We’re happy to announce the launch of the primary cohort of the Decentralized Nodes Program!
The response from each inside and past the Polkadot neighborhood has been distinctive. We acquired a formidable whole of 276 purposes, for 241 Polkadot nodes and 452 Kusama nodes. After a radical choice course of, we nominated 63 Polkadot nodes and 152 Kusama nodes. These nominations turned efficient on November 15, 2024, and the time period for this primary cohort will run till March 15, 2025.
The analysis course of started on October 1, 2024, and took over a month to finish. The primary aim was to pick out validators who might present sturdy assist to the neighborhood and improve community safety. We targeted on the operators’ technical abilities, the efficiency and safety of their nodes, and the geographical unfold of nodes in every community. We additionally thought-about how actively the operators have been concerned within the ecosystem past their position as validators.
Based mostly on these targets and suggestions from the neighborhood gathered by means of a survey in July, a number of tangible and quantifiable choice standards emerged:
Operations: We examined the operations utilized to the administration of the nodes, together with its safety, updates to the shopper and OS, monitoring, and the existence and administration of excessive availability setups.Technical experience: We thought-about the technical experience of the operator, as derived from earlier expertise in working nodes as a part of or exterior the Thousand Validators programme, working collators, working validators in different ecosystems, and their skilled expertise in DevOps areas.OpenGov engagement: We regarded on the operator’s participation in OpenGov by means of voting or delegating, by means of proposals, and common engagement.Ecosystem engagement: We regarded on the operator’s total engagement and contributions to the ecosystem, each at a technical and social stage. Moreover we checked out their technique for attracting nominations from the neighborhood with a purpose to turn into unbiased of this system by the tip of their time period.Node efficiency: We evaluated the efficiency of the {hardware} for use to make sure that the node can adequately carry out the validation duties with out issues, in addition to the kind of server and its upscaling capabilities.Decentralization: We paid explicit consideration to the placement and the supplier utilized by the node, to make sure that chosen nodes contributed to the geographical decentralization of the lively set.
As a result of massive quantity of top quality purposes we acquired, we have been in a position to nominate solely a single node per operator for Polkadot, giving as many operators as attainable the chance to take part whereas decentralizing the lively set. Equally, almost 100 completely different operators have been chosen for Kusama.
The chosen nodes might be nominated repeatedly for 4 months. Nonetheless, there might be periodic checks to see if any of them have collected sufficient nominations to validate independently of this system, by which case backup validators might be known as to take their place.
The whole record of chosen and backup validators is out there on the Decentralized Nodes web site.
