New ICF Delegation Policy ~ Draft

Can we strike the word centralized please?

I think all validators are centralized, together we make a decentralized network.

Or maybe it should say “centralized exchange” - not sure intent here.

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Many thanks for sharing the initial draft! Here is our feedback:

-For the Public Good and Community Ecosystem/Cosmos hub there is no point limit indication, just that ‘1 point is received for each eligible activity/project’. The big issue we see here is that the amount of time/effort/costs between one project and other can be very different so awarding both with 1 point doesn’t seem fair. Example: being active in this Forum would earn 1 point, and also organising Cosmoverse or producing our bi-weekly videos would earn equally 1 point. I think we can agree the amount of costs/time/efforts differs vastly.

-Also, a community project could be supporting the Cosmos hub, the ecosystem and be a public good at the same time, so how would this be evaluated then?

-I think that big projects in terms of resources required and value added to the ecosystem should be evaluated differently. Projects such as Cosmoverse or our news videos is really a lot of ongoing work daily and huge costs involved, I don’t think big projects like this can be just awarded 1 point

-Also, there are mentions about releasing content weekly, I think this is also a bit misleading. Some may release something weekly like a brief twitter thread done in 30min, while us for example we release the news videos bi-weekly but we are working daily on this researching/filtering the news from multiples sources and preparing the content, shooting several video takes for each section and preparing all the material for filming, and then all the video editing part

-Since validators outside the active set are also eligible to apply, the number of applications may be very high. One idea would be to assign a larger % of the available ATOMs for delegation to validators that have been a long time in the active set and voted for example in +80% of the governance proposals since joining the active set

Looking forward to hearing the feedback from the rest of the Cosmos community!

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I think this is a fantastic start.

“Centralized exchange or custodian” would be a good change in verbiage.

Would also recommend just establishing a clearly defined minimum (i.e. 1%) for Foundation delegations. I could foresee a world where a validator would say “My 0.1% commission isn’t technically 0%” and sort of nullify the whole criteria.

Other than that… looking forward to seeing this puppy in action!

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Forgive me, I’m not sure I understand the criteria. We’ve not designed a wallet for the ecosystem. People delegate to our node using Keplr, Cosmostation or Trust wallet mainly. Am I understanding this correctly?

Dashboards: Does this mean if our website had some sort of dashboard our delegators could log into?

Explorers: Does this mean we’d get points if our website had mintscan info readily available on it?

Bravo on the policy overall! I was smiling and feeling excitement as I read through it. Thank you for valuing decentralization and excluding the top 20 largest nodes and 0% commission nodes. Thank you.

We became an ATOM validator in October of 2021 and were jailed for a couple hours because we missed the Vega upgrade in December. Fortunately we upgraded and got back online quickly. My initial reaction after reading, " * Must not be jailed more than once for downtime" was disappointment. We truly felt like it wasn’t our fault since the Cosmos team had no established practice to notify validators. Some of the team uses Twitter, some Telegram, some Slack, etc. Additionally, there’s no email list that goes out to validators to let us know about important events. Everyone has their preferred platform and so information distribution is highly fragmented. I spoke with Lexa and Syed about this. My point, perhaps there should be a forgiveness period where getting jailed drops off our permanent record so to speak. Maybe it could be, “Must not have been jailed for downtime more than once in a twelve month period” or something. Just a thought. We’d love to be forgiven for getting jailed.

Other than that, the policy draft looks great. Thanks again for caring about the ecosystem. Cosmos is by far our favorite project and by far our favorite community.

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To see this come out is great!! Thanks to everyone who made this a reality. A few points:

-like mentioned by others, better clarification for the centralized entities

-are white label operations going to be eligible for this? For example, can the provider get foundation delegations for multiple instances?

-a situation where someone has more than one validator, are they eligible?

-will supporting consumer chains, or participating in the ICS testnet be criteria that increases the likelihood/amount of delegation?

-if I have a dashboard on my website for user to stake, does that count? I think we need more clarifications on what qualifies and is expected with this category. And if it was previously grant funded, that’s not eligible right?

-anyone who has gotten a grant for for things they’ve built, cannot use those things in consideration for this? ie RPCs, monitoring tools, and other apps? Is this including grants from any chain or entity? How can we ensure this is fairly/consistently enforced?

-if you’re going to allow one jailing for downtime, maybe make that 1 jailing over a 12 month period or during the delegation period.

-is there a policy for voting from these delegated tokens? What are peoples thoughts on no votes from foundation & leaving that voting power with said validator?

-flat 1 point for each category is best because then there’s no subjectivity that comes into play.

-what happens if someone is pushed into the top 20 from a foundation delegation?

-how do we stop people from just doing things to check off the box? Maybe a maximum amount of points available to give out for categories?

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Hi, it’s BlockPower and we translated a Chinese version for your draft delegation policy.New ICF Delegation Policy ~ Draft-Chinese 中文版

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With regards to this I believe rather than just blocking out the top 20 you could also delegate using a sliding scale on where where a validator falls within the set/% voting power which would give an objective metric for The Delegation Team to use in deciding the amount to delegate. This could be used in the scoring system where validators lower down the set gain more points or added as an addition guideline to The Delegation Team.

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This will surely help around decentralization! :ok_hand:

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Initial feedback: This looks great, we are looking at the details more closely, will share any findings/improvements

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Thank you for posting this. It looks like quite a bit of thought went into it. We’ll be posting more feedback later and attend the Wedensday call, yet for now, the first comment I have is on the above.

While I support active governance participation being a key criteria, I feel “Abstain” should be included, not excluded. At Chainflow we feel Abstain is a legitimate way to vote, particularly for smaller, resource limited operators. Delegating to these types of operators seems to be at least the partial focus of this program, i.e. “not in the Top 20 validators…(by voting power)”.

Forcing a Yes/No/NoWithVeto vote may force delegation recipients to make decisions they’re not fully comfortable making. Depending on the level of discomfort, some may choose not to vote at all, which goes against the goal of this criteria.

For example, at Chainflow we feel that code audits should be completed by a group of third-party developers from the Cosmos community, i.e. not the developers who built the code. Validators could then choose whether or not to accept the code associated with an upgrade based on the third-party audit. It’s primarily for this reason that we often choose to abstain from votes that are tied directly to code.

Other validators may have other reasons they feel are legitimate and require and Abstain response. While I understand that using an auto-voting system that votes “abstain” by default goes against the spirit of the proposal, I don’t think excluding “abstain” is the way to go. Maybe a middle ground could be to allow “abstain” along with an explanation that describes the reasoning behind the decision to use that option.

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I think the answer is no to both those specific questions - IMO of course, it would be the Delegations team that would have to clarify in detail.

But the criteria is saying “if you are a validator, and you also happen to have created a wallet for use by everyone, you will get a point”.

So for example, Cosmostation would have received an Engineering point for making Cosmostation Wallet (engineering project, open to all, not just their delegators); an Engineering point for building Mintscan; and maybe a Public Good point for maintaining Minstcan too. (but of course Cosmostation isn’t eligible for actual delegations since they are in the top 20).

However, that example also illustrates some of the issues @Cosmic_Validator identified:

Building and maintaining Mintscan is a lot harder than another dashboard that shows a few stats. But as it stands now, it does seem like both will get a point each.

And yeh, that’s not fully fair -since the assessment is based on quantitative measures - but how could it be improved? Bearing in mind that the ICF wants to be confirming / redelegating every 6 months, so ideally “subjective analysis” needs to be kept to a minimum, right?

This also ties in with other comments (here and twitter) about having a sliding scale type of mechanism for awarding points - based on validator commission levels or gov participation levels. Personally, in principal, it makes sense. Practically, it would be a nightmare to make it fair right now, and a bigger nightmare to manage it regularly.

I see this is v1.0 of delegations - ship something that is fairer and better than what the ICF has now; keep it simple, so that it can be managed and delegations updated regularly; and once the process is working smoothly over the course of 2-3 six-month reviews, then start adding more complex criteria/calculations.

wdyt?

Again, everything is just my opinion. It’d be the Delegations Team job to flesh out these properly

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First of all, thank you to all involved in composing this draft policy, as it greatly helps with understanding what is required to qualify for the upcoming ICF Delegations program and lays out a clear path for all

Just to echo a couple of points already raised:

White label validators: I would like to see white label validators being a reason for disqualification from selection and added to the Mandatory Criteria section of this draft
Reason: we feel white label operators (and any awarding of ICF delegations to same) would go against the whole ethos of this policy

2.) The inclusion of clearly defined MIN and MAX percentage of foundation delegations for each tier and score on any matrix would also be good

3.) Not directly related to this draft, but…
Staking rewards claimed by the ICF could be channelled back into a type of incubation program/fund for new validators.
There is no doubt that the bar will be raised and standards improved on with this new policy (and rightly so!) thus getting into the active set I imagine will become more difficult for the type of newcomer required (and desired) in the validating family that would help ‘decentralize’ the chain more

To promote a more community-owned decentralized ecosystem then having a fund available to identify and support new validators can only be a good thing!?

At Silk Nodes we greatly appreciate the introduction of this new policy and the obvious positive changes it will bring to the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole

exciting times!

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Good decision :tada::tada::tada::confetti_ball::confetti_ball::confetti_ball:

Appreciate it.

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Let’s take an example: a validator ranked 21# is eligible to apply, they are well funded and with lots of resources to invest in building wallets, explorers, etc., they will get many points and likely one of the top delegations, which won’t really have much impact to them since already well funded and large validator. In contrast, a validator barely staying in the active set but that is creating huge value for the ecosystem in some engineering or community project, with very low resources, since not enough funds are available to do many projects in parallel then not many points will be received and hence a low delegation. However, a good delegation to this smaller validator may allow them to boost their project and add additional huge value to the Cosmos ecosystem

In 2020 Tendermint re-delegated ~19M ATOMs to new Cosmos Hub Validators and delegations were organised by tiers (100k, 200k, etc.). I think since the top 20 validators are not eligible then the next 20 could be eligible only to the smaller tier let’s say 100k (the tiers will need to be decided), the next 20 to this tier and also the 200k, and so on. In this way, if for example a validator ranked 21# has done similar contributions as a validator ranked 150#, the smaller validators will get a larger delegation. This will improve decentralization and support more smaller validators which need this support more

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Are not being paid/receiving a grant for the same work you’re indicating in your candidature

Why should this be disqualifying criterion? First of all, grants are varying in size and often times just enough to cover development expenses and not make a hugely long-lasting profit. Also, grant applicants might have not included support and maintenance of the project leaving small development teams fixing bugs, adding improvements, and updating projects out of pure enthusiasm without any monetary support.

This is a great start!

One point I’d like to highlight is section #1 Engineering (Ecosystem)

I believe there should be an additional section for open source contributions. As an example, we have:

These are all extremely valuable contributions that should be rewarded a point, but don’t fall under the selection criteria.

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Yeh, they are valuable tools. If not part of the “#1 Engineering (Ecosystem)” [I think it’s in the ‘spirit’ of that section though], these tools would fall under the the “Public Good (Ecosystem)” category - these are valuable tools.

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Love the tiered idea

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Thanks for your well-thought response. What do i think? I think I’m glad people who are smarter than me are involved! You make excellent points. The tiered delegations or sliding scale seems to make sense, but then there would be other nuances to consider and I’m not sure what those are.

Yeah I think that could be a good middle ground.

Like 1-20 get x% of delegations to split and so on

Or

1-20 has a max cap of x delegation

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