The Sentinel Network has made major progress since the launch of the main net in March and none of it could have been possible without the support of our very strong validator community. This article will highlight the updates to the validator set on the network and detail the process used by the foundation to delegate tokens to the validators.
Expansion of the Validator Set
Sentinel’s mainnet launched on the 27th of March with a max validator set of 50 validators. The set later expanded to 64 via a proposal on-chain . Recently as a result of the rapid expansion of the network, another proposal to expand the set to 80 validators was passed.
The two proposals can be found here:
https://www.mintscan.io/sentinel/proposals/1
https://www.mintscan.io/sentinel/proposals/4
The increase in the validator set allows for further decentralization of the network and also allows for the expansion of the ecosystem to include more organizations that can play an active role in growing the network. Each validator on the network is a crucial part of the sentinel ecosystem and this expansion is proof that the network is growing rapidly and needs a larger set of validators to accommodate for this growth
Foundation Delegation Criteria
Delegation Form Link:
The validators not only play an important role in maintaining the network and working with the network to ensure smooth operations but also play a role in helping promote the network and spreading the message about Sentinel. The Sentinel foundation recognizes this important role and hence encourages validators through delegations and works with the validators closely to ensure harmony. Therefore the Sentinel Foundation is revising its validator delegation criteria to reflect this and will be delegating to validators purely based on how active the validator is in the community and how much they are supporting the network.
Validators which expect to receive a delegation from the foundation must maintain a maximum staking commission of 5%, and a minimum staking commission of 1%.
The foundation’s delegation decisions are politically agnostic. It goes without saying that the Sentinel ecosystem is one of virtue which is focused on bringing freedom of data exchange to people all over the globe, so the foundation will not exclude any particular community.
The Sentinel Foundation will delegate to validators based on the support given by the validators to the network. Support to the network can be in many forms and highlighted below are the criteria the Foundation will use to evaluate delegations.
The key criteria for evaluation of delegations from the Foundation include:
- Technical/Ecosystem contributions to the Sentinel or Cosmos Ecosystem: This will be evaluated by assessing whether the validator has been able to contribute towards the codebase of Sentinel or Cosmos
- Past participation/Plans for future participation in Sentinel’s bandwidth monetization economy: This involves the hosting of a node or multiple nodes on the Sentinel network or launching a white label dVPN application on the network
- Validator Experience and Technical Architecture/Security Standards: This will involve assessing the hardware configuration of the validator and other details about the architecture and security of the validator setup. It will also assess the experience and size of the team behind the validator. This category also rewards validators that host relays.
- Promotion of the Sentinel: This is one of the most important aspects of the delegation criteria, it involves assessing the marketing and promotion being done by the validator and how well the validator is promoting Sentinel through their networks. The foundation will look for events airdrops and other such promotions being done by the validator and will be checking to see if the validator is effectively relaying to their audience the latest updates about Sentinel. It will also check how much the community of the validator is growing and how well the social media pages and website of the validator are being maintained.
- Introductions to new partners: This will be evaluated based on whether the validator is able to utilize their network to connect sentinel with other projects, knowledgeable developers, key opinion leaders, Youtube channels, podcasts, that can help spread the reach of the Sentinel.
- Self delegation: validators should have higher skin in the game, till now we haven’t considered this as a parameter much to help bootstrap the validator set, but from now onwards it will weight a lot in the reward redelegation, from validators that self delegate less to validators who self delegate more.
- Decentralization of the network: we will try to spread delegation across more validators not in the top 25 trying to make sure the network remains as decentralized as possible.
The redelegation will be on a monthly basis to bootstrap the following program:
We will introduce a telegram channel with monthly reports to highlight validators accomplishments, technical upgrades and notable contributions so that the community can be better informed about which validators to choose.
Any validator can decide to submit any kind of information for this Telegram channel and the ongoing redelegation campaign.
