The Community needs to take initiative against White Label Providing
With the growing concern that the Community should have regarding White Label providing services on the Hub and in the Cosmos in general. We need access to information on which validators are independantly running their validators, and are not providing the white label operating VaaS model.
With the validator job, getting ever more complex as Replicated Security comes closer to launch, we as a community need to know who we can trust are independent and are also not offering the white label VaaS model. I fear that as Replicated Security catches on and more chains utilize the service, the lower bound validators may find it more profitable to outsource their validating to All Nodes or another white label provider, as it adds insurance, if a slashing or jailing happens to their validator, and it also cuts some of the overhead and most, if not all of the technical skills needed, for the validator utilizing the white label providing service, therefore limiting risk of a jailing or slashing offense.
How can we as a community help to encourage better delegation, and in turn better validation practice?
I believe that we should come up with a list of independent operators who do not offer this white label providing service, or at a minimum do not offer it at a large scale. This list could be a good resource for delegators to use as a basis of good delegation, rather than delegation that leads to private key and validator machine centralization. Many in the community, simply don’t understand the technical side of how chains truly stay decentralized and secure, and I include myself in that, as I am not a validator nor am I a very technical person. So if trusted members of our community are able to throw a list together, to encourage good delegation, that may be a very good resource for us to get out into the hands of the community at large.
I would love to hear ideas on how this should be best accomplished, but here are a couple of my own ideas. The first is, it could literally just be google doc, written and acknowledged by some of the more notable and respected community members, that people could reference?
The idea I like more though, is, what if there could it be reference website, where people can do more in-depth research into validators? Maybe validators who wish to participate, could explain their validator to the community in a long form profile, similar to what is done on this forum, in validator profiles. Hwoever, this would be done in a website dedicated to the honesty and trustworthiness of these valdiators. These validators can give in-depth mission statements, link their website and other projects they are actively building, so these delegators can not only gain trust in the validator, but also see that “this validator is actually building”.
There may not be recourse if a validator lies or misleads, however the credibility and optics if they lie about their validator on a highly trusted community website, and they get caught, could harm their brand and validator if the community then redelegates away from them. But sunlight is the best sanitizer, and this community resource would hopefully provide alot of sunlight.
Overall, this site would almost be a social media site, for validators to advertise their products and brands. A main focal point would be that validators are required to acknowledge whether they are an independant operator, or not, in order to participate in this website, that the community would ideally use heavily as a trusted resource.
Conclusion
Overall, I believe we need a community reference of good trusted validators, to help level the playing field for the community and delegators, with less understanding about the importance of how delegation can lead to the centralization or decentralization of a chain. The new people in Cosmos, tend to have to find their way to a decentralized stake, the hard way. A resource for these newer, less technical, yet still caring individuals may be a huge help to the Cosmos Hub, going forward.
If the website idea, peaks any interest, I am not a technical person, but I have plenty of ideas on how this website could look and operate, and it would be alot of fun to help someone or an entity build. I believe it could be very beneficial to the Cosmos Hub and the Interchain as a whole, to have such a social media type of website, dedicated to mutual validator and community trust, that also incentivizes best validator practices and may also encourage decentralization.
Thanks for reading.