This proposal does not promote validator meritocracy or greater health of the network.
Hoping the below is clearer.
Uptime
Uptime is a vanity metric.
Near-perfect uptime is not a mark of service excellence. It simply reflects the minimum technical competence required to avoid slashing.
It says nothing about broader contributions to the Hub or the quality of operations or its operators either.
And we see this clearly: 179 of 180 hub vals have +99% uptime; 172 maintain 100%. Uptime is a baseline expectation showing non negligent behavior. It’s not a differentiator.
Meaningful metrics differentiate.
Moreover, the community over prioritizing uptime incentivizes geographic clustering as operators chase latency advantages. And this is already happening.
We have a lot of nodes clustering (city, region, data center) around European cloud zones rn like AWS Frankfurt (eu-central-1) and Hetzner.
Geographic and jurisdictional concentration materially increases systemic risk and regulatory exposure. We saw this w U.S. asserting jurisdiction over Ethereum, citing majority of their nodes in TX.
Highest Number of Signed Blocks
Number of signed blocks is marginally better than uptime but also problematic. It’s biased towards those with greater voting power.
Validators with more vp get scheduled more often to sign blocks (propose and vote). This is bc Tendermint Core uses weighted voting.
- Higher stake = more proposing opportunities.
- Smaller, high-performing validators propose fewer blocks bc they are selected less often under Tendermint’s rotation.
The reasoning: vals with more stake have more to lose via slashing if they behave badly.
Although on a protocol level, every val has the equal opportunity to sign each proposed block, the same infra that prevents an embarrassing “missed my own proposal” event also reduces the chance of missing any block.
While all vals have the same theoretical chance to sign each block, the ability to use that chance is uneven in practice. Larger vals hosted in Tier-1 data centers/reguons enjoy latency advantages and stronger economic incentives not to miss. Such structural gaps, can amplify unequal signing advantages over time.
Using uptime + clustering + “highest # of signed blocks”, is more expressive of existing power hierarchies and structures. It doesnt accurately capture operator’s service quality or diligence.
Commission ≤ 5%
≤5% commission threshold definitely not capture or indicate excellence either. In practice, operators offering 0–2% commission have frequently used aggressive (arguably anti competitive) pricing strategies to rapidly attract delegators, enter active set, and climb in rankings.
Low commission often correlates with predatory behavior and the bait and switch to much higher commission rates are well known.
I never discourage discussion.
That said, to be candid (again), it’s difficult to take seriously a proposal that relies on weak metrics as the evaluative schema for an unprecedented staking program intended to promote excellence and resilience; especially when suggested metrics risk achieving the opposite.
The primitive nature of these metrics has already been extensively debated in this forum during prior ICS/RSS,/PSS, and voting power tax discussions. The consensus was clear: such metrics are inadequate and, when used without proper context, can be actively harmful.
Assessing validator performance demands far more rigor and nuance than what the OP and some respondents have suggested.