest is in favor of this proposal.
Thanks Erialos for naming us.
:fox_face:

1 Like
8

I agree here, though currently it is hard for anyone to maintain 75 reliable validators. I’d seek to open this up in the future and instead support the smaller validators on the chain rather than letting more on.

9

with experience on many chains, increase the active set will not modify the current one

10

I am, of course, strongly in favor as a validator sitting just outside the active set with what is now already an incredibly high barrier to entry just one week in. I am also more than willing to contribute additional infrastructure as a member of the active set. Some signal, one way or the other, would be extremely helpful in determining how to proceed.

1 Like
11

I fully support this proposal. Cosmos has many great validators and extra 25 positions in active set is ok.

1 Like
12

edit: oops I didn’t mean to reply to your message Erialos! Apologies!

Personally, I think it is quite a bit too early to be adding a whole other 25 validators to the set. Looking at the list of inactive validators, if we were to add 25, then the lowest validator would have 1.1 MARS bonded… Keep in mind that if some validators lower on the list are not reliable, get slashed, etc. this could present a bad experience for users trying to spread out delegations (even if the network would still be fine), and might promote delegating to the top of the list only. I would think adding 10 more to the set shouldn’t present any problems, but just don’t think we’re ready to safely add more than that at this time. We could always add more in subsequent votes later on if what I mentioned above changes.

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own. I am not a developer, I just noodle :ramen:

13

Thank you for naming us! :grinning:
NodeStake is in favour of this proposal.
We also provide the services for Mars mainnet and testnet:
https://nodestake.top/mars
:white_check_mark: Explorer
:white_check_mark: RPC/API/gRPC
:white_check_mark: Genesis File
:white_check_mark: Addrbook
:white_check_mark: Live peers
:white_check_mark: State Sync
:white_check_mark: Daily Snapshot

14

I’m against this proposal. I’d prefer to stick with the current validator set. Mars has just launched and is getting settled in. I’d like to see everything run stable for several weeks before re-evaluating the current validator set size. There’s no need to rush this decision imo

1 Like
15

I am opposed to this proposal.

I personally think that adding to the validator set this early in the game could provide detrimental to the community. I would let things run for several more weeks before issuing a new vote to increase the set.

1 Like
17

Can you elaborate on how this would be detrimental to the community?

1 Like
18

It’s not entirely clear to me what the advantage for the chain would be from a security perspective with an increase of validators.

19

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “Security perspective”?
How is an increase in validators a security risk?

20

I don’t think it a security risk. I am just saying I don’t necessarily see an increase in security at this point by adding more validators. Just my opinion.

1 Like
21

Hey Dohko.
I agree with you, there are no additional benefits from a security perspective in adding extra slots for the current set.
On the other hand, we will have some latency for block times (which can be adjusted anyway by changing Consensus Conf Options).

I personally believe though, that increasing the set before removing the temporary delegations could help with the timing to spread more organically future delegations since the current set will see some changes.

By “help with the timing” I mean that:

  • If a validator sees the possibility of a set increase, it could consider starting validating even at a non-profitable level (at least it doesn’t have to acquire $MARS for self-delegation to enter the set)

  • Once the temporary delegations are removed, the apr will increase to approx 50%, in the meanwhile, if external incentives are not renewed on MARS/OSMO Lp, this will make staking rewards more competitive and encouraging (50% apr vs 40% on Osmosis).

I think this (the last point) could lead to an opportunity to increase the current Bonded Ratio and would be great if it could happen while the set size has been already increased.
But this is just my humble opinion.

Thanks to everybody for sharing their thoughts.
MRC-5 is currently in the deposit period.