[PROPOSAL 797] [Passed] - Increase the validator set of cosmos hub to 180 from 175

I would love to read your thoughts and learn more.

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For us increasing the active set will allow new stakeholder to bring contribution to the network, new ideas to appears and reward validators that participates to the ecosystem (who are currently inactive)

Also we think that the millions of $ of $ATOM that arenā€™t use will better serve the network in the active set to securing it whereas having them not use.

More, the block time shouldnā€™t increase as they still will have a poor voting power.

This being said, we are more down to increase the active set to 190 (not to 200) AFTER the coming of Replicated Security.

During that time other validators in the inactive set will have time to learn how to deal with ICS.
However, we think that being compliant and robust is the role of a professional validator, those who deserve to be in the active set should be able to run ICS chains successfully.

With 190 validators the active set will still have a huge barrier of entry but it will be more accessible for new stakeholder to enter.

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For us increasing the active set will allow new stakeholder to bring contribution to the network, new ideas to appears and reward validators that participates to the ecosystem (who are currently inactive)

As said earlier, more validators does not brings more decentralization nor stakeholders/adoption.
Unless one of the validator is especially knowned in other chains and have a lot of community tractions the likeliness of new delegators is 0.
And thatā€™s also part of the governance problem, new delegators are stuck to the top validators for delegations since they are mostly not educated and choose to pick ā€œā€œthe bestā€ā€.

Ideas and Contributions are already free to flow:

  • For ideas: You have forums, servers, channels, social medias that are free to use to express yourself

  • For ā€˜Contributionsā€™: Everything is open source (code), itā€™s your choice to delegate to inactive/active val

I am not seeing how expanding the active set will help/change any of that.
In a sense, assuming inactive validators are contributing to the network, I do agree that they should get a piece of the cake by having a validator running.

Also we think that the millions of $ of $ATOM that arenā€™t use will better serve the network in the active set to securing it whereas having them not use.

I strongly disagree, security of Cosmos comes from a balance of 2 things (spreads and valuation), you canā€™t assume bringing couple more millions will make it any more secure.
In fact last time I posted top 14 validators was 50%+ VP, with 25 more validators it would only take top 15 validators to keep that majority concentrated.

More, the block time shouldnā€™t increase as they still will have a poor voting power.

200 validators should not be a problem in that regard but you should know that block propagation also intervenes in the equation and if the propagation takes too long Tendermint will adapt and adjust blocktime (longer). It has nothing to do with VP (unless I am mistaken).
This topic was also discussed in the other thread with far more knowledgable people than me.

Other thread

This being said, we are more down to increase the active set to 190 (not to 200) AFTER the coming of Replicated Security.

I do agree. IMO the lower at a time for now, the better because it brings less risks for a Neutron back-pedal (Less potential validators having financial stability issues). Right after ICS is IMO not a good idea, we should give it a couple month. Perhaps plan small bactches every months instead of big numbers at a time. This could also help future validators planning for action in advance since things would be set in stone.

During that time other validators in the inactive set will have time to learn how to deal with ICS.

I did not see any numbers yet, but I doubt even the most active validators experienced the testnet for neutron.
But I take it as a no argument, every validators should learn how to deal with ICS either they are active or not.

we think that being compliant and robust is the role of a professional validator, those who deserve to be in the active set should be able to run ICS chains successfully.

Could not agree more but this is not how things work in the Cosmos, only the amount of bounded tokens counts.

Hopefully I am not coming up as condescending this time :wink:

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Just published it here :slight_smile:

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You can now see thinking together is better than thinking only with one person. Thatā€™s the reason why group of people in Community is very important. Sharing an idea together is great for our community members. I really appreciate you for ever supported.

Yes we need more discussion about this proposals. all the community should let me know what to do I need more ideas from you guys.

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Thankyou for sharing.

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I see that now with Neutron being live, the active set entrance level hasnā€™t dropped due to validators leaving the active set, it only was increased. Hereā€™s how many tokens you need to get into the active set, for the last 60 days.


There were some drops (mostly due to validator not upgrading their node in time during an emergency upgrade on 8 May and for not running a Neutron node), but all of them were resolved quite quickly and all of these validators are now active.
So in my opinion, ICS didnā€™t influence the active set entrance level that much, despite it costing validators more to launch additional nodes, validators and itā€™s getting more difficult for new validators to join the set to help securing the network.
Moreover, when we got 8 jails of validators for not running a Neutron node, as I could see those new validators joining the set were signing blocks, meaning they were ready to join the set despite not being active currently, which can mean that thereā€™s a desire from at least these validators to join, and likely there will be more to come.
Therefore I suggest to resume discussing the increasing of the active set. In my opinion though it would be more safe to submit a few proposals increasing the active set by 5 or 10 validators rather than making one proposal that would increase it by 25 validators instantly.
What do you all think?

(Disclaimer: I am one of the validators (Quokka Stake) that was kicked out of the active set due to this race for the last places for the active set, so I may be biased.)

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i kinda foreseen this. i mean the fact that it would not be an issue. so as mentioned before i think its a great idea

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here is a revised proposition, because people are largely divided in increasing the valset, can we increase the valset by 10 and push it on-chain? It is not NVW I assume, and it gives a fair chance to this proposal.

Iā€™m all in, and 10 seems way more safe than 25. Maybe even decreasing it to 5 and making another proposal to increase even further would even more safe, but both of them seem solid, as I am pretty sure that raising it to 25 would instantly drop the entrance level to around 1 ATOM.

Feel free to ping me if you need any assistance on actually submitting a proposal on chain or any other help is needed.

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Increasing set by 5 validators seems pretty reasonable, as Cosmos Hub is growing and we need more trusted validators protecting the chain! Also, going further and checking the Inactive list we can see that Quokka Stake is pretty much trusted one with more than 100k $ATOMs in delegations, and the next few also have some potential, so maybe thatā€™s the right time to increase the set and lower the entrance level as well a bit.

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Letā€™s wait for 2 days to see what type of support we have. and we can push this on-chain by the start of next week with an increase of 5.

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GATA DAO will support the increase of 5 spots in the validator set.

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Hi there. I do not see any strong objections here, and the feedback for the last few days was overall good. Shall we proceed?

Let me know if thereā€™s any help needed from submitting a proposal, I can help with it if thatā€™s required.

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Hey, because of my non-tech background, I have little info on how to push prop on the chain actually. I will look at it.

When I do I will share the deposit address here so everyone can chip in. Otherwise, please push the prop on-chain. and we all chip in with the deposit.

One way is to use this tool: https://app.interchaingov.com/, I never used it though but it should do the trick I guess.

Also if you want I can put it on chain on behalf of my validator, but I do not have enough tokens to push it to voting period, as all of my tokens are staked, so Iā€™ll need someone to deposit more to put it to voting.

Which one would be the best for you?

The second option.

I am sure @Enigma @wassie @Bro_n_Bro will be able to play their part in the deposit.

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Lovely. Iā€™ll submit it on chain in a few hours then. Will post a message here once itā€™s in deposit period.

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#### Problem

Currently, the validator set size in the Cosmos Hub is 175, and the last validator has 113K Atom delegated to them (at the time of writing), which translates into 1.2 million USD worth of Atom. This higher requirement barred many Cosmos community validators from validation on the Hub.
It is extra difficult to get into the active set with this barrier even if a validator receives delegations or tokens for their contribution (such as ICF delegations or Game of Chains/Game of NFT projects) or if they are bringing value into ecosystem in any other way.

#### Proposed solution
Increasing the validator set to 180 from 175 can solve this problem.

Originally, the Cosmos whitepaper stated that the validator set size should increase 13% yearly until it hits 300 validators as a cap. In July 2019, proposal #10 suggested a new way to set the validator set size: through governance.

The decision of increasing the validator set just by 5 spots, as opposed to past proposals, was done to ensure increasing validator set would be safe. If this proposal passes, the community can later decide whether the Hub wants to allow more validators to join after analysing how this proposal affected the validator set, and submit another validator set expansion proposal, if needed.

#### Governance votes

The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:

YES - You approve this increase in the validator set to 200 from 175.
NO - You disapprove of this increase in the validator set to 200 from 175.

NO WITH VETO - A ā€˜NoWithVetoā€™ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ā€˜NoWithVetoā€™ votes is greater than a third of the total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.

ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to the quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.

Commonwealth thread with pre-governance discussion: https://forum.cosmos.network/t/proposal-draft-increase-the-validator-set-of-cosmos-hub-to-200-from-175/7283

I made a description by copying your original post, updating the desired activeset size, last validatorā€™s stake and adding a motivation on increasing the active set just by 5 spots, can you proofread if thatā€™s good?