We’re happy to announce the launch of the second cohort of the Decentralized Nodes Program!
The response from each inside and past the Polkadot neighborhood has once more been excellent. We acquired a powerful whole of 188 functions, for 256 Polkadot nodes and 530 Kusama nodes (a 6% and 17% improve respectively in comparison with Cohort 1). After an intensive choice course of, we chosen 104 Polkadot nodes from 63 operators and 210 Kusama nodes from 69 operators. These nominations grew to become efficient on March 17, 2025, and the time period for this second cohort will run till July 17, 2025.
The primary purpose of this cohort was to extend the diversification of the taking part nodes and, by extension, the energetic units. Many blockchain networks endure from having validators working in the identical areas and on the identical internet hosting suppliers. This creates single factors of failure and reduces their resiliency. Polkadot and Kusama aren’t any exception, however with this new route of the Decentralized Nodes program we intention to enhance that state of affairs.
For that reason we gave choice to operators who have been keen to host their nodes in much less standard areas and fewer saturated operators, and moreover, to those that wished to self host their nodes. Moreover, we sought to lower the dominance of AMD CPUs used for nodes by incentivising using Intel processors.
Apart from these, we targeted on comparable issues as within the first cohort: the nodes’ specs and efficiency, the technical experience of the operators, and their ecosystem affinity, and we supplied candidates with detailed choice standards. We additionally evaluated the efficiency of nodes and operators that participated in Cohort 1, whereas giving newcomers a bonus to incentivise new individuals to affix this system. Lastly, we additionally launched a change in comparison with Cohort 1: operators may apply with as much as 2 Polkadot nodes and 5 Kusama nodes and they might be evaluated as a bunch for every community.
A lot of the functions have been of the best high quality, which made the analysis course of very tough, however allowed us to have a choice of wonderful nodes and operators. And the purpose of diversification was achieved to an incredible diploma. The next graphs converse for themselves.
Polkadot Cohort 1 distribution
Polkadot Cohort 2 distribution
Kusama Cohort 1 distribution
Kusama Cohort 2 distribution
Europe and North America dominated through the first cohort, however within the second we noticed a rise in nodes being hosted in APAC, which grew to become the dominant area in Polkadot, LATAM, and Africa. We additionally noticed a rise in supplier diversification, despite the fact that the choice to some suppliers (totally different from Cohort 1) couldn’t be prevented. As for CPU diversification, on Polkadot AMD’s dominance decreased from 90% in Cohort 1 to 64% in Cohort 2! On Kusama the outcomes have been much less astonishing, with a small lower from 76% to 70%.
The second cohort additionally marked a big milestone, a real first for Polkadot. This system now nominates the primary different, production-ready host implementation! That’s Kagome, the C++ implementation developed by Quadrivium and funded for the final 2 years by the Polkadot treasury. This marks a brand new, necessary period the place the Parity host isn’t the one one validators can run. The node is run by the Quadrivium workforce, however within the subsequent cohorts we intention to push this additional and have much more operators operating Kagome on their nodes.
Lastly, one different distinction from Cohort 1 is that this system not goals to make nodes impartial of its nominations. This was a noble purpose, however in follow we noticed that independence wasn’t that straightforward to find out or apply and it triggered stress to individuals that feared dropping the DN nomination may imply dropping out of the energetic set.
So, as a substitute, the chosen nodes will probably be nominated repeatedly for 4 months no matter their neighborhood nominations, and might probably be a part of subsequent cohorts, in the event that they carry out nicely.
The whole listing of chosen validators is out there on the Decentralized Nodes web site.
