Responding to question from Twitter.
- How do we think about validator nodes in our network?
Polkadot: Polkadot moves as much of the distributed devops as possible into the the runtime via WebAssembly everywhere. All participants in the network run the same software and play different roles depending on what staking slots of for consensus, collators, fishermen etc. Upgrades are largely automated. Normination means that operators don’t need to unilaterally There are thousands of slots and each of them at staked with different chains. Polkadot requires a strong source of randomness for committee selection and aggregate signatures.
Cosmos: Each chain has on the order of 10-300 validators. The distributed devops functionality is separate from the core software and left to the validators to build themselves. Upgrades require a lots of manual intervention. Delegation allow stake holders and operators to be distinct from each other while retaining skin in the game. We anticipate the validator sets for Cosmos chains to overlap but assort based on market forces. There are perhaps 200 operators in the world with kinds of security critical distributed devops capacity we are looking for. Future work like bringing aggregate signatures to Tendermint will allow for future chains to have 1000s of validators but the also requires 1000s of operators to emerge as well.