With ISLE concluded, we’re back on the regular Testnet Wednesday schedule!
TIP has been renewed by AADAO and we’ve adjusted our criteria and event planning to be more lenient in some ways (no need to do things perfectly every week – showing up and trying is enough) and stricter in others (you must assign consumer keys on mainnet now). Read more here!
May 29, 2024: ICS 2.0 Validator Set Cap
Per our adjusted criteria, we’re making events more open-ended for how validators can participate. As long as validators are present and able to be recorded (voting on a proposal, signing blocks, sending a particular tx), we’ll count their work towards TIP eligibility.
For this event, we launched the test-valsetcap-1 chain and validators had to vote YES on the launch proposal in order to be officially counted.
We demonstrated one of ICS 2.0’s power shaping mechanisms: the validator set cap.
Capping the size of the validator set: The consumer chain can specify a maximum number of validators it wants to have in its validator set. This can be used to limit the number of validators in the set, which can be useful for chains that want to have a smaller validator set for faster blocks or lower overhead. [pre-release documentation]
On the provider chain, we had 43 validators voting YES on the proposal who might have also opted-in and tried running the chain. Using Quokka Stake’s tmptop tool, we can see that the set cap of 8 validators was being enforced:
Throughout the event, validators and testnet coordinators worked together to opt-in and -out of the set to see how the consumer validator set changes. Shout out to the following validators for taking the extra time to interact with the feature even though it wasn’t required for TIP:
- Stakecito
- High Stakes
- Interstellar Lounge
- w3coins
- HashQuark
- BlockHunters
- KalpaTech
- Quokka Stake
- CroutonDigital
We saw that the validator set cap uses the same logic as a sovereign chain’s active set: for a set capped at M validators, only the M validators with the highest voting power will be included.
This behaviour was not captured in the docs, but will be added now! Thanks to the testnet validators for surfacing this 
As always, TIP eligibility can be tracked in the public spreadsheet:
Note that if either your mainnet or testnet key changes, you need to resubmit the form with a fresh proof of identity! We can’t track you if your key changes!