Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the cosmos from independent validator teams.
Hello everybody, welcome to Game of Nodes, the podcast by independent validators of the cosmos.
So today we are a reduced team here, some of our colleagues, the Frey and Shilty have incredibly poorly times when they're going to be at shit internet, which they are at right now.
So they tried to get on here and it didn't work out very well.
So I think they're talking like single digit megabits. It's unheard of, absolutely unheard of these days.
So you're stuck with myself now and we've got Usurpa here and rejoined today by Thyborg and Ghost from Whispernode.
So we also have fucked up and didn't make notes from last week to follow up.
So we don't have any follow up from last week and it looks like we don't have any ask going from this week.
So as we're talking, if you guys want to ask questions, we can jot them down in our spreadsheet and we'll address them when we get to the end or if they're relevant, we'll address them at the time.
So anyway, Usurpa is going to give an introduction to the project that Thyborg and Ghost have been working on and it's been the subject of conversation a couple of times in the last few weeks.
I think today we're going to get a pretty good conversation on this particular topic.
Yeah, over the last few weeks, like as Nell said, over the last few weeks, we've had a little bit more conversation coming up around governance in the cosmos.
I can't talk. And it's come up both from a couple different groups that I think a few weeks before consensus and then at consensus, there was a lot of different kind of separate governance related conversations that I had.
And I think others had that were down there and we were kind of sharing notes and those types of things and around that same time or a little bit before that actually.
There was a group that originally called the Validator Cosmos League.
There's now just Validators, right? Sorry. That Thyborg and Ghost and I believe also Tom from EcoStake, kind of the three original founders of that.
And all these different groups that we've at least had some conversations with have had slightly different approaches to this.
But being independent validators and this group is being started by independent validators and others.
This is the one I think that we've had a lot of conversations about and it has a huge amount of backing going around in a lot of conversation.
So maybe I can stop talking. Maybe Thyborg or Ghost, you guys want to give a little bit of background in terms of how the three of you started talking about this and kind of what kind of prompted this creation of this group,
or at least starting to open the conversation up and then maybe we can go from there.
Yeah, for sure. So I can start.
Thank you guys for having me.
I'm actually, so the backstory, maybe my backstory first. I come from an economic background, but I've worked in tech for the last 10 years and I sold one of my company recently.
That was last year. And so I started, you know, getting into crypto, actually spending time to understand how everything worked.
And, you know, I came across Cosmos. I felt that was a very interesting ecosystem to look into.
But I actually, when I bought my first atom, I kept them at Kraken for a while.
And then after maybe a couple of months, I moved them on chain, but I stick them with Uobi, right, for at least six months, which was great because I missed all the airdrops for Osmosis, for Juno, for everything.
And I think, you know, that's a common experience, basically, that people move their surf online on chain and they see a list of names and they're going to pick the one that is the most recognizable and obviously the one that is on top of the list.
So, you know, once you get into Cosmos more, you realize, you know, this is a very stupid thing to do to put your stuff with finance, Kraken, Uobi, you know, they have a high commission and they give you nothing.
And as you go deeper and deeper, you realize they're not contributing either.
So, from that, I looked a little bit, you know, what was being done to fix that, because I started to meet somebody who was actually doing stuff, make things for the network, and realized, you know, I didn't see like there was any clear path to fixing that.
So, I started doing these Cosmos reports and in the Cosmos report, you know, being active on Twitter, I started doing some interviews with, I think I did in the end, eight studyators where they explained to me, you know, how they got into Cosmos, where they were based, and also what kind of contribution they had made previously.
So, you know, Tom from Ecosake was one of these guys, and you know, Tom is one of the big ones, because he built a restake, which is also a compounder for staking rewards, which, you know, I don't know how many validators are using now, but that's a whole bunch.
And I felt like, okay, well, there's something there, we can, you know, maybe the way I've been running things right now, and basically, you know, on my own, very subjectively, putting great and, you know, ranking people in that way was not scalable and was not, you know, that useful.
The threads were getting some attention, but not, you know, it was not going to be used in the long term, basically.
And so Tom had been working on the Cosmos directory, which I'm sure you guys know about.
It's extremely useful. I was super impressed to see what he had done there.
And so we basically thought, okay, let's combine these two projects, let's join forces.
And Ghost was joined, you know, pretty much at the same time, like, you know, with, I think, you can talk about that, but Tom and yourself, I'd be talking about something similar.
And yeah, we said, okay, let's define what we want to do, let's define how we want to do it.
And so we made a GitHub post that I shared online to explain, you know, the goal, which would be to build a ranking, initially, that's all like that.
Now, you know, the project has a little bit evolved based on the feedback, but it started as doing a ranking where we would put, you know, rank validators based on their contribution to the networks where they participate.
And so we had two kind of data. One would be quantitative data, which would be based on, you know, number of votes, participation in governance, that would be based on slashing events, misblocks, you know, all that unchain stuff.
But at the same time, we want to include stuff that is a little bit more qualitative and therefore, you know, harder to measure. And that means, for instance, stuff like the Resake app, stuff like, you know, Pocket 2 is doing state sync.
You know, every validator has done some GitHub, some tool contribution, some, you know, they've built some tooling for the network that is being used by others, and we want to make sure that, you know, the general public knows about it.
Yeah, so that's a brief intro. I think GOS can, you know, tell you if I miss anything.
No, definitely. So my involvement with this kind of started pretty much around the same time that I threw out my eBoss posts, and hopefully you guys can hear me okay, if not, kind of just, but you know, the eBoss posts about decentralization and just that's been my biggest thing for a while now is pushing decentralization.
You know, a lot of these chains, the Nakamoto coefficient is like four, five, six, you know, so these top validators go down, the whole chain halts, it's a security risk. It's been a big issue that, you know, it needs to be talked about and we need to find solutions to it.
And as a validator, you know, we do have a few networks where we are top four, five, six, and even then I still push the same message of decentralization, even at, you know, if it's going to affect us, that's fine.
I would rather promote long term, you know, security and just longevity of everything versus own personal profit.
You know, I truly believe in the cosmos and everything that it's trying to accomplish. And just, yeah, you know, so when I kind of saw thigh board doing these threads, and then between, you know, Tom and his contributions and just various other validators and their contributions.
You know, it was inspiring and I think my original inspiration for this really came back about a month or two in from when I first started validating. I started in November with Whisper node.
And then in December, I came across Bro and Bros. GitHub repo that did like a gist. And it was this sort of, you know, early, like, ranking system for validators not just based on their VP, but also based on, you know, just other qualitative metrics.
Like, what's what are they doing outside of just validating or they contributing things are they building things. What's their, you know, max commission rates that to are they building RPC nodes or you know, you can't know it's like, all this other stuff so I thought about that and I've always wanted to be.
I've always wanted to expand on that. So, you know, just in the past month or two, it's kind of come up more and more especially with the most really taking off and we've seen over there, how quickly that's blown up and how the top few have really gained a high
level of control there. You know, so it just become a really important thing for me. And, you know, even at the cost of our own selves, it's fine I will continue to push the message.
So what we thought putting together a discord a community away for validators foundations teams teams themselves other, you know, projects analysts contributors of the columns as a whole, bring them all together to kind of discuss these topics gather feedback, and then find a way to use that
feedback and create some sort of system whether it was the scorecard or ranking system whatever, you know, to provide to the community so that they had alternative ways to look at it versus just going to min scan and seeing.
Okay, top 10, I'm always going to pick the top 10, you know, because they feel like the safest bet.
So that's, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much, you know, my motivation for it is just really decentralization this top four or five, six stuff.
It hurts us all in the long run, not just as validators, but the community as well, you know, everybody's putting their investments at risk.
So for everybody listening, if it sounds like ghosts is talking from inside of a fishbowl it because he actually is talking from inside of a fishbowl because you can't see this.
He's got the ghost whisper he's got a whisper note head on and the mic shoved in there what are you doing with that.
No, so I have, I have my wireless earbuds in here.
The mic here and that's not bad.
So, and then you guys talked a lot about evamos because evamos is, you know, obviously, it's a bit top heavier.
I think the Nakamoto coefficient, which what we're talking about here, at least the definition that I know of is, is what how many validators from the top down do you need to get to be above 33 and a third percent, right?
Or third, whatever it is, right?
33 and a third to be able to get to that point.
So right now that number would, I guess, be five because five validators within evamos is about 36.6. Four validators is 32.91, which basically means those top five go down and the chain halts and we're stuck.
Or even those, those many top two, in this case, three makes up almost 30%.
So those three plus a couple down the list and next thing you know, you're at that, at that structure, right?
It doesn't have to be just a top five.
And so obviously that, for folks who don't know that's obviously not only a concern from, from a halt perspective, it's an uptime side of the house.
There's a lot of things that can come to that, to that large percentage, right?
Definitely.
There's a few big standouts.
Like, if you look at Carver, Carver's got a massive top heavy contingent there with those validators.
What's even worse is that it's a sex centralized exchange validator that's actually got that.
And I think that's nearing on 30%.
I haven't looked at it for a while, but I think from histories from, from what I previously looked at it, it was nearing on 30% of the network power and in one validator at the top.
I mean, if you look at the history of staking and staking habits, it's pretty clear that people from the outside looking in without knowing too much about networks and the validators come in and just, you know, pick the ones at the top of the list because
they're probably, you know, perceived to be a safer bet in terms of slashing. So also, you know, it's, it's in our nature that bigger is better and towards the top is considered to be the bigger one.
So I guess for people who are listening, you are too familiar with some of the issues that can happen when networks get too much power in one or two validators.
I might talk about that a little bit because it's not, I think other validators, especially ones that are at the top, think that the concern of the rest of the validated community is that they're making all the money and no one else is.
So, you know, that is one factor, of course, but that's not the only factor. And, you know, depending on who you are, depends on your motivations really.
But, you know, that keynote's were concerned primarily about network health, but we also have concern, you know, that we would like to make more money as well, of course.
But so when it comes to network health, the problem is, if you get too much voting power in just a couple of nodes, alright, so Todd has written in the comments here that on Carver,
and that Prakon has 27% of the network, and Malia has another 11% of the network.
So what that means is that there's 38% of the network voting power in two validators, right?
So to give an example, yesterday we observed, and I posted into one of our chats, that there was a situation where probably, I would say, 8 to 12 validators all started missing blocks at the same time.
And, you know, we speculated what that might be, and landed on that it was probably a network outage, either in a region or in a data center.
And with those, potentially those nodes concentrated into one data center or region, then those nodes all went off long at the same time.
So if Prakon and Malia on Carver are in the same data center, and they have a network outage, then the network stops working.
It will just turn off because they've lost too much of the vote power.
So work outage can span anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of days, depending on what the problem is.
If someone's dug a hole and ripped a body, you know, fiber cable out of the ground, then it could take days to master some resources and fix that if they don't have redundant internet.
So network health is a big issue when it comes to the concentration of vote power to a couple of nodes or even, you know, fiber seeds.
So that's our primary concern.
And Thiborg and Ghost, have you guys, you know, taken a temperature check from, you know, other validators in the community about other effects of having concentrated vote power?
Yeah, actually, I wanted to give an example also because not just the network can hold.
A good example for me, and I posted about this on Twitter, was during the Terra meltdown, basically.
A couple of, I don't know how many exactly they were, but, you know, the chats were made public, and I read through these chats.
And I think there was maybe 20 people participating in, 20 validators participating in there.
There might be, you know, a little bit more people talking in that chat.
But between them themselves, they decided that they would stop the market module on Terra, which, you know, is the module that allowed for arbitrage between USD and Terra.
And so Terra, I think that was like 12 of May.
You know, it was going straight to zero.
And so a lot of people were shorting Terra, including me.
And so, you know, it was being printed like crazy.
So there was no way Terra was going to go up, but at some point during the night, I guess these guys got together on the dashboard and they decided, you know, for the health of the network.
I mean, in that particular case, there was no collusion and there was no, you know, intention to arm, but that could have been the case.
But they decided to just stop the market module.
And so as soon as they did that, I think like Terra went up like 10,000 X within like a couple of hours.
And so for me, I was out of the trade, but I know, and I read actually just this morning that there was some big Korean VC fund that just got liquidated for 99% of their wealth on that particular night.
So it's just an example of a case where another couple, you know, it was probably handful, maybe more, but at least a sufficient number of people got together and decided that they would do that.
And they could have made themselves very, very rich.
Maybe they did.
We don't really know.
And made people very, very poor.
So, you know, it's a risk that I guess few people anticipate when they when they put their crypto on chain and, you know, when they invest crypto in general, that that kind of stuff can happen.
And that kind of stuff, you know, will continue to happen if the networks are that centralized and inside that difficult to implement.
So I guess when it gets dangerous on proof of stake, networks is when token gets cheaper.
So there was on Terra with the Terra mania when it was all crashing.
There was so Terra classic we're talking about now.
Obviously, there became a lot of abundant token at very cheap prices and a lot of that was getting staked validators and the voting power was changing like mad.
So, you know, at that time, I mean, it was probably all happening too quick to be able to collude in that instance to, you know, do something by voting that to benefit a few at the demise of others.
But when you look at now at the moment, osmosis and some of the other chains, you can see that there are individual wallets, I'll say, I'm not going to say people with individual wallets that are buying up a lot of token and staking them reasonably responsibly in terms of network health.
So the other day we saw was there one wallet.
When it's breezy, managing one turning your microphone off.
So I think there was one wallet that used that bought and staked.
I think it was about two and a half million Osmo, right?
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, six million was it?
Yeah, and I looked at a couple of wallets there and some of them staked them to a couple of different nodes.
I think there's another wallet that might have been like three or so million states, but to different validators.
But there was like three validators or two validators or something that they state to and they'll both in the top five.
Yeah, number one, number two and number four that they went to.
Sorry, one, two and three that they went to, I believe.
Yeah, so it's not necessarily even the validators that are buying up cheap token and self staking themself to get to the top of the list.
But people see those as safe bets and just state their token of that instead of spreading it around all the validators, which would be the safer bet.
So, you know, all the prices are down at the moment and it's an easy thing to do.
So a lot of people think that because it's, you know, the tokens on a market that you can't buy up a meaningful percentage of token without pushing the price up.
Well, that's not the case.
When there's a lot of sell pressure, you can certainly do that, especially if it's in a sex or if there's OTC facility somewhere over the counter for those who don't know.
The acronym, you can buy up a shitload of token when they're cheap if you've got the money and then you can basically control the network.
So those massive wallets that do that.
Some people say, you know, if they they diversify their staking, then that improves the network health.
It does in terms of the network's health in terms of the network's viability and long term health, you know, having a lot of tokens under the control of one person is not very good because whilst they might stake it to a lot of different validators and people believe that that diversifies the voting power.
At the end of the day, that wallet that one wallet controls the voting power, not the validators.
So it's also a state of mind that's in that situation.
So have a look. See if we've got any good questions here.
Callan's been saying a few things.
So for you guys, obviously this problem is a couple of different things.
One you originally talked about was really more around education, right?
That people were just picking the whether it's what's easier, they're picking the top 10, which is really a that's a delegator decision.
Because even when I got in this type of thing as well, you, you just blasted with 100 or 150 icons, right?
And they're ranked.
And so obviously, there's some there's some UX here in UI that actually is driving some behavior around around specific things, right?
And I've called out like Mint scan on why they put the top 10 in a different color and just things like that, right?
Like you would, there's some things in the UX UI perspective that I think inherently drives people to pick the top 10.
I've seen things on Reddit threads around, oh, anything, you know, in the bottom third is extremely dangerous because they get slashed more and things like that, which doesn't make any sense, right?
There's no, there's no relationship here at all between.
I've said this before in 20, there's not much relationship between competence and position because I'm number nine on star stargazes.
So that clearly shows that lack of I'm doing me is totally incompetent.
So but yeah, so that's only that's one piece of it, right?
So that's that's an education thing that you guys can do we can do either by, like you said, like trying to find UX type of things where I want to be able to provide you the data on chain or off chain to be able to make,
allow intelligent delegators to make right decisions around where to be able to stake, right?
And and take safety and because right now it's kind of like here's a rank of 100 and it's all based on safety, which is totally not true, right?
And so now we want to take these other kind of contributions that are types of things, right?
So that I think that's a that's a valid that I encapsulate that well, that's a that's a valid type of and very beneficial structure.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think most of the centralization issue can be solved through good UX and that that's not, you know, that's everywhere, right?
It's not just Kepler.
It's also a Netflix.
It's also a Cosmo station.
And it was in fact, you know, they all had the same list that is weighted by by a number of delegations. Obviously, they all face the same issue.
And so we can fix that in just one go by providing.
So there's two things there.
One is the original idea was to provide lists.
So that's, you know, that's all this.
We're going to make the criteria is we're going to make the parameters of the ranking and the weights voted on by the validators themselves.
So, you know, we don't take control over everything.
And this is a list that, you know, you guys can use if you want.
And actually not just for the second interfaces, but also the delegation programs run by the ICF run by Ignite.
You know, these guys are huge.
And so they have a big weight.
They have a big say in the way that the tokens are being distributed and they can help tremendously pretty fast with the centralization issue by just changing the way they deal with that.
And another another group of people that have quite a bit of power there are these liquid-saking providers like LiDOM, like persistence.
I'm missing one probably, but you know, there's a couple of liquid-saking providers right now and there will be more in the future.
So these guys, none of them I know Quicksilver doesn't do a white list, doesn't white list by theators, but most of them do that.
So if we provide them with good data about, you know, who contributes to the network the most, then they can take that into account in, you know, when they do their white listing and basically push up the small community of added errors that are actually active.
So that's that's at the same time.
So the main feedback we got from that Discord, which was useful, was that, you know, a ranking is a ranking and we're going to be a small group of people deciding on what the parameters are.
And we're going to have outside control on too much money basically, because, you know, if we put that school guy first, that's the guy is going to get a ton of delegation from people.
At least, you know, that's the expectation from putting in that that that's going to vary data on top of the list.
What we decided to do instead is being a data service in the sense that we would gather the data, both quality of data and quantity of data.
And we would provide that data to others, third parties.
So that could be dedication programs, liquid-staking providers, the users themselves, and they wouldn't, you know, basically wait that data the way they see fits.
And so that way we would end up with more than one ranking.
We would, as a, you know, as as the Cosmos, the Validator Group, we would have our own ranking, which would be based heavily on contribution, but anyone can do can can do something different.
So if you're a liquid-staking providers, maybe you want to put the focus on, you know, uptime, for instance, or lack of slashing or, you know, number of misplugs.
Like, you know, you can wait the ranking the way you think that benefits most of your products.
And so that that that's a big pivot we took.
And that that's that's the direction we're taking now.
And then that that that I think makes a absolute ton of sense. And then you also have the other part of this, which is not just UX, but people are just delegating because of free shit.
Right. Then you have you have the whole free shit thing.
The free shit is like, like, you know, Edmonds, I think is a huge free shit type of ranking there.
And people have promised things or they're a future token or an NFT drop or this or that.
Hell, I'm part of that too.
Right. So I mean, that the free shit moniker kind of fits.
That's a huge piece of this that's driving that as well.
Right. And so so I think what might kind of where I'm going with and I assume you guys agree with that.
Right. There's and that regardless how much how much education there, it's just a race to how much free shit you can give away.
Yeah. So we've been thinking about the free shit problem.
And we want to offer a solution to that.
And we want to gamify the ranking in the sense that each user, each wallet, in fact, would get a delegation score.
And the delegation score would be based on how you've put your stake with respect to the recommendation, basically, of the ranking.
And so if you've been splitting your stake, if you've been using the variables that will show up at the top, meaning the people that deserve it the most.
Also, just a small note on that deserve it the most will be, you know, dynamic in time because we want to make sure that
even if even though you might be a great contributor, you know, the goal is actually just to replace the top with another top.
So we'll wait your your place in the ranking based on your number of delegation and how much you need them.
So, you know, if Cosmos bases, for instance, you know, they're doing great work for the community, they are very active there on, you know, making sure people understand how the Cosmos works.
You know, if they are at the bottom of the list by by delegation stake, they will probably be on top of the list by contribution stake.
And so they will people will be able to delegate to them first.
And so if you follow these guidelines, you will get a delegation score.
And that delegation score is something that we want to make public and any project that you know care about decentralization.
You know, we want to basically do some business development, you can call that and tell them, OK, you could use that in order to wait your air drop in order to promote decentralization.
Try, you know, to favor a little bit more the people that have a great delegation score.
So you as a user, you come in, you check the ranking, you see that you are at 10%.
So that's a very low score.
You haven't been doing great.
You're going to be incentivized to basically prop up, increase your delegation score, get to 80% and get maximum maximum air drop from
projects that are interested in helping us with that.
OK, go through you guys.
I thought you were leaning in there to say something to.
No, no, sorry, I was I was reading one of these comments from Adam.
Sorry, it's kind of hard to see out of this.
So yeah, it's kind of foggy.
But so if it's the former, I don't see why it would be unreasonable to rate limit or tap validator delegations.
So this is an interesting one.
I know ping.gov and I believe chill validators fork of ping.gov may do something where, you know, depending on the network, there will be like this number next to the delegate button every day for each validator.
And it'll say, OK, this, you know, this validator is already received, say a thousand tokens and delegations today, considered delegating to another validator.
I think that's a pretty reasonable approach as well.
And, you know, it's another UX issue, of course.
I totally support something like that.
I've also heard other people say, well, why don't we tap validators, you know, no matter what they can know, no more than control 5% of the network at, you know, anyone given time and after that they're no longer able to delegate it to.
I think there would be issues implementing that, of course, there would be, you know, public outcry, whatever.
I don't see that necessarily working.
I believe that the solution really lies in education and just getting community of the tools, platforms and just the ability to see the data for themselves.
Now, of course, not everyone's going to use these or even know about them.
You know, like you said, when you first joined the cosmos, you know, I even I when I did, I didn't know about half of this.
I didn't even know sticking with a centralized validator, you know, or a sex would exclude me from a drop.
So they would get near drops and I wouldn't, you know, um, just before you get too further down the line, I would like to talk a little bit more about what you just mentioned with having staking caps built into the network because we've been taught about
this lately, particularly on Juno in core two, and we're putting up probably a proposal on Commonwealth soon.
And I'm thinking about writing a paper on it because the they're like social education is one thing, but it doesn't control outliers where Wales just stake willy-nilly, right?
So the we were looking at potentially implementing a staking cap that is like a percentage of available VP that has a governance controllable parameter for the multiplier of so what the maximum cap would be is affected by the multiplier.
Yeah, so we've been talking a bit about that lately. So what what is the feedback you've gotten from people and what are your thoughts about how that could be a negative thing for a network rather than a positive and how like could it not work in conjunction with
staking education and, you know, like a platform like you guys are talking about because you have to understand that like the only, well, in my opinion, the only real way to control staking weight is to do it at a network level because of all of the different UIs and avenues into actually doing staking.
So have you got any further comments on that?
Yeah, so I think the issue with doing it at the network level is people it's going to be easy to game the system for various if you look at Ethereum, for instance, you know, they've tried to do that.
And what you end up seeing is a big value errors that just create multiple notes.
Civil attacks, right? I mean, even with a civil, it's better than having it in the one place like you can still use like the staking UIs that you guys are talking about and obviously if someone's doing a civil, then that would not work out in their favor as far as your staking UIs concerned.
However, you know, in terms of network health, the civil is probably better than one validator having a lot of vote power.
I don't think it's better because if you have a really big entity behind, you know, half of the network node, that entity just does whatever it wants with the network.
So, you know, maybe that's, but if that one entity can get, you know, what's the fear that they're going to be able to get more delegations with more nodes?
Like, if they also buy an end staking, right, then, you know, they're going to have their supporters.
If it's spread over 10 nodes or one node, the only difference is that it pushes out other nodes, but it's overall, I think, better in terms of, you know, if we're looking at it from purely a network health standpoint, you know, in terms of nodes going down,
data centers, whatever, potential chainhults, yes. Obviously, it's still if it's one person controlling 10 nodes and maxing out on each one, that's still the issue, you know, an issue of, you know, an entity controlling a large amount.
But this is where I feel like having some sort of community watchdogs, which we clearly already do. I mean, you know, people writing up all these great threads, doing all this research kind of tying wallets together, see who's doing what, what's shifting where
the stuff's been called out before and I believe it continues. It needs to continue. Absolutely. You know, and validators that are doing this sort of stuff, sibling, you know, they should be called out because yeah, you are pushing out other
potentially great operators from the ecosystem. And it is another centralization factor. You know, like I said, yeah, going down to just purely network health, yes, it would be better.
But overall, I still don't think that's the right. So I feel like having, you know, some sort of tap on the limits can be good. And there was an interesting one, I'm going to take this over to Osmosis, I believe it was Leonors crypto man, a couple months back on Commonwealth,
proposed this sort of system where there would basically be baseline commission paid out daily to every validator in the set, you know, up to a certain point. And then, you know, like, if you were, you know, say top 33% or whatever, there would be
a little bit of incentivization for people to actually delegate to the lower ones, you know, a small multiplier say, you know, 5%, 10%, whatever, if they delegated to a validator that was lower on the charts.
That would provide financial incentive for sibling. And that's seed that's really, you know, it all comes back down to how do we get past the civil, and at the same time, even things out, of course. So and that's why there was pushback on that but I thought, you know, if there was some sort of way to evolve on that,
you know, continue to at least discuss the idea and get more feedback.
So I like I think symbols would self regulate themselves if you're just limiting state because if you, you know, if you publicize that civil bad, right, then, you know, those if there's 10 finance staking validators they just, they won't take off they would just, you know,
they won't delegate to them because I go well these guys are clearly sibling and you can control that as well and you're staking in a face but it does stop any one validator from getting too much voting power like any one node.
Yeah, I think there's a key.
There's technical, you know, network health health and there's governance network health. And in general, I think, you know, it is going to be a bad thing for the same entity to control multiple nodes.
And if you, you know, put a cap on stake, you're going to get that. I think, you know, the way I think about blockchain is this.
Why would. So I'm just confused as to why we're going if there's multiple nodes, they're going to have more voting power than what they would if they had one.
We're just leaping straight to that for some reason.
So if the governance is from the state tokens, right? So if that state spread over 10 or one, then it's, you know, they've got no more or less voting power but ultimately the voting power lies with the state wallets anyway.
So if those people are educated in voting, then it doesn't matter how much stake the validator has in terms of governance. They can try, but all it takes is, you know, some communication with the public and they'll unlikely to be able to do anything unless they own the tokens, in which case it doesn't matter
whether they stake it to their validator or another because they still control the vote anyway.
If you imagine, you know, one entity that is able to do that to split, you know, in their sake into different nodes, you also give the incentive, you know, you can expect that these guys are going to accumulate more power because if they have more node on the network,
naturally some more people are going to delegate to them without knowing that this is the same entity. So I think the end result would be these guys will be will have more power at the end of the day, not by splitting.
So there's absolutely nothing if that was the case, then you know, there would be more symbols now because at the moment there's absolutely nothing from stopping anyone from doing that anyway.
But if that was going to be a more profitable approach, people would do it now and some people try, except at the end of the day, the reality is, is that no one stakes to the bottom anyway.
So, you know, they can't really civil and get any more meaningful amount of stake. And if they call it the same brand, if they use the same branding, then people will know they're sibling.
And then people don't like that. So they wouldn't. And that's, you know, as a community that's frowned upon.
So, okay, right. What's the solution that you want to suggest for the camp? Like, what do you have in mind?
There's there's no one good solution. I'm just, you know, being the devil's advocate and debating the available.
Yeah, I want to send your solution to it. So you want to put a cap and beyond that cap, you cannot get more stake.
So talking about or two, right?
Okay, so what we have talked about and to be honest, we haven't landed on anything we argued about it ourselves at the moment, because we're trying to land on the like we haven't even put up the proposal and Commonwealth because we want to research the effects on things before we go and, you know, start actually talking about doing it on on the chain.
Right. So it's a matter of looking across and getting expert opinions from people from all over the network and different developers and different network founders and try and like determine what the possible effects of doing this might be.
So my proposal was to have a limit on the amount of stake based on multiplier of so say if you had like 100 validators, right, and there was 1000 token state, then divide 1000 by 100, which gives you 10 and then have a multiplier.
Which is a governance controllable parameter of what the maximum can be so maybe it's five so the top validator can have 50 right five other network or something like that.
So at least it's controllable. But what what that would mean is that then if they already had more state than that so say if the if the amount of validators was changed by governance from 100 to 50 right because I don't know maybe the network's not going so well, and it's not economically viable for the
lower validators and you want to like tighten up the set right to the good ones or something like that.
Or just maybe there's network performance issues or something you want to tighten up set right so say you end up with the 50 validators that would mean that the top validator would have 10% of the vote.
It's not going to force undeligated anyone. It just means that until you know that becomes down to 5% again people can't delegate to it.
So and that wouldn't limit the amount of rewards that they get that still get the 10% of the rewards.
For their state is just means that people can't like every time you try to delegate to you just get a message that says that you can't delegate it is already too much voting power.
So that was just one solution that I thought of and this people have definitely raised issue with it as you guys have.
And we definitely need to do more research around you know the different social aspects of it as well as any detrimental network effects that it might have.
So yeah I think I think I think that you know basically what we don't want to lose is the incentive for validators to be great validators.
So if you implement your solution and it's you know easier to just create multiple nodes and to be a great validator then it's a problem.
But if you you know wait it's just the right way so that you have a combination of both basically you have the education so that people have the incentive to be great to you know keep doing what Pocachu,
Acos, Cosmos, Spaces all these guys are doing and at the same time you know you put a cap on how much you know you basically prevent the Nakamoto coefficient to be too low.
Then you know then then we're talking about a solution that takes into account the two side of the equation.
Guys I'm gonna I'm gonna have to go I'm sorry this is a very interesting discussion but I have another call right after that.
So it was a it was great to talk to you and I hope we do this again maybe.
Thanks for coming on.
We definitely need to keep talking about this as a community as well so interested to have more discourse on that terrible place Twitter and also in your business.
Yeah, yeah to be clear I'm not shooting down any ideas I'm just talking about the different avenues.
No of course and I think that's very important.
Thanks to coming on.
We know you're gonna get me.
Thanks a lot.
It's a tough problem because you want to I think as I work said you want to be able to ensure that values are contributing or that that are earning.
Obviously you're putting time and effort in you want to make sure that they can they can profit from that right.
I still know it'd be interesting.
I like this idea I like the cap idea I think it's interesting what you get into things like like even look in in Juneau.
I also really always love Juneau because it's the chain that takes chances and wants to kind of like there's nothing sacred right just because something is that that's what I really like about it.
We can share the norm that it's not like it can right and we can always you can always return it right like nothing here is permanent.
I don't think in any sort of sense well maybe depending on how you transition this into that group might be somewhat permanent but.
But if you look at Cosmo Station on within there like right now they have about 7.9 7.9% 8% let's say and so if that if that cap limit turned into be 4% like no based on your math right or whatever that was maybe it's 4% 5% like.
Are they if they're contributing and if they feel that that there's a limit on how much can happen on Juneau does that chain then turn into.
Not as important in the wallet like maybe they don't market as much or maybe it doesn't show up there maybe it's it's something else where they have 25% because they know that when I hit the button to stake it comes that way right.
Now does that does that in the end doesn't make that much of a difference and is that the group that you're we're trying to.
Be able to protect I don't know but I think the idea is.
At least the idea of being able to take somebody who's contributing and chop that down to say you contribute but can only contribute this much or as much as you contribute this is the max you can earn out of that right.
That's tough I think but but again that I don't know if they're like the if that's a good example of someone we're trying to change or if it's something else.
Like a different type of value that might have a large percentage that we think is just more dangerous right like that's maybe going back to the crack an example.
So yeah I mean I do kind of so the thing is right.
You create a good wallet with all this information and you know.
People people can get that information and making form decisions or the point system and all that stuff right you have to get adoption of that wallet otherwise it means nothing if right you the wallet and people still use.
You know Kepler staking in a face then it's still going to be the same on Kepler unless you sort of talk to them and get some buy in and get them to maybe.
Implement through an API or something similar solutions or based off of this external solution but I mean.
In my mind if it's not at and I've said this before when we're talking with Osmosis the other week you said but if it's not a network if you can't find a viable solution at a network level.
Then you're really passing control of the.
The how it's presented to people to someone else yeah and that is a very central way to do it and that you know everyone has to build the UX is in the UIs and people can make different decisions around their own motivations right and you know at the moment.
Say it's a collective building this interface and that might consist of you know whisper node.
Thyborg and EcoStake and they might all be very great people right now right but say next week EcoStake.
Wants to buy a mansion and whisper node has all of his UST go to zero and they need to make some money what it is to stop that additional motivation then like incentivising them to modify their algorithms to to get them some more money.
I put themselves to the top or you know and this is nothing against disperse but they had a wallet that I believe was like one of the first wallets to be able to stake on Evmos with ledger right I'm not 100% sure about that but I it's a pretty popular.
Staking interface for Evmos right and for the longest time and I'm not sure if this is still the case they put themselves at the top of that list the same as Ping does and the same as Cosmos does in the Cosmos wallet right which if you have a popular wallet is very effective.
Because if you look at Evmos you'll see disperse is right up there with number Cosmos station and orbital apes so and the rest of them so yeah some say.
Yeah the problem there and you know I mentioned something about this the other day was that they were highlighting other top 33% is with this red flag that if you hovered over it hovered over it said hey you know support the central station.
Delegate to other validators but they didn't have the flag next to their own name and they are number two which to me seemed a little strange.
So.
But they fixed that right.
They've since fixed that that's correct you know but you know I caught that and I thought it was interesting I did a few random refreshes I tried different browsers and I thought at first maybe it had some sort of just every time you refresh it was like randomized.
The list because it wasn't ranking by default when you went to visit by your VP.
It was just like completely random unless you selected one of the filters and their top right.
But every time I refresh no matter what whisper note showed up at number 112 and I thought that was kind of funny because we're like number 40 number 39 and our up times.
Good so I was curious how and why that you know what the rationale behind that was and then I had other people check that out and they confirm the same thing.
Not enough to be right you know and and they had mentioned that they were trying to follow in Cosmo station steps you know footsteps with their wallet which I went and checked their wallet I didn't I didn't see anything different other than just the owner of the interface you know Cosmo station
was trying to figure out what their themselves being number one and then VP down.
So I just you know since then it seems like it's completely randomized now the you know they do mark themselves the red flag which you know I believe that's it was a can move on their part it's honest and you know they're still actually growing so that's you know they've made a good
thing is the owner can absolutely decide you know there's that internal bias of whenever they want.
Yeah well you always look at number one right number one being yourself but so I mean even no matter how much of a nice person you are if you're in a pinch you can look out for number one.
So and that's what we wanted to do the collective you know everybody in the ecosystem in on it together.
I understand that the model is just that at the end of the day it is still basically controlled by a few people no matter how many people have a say in it someone controls this is going to be an admin or two in the GitHub repo and then you know they basically control the platform right.
So to get I don't know how to say it I'm going to say gains Alex because that's the way phrase is it to me.
That sounds correct on the way it's about if it's not it's the phrase problem.
Yeah it's the phrase problem now I don't want anymore.
But anyway to be fair you raised that question and he responded within like a few hours and then the next day it was fixed or.
Yeah it was completely yeah it's totally random now when like I refresh and it's totally random every single time now.
So do you think that was standing on you pushing you to the bottom.
You know I mentioned the comment that I felt like we got blackballed and the reason I felt like that is because of my constant pushing you know my posts about even most like top four controlling 33.02%.
Post is still being retweeted and shared around not as much but it's still getting traction and it got a lot of attention and you know even most themselves commented on it you know one of the team members saying alright how can we approach this problem and try to resolve it.
That's a little different when I mentioned the friggin vote weights in the well I mean I've wrongly went straight after away and just got smoked.
Initially I did and you know it's not like I had it was something personal it was literally just the motto you know we're going back to the free shit model.
But free shit to the point where oh no we need more I mean now we just saw them enable restake what two days ago like we didn't have enough now we need more or we were losing you know 0.2%.
So now we need to get that and they have since they've enabled it they've gained back what they lost and more.
Growth growth in Ecostera. Yeah so you know and hey it's open source it is what it is you know that was the whole point of it anybody can use it that's part of the network that's you know that was one thing that I really appreciated about Tom's work on everything he's built so far is that it's open source it's open to everybody you know.
There's no. Here's the thing Ecoster at the top on restake dot app right and the only reason people fork that and create their own one and ghost is absolutely guilty of this whisper knows themselves at the top right.
Absolutely.
I don't bother because I'm bigger than that.
See my thing is that I don't have a problem if you put you know if it's your platform I don't have you a problem if you put yourself at the top my problem was not flagging themselves as being part of the top 33% but flagging the other ones and then throwing them at completely random positions.
That was my great.
I am baiting.
No I know you're giving me shit but yeah no.
You know that was my thing was the flag issue you know it's like because I saw you know it had away like number 23 it had.
I don't know who's number three.
I can't remember but it had them like 60 you know it just had a random spot but it wasn't random because when you refresh it was just static every time.
So.
Speaking of losing out the free shit at most guardians I'm losing out those guys have jumped up significantly and that's also out of nowhere right.
They and so we play this game they play this man.
Yeah so so here's a funny little thing about even those guardians yeah they approached us I think it was about a month ago maybe a month and a half ago you know right when you most finally pick back up and was starting to become a thing.
So we got this to give away to our followers and you know personalized NFTs for us which we just gave away anyways.
And they never mentioned anything about having their own validator you know I didn't know they were either at the bottom or just inactive but still voting if you look at their voting track record they don't they've only missed two votes they've been around since you know.
Yeah they won pretty much and then now all of a sudden yeah they're blasting past everybody and even away was losing delegations to them so that's why I feel like that restate me because it was like OK well if you know we're gonna start losing market share then.
Yeah at least I like the or at least the orbital apes artwork isn't is OK this stuff I don't know.
Look at the comment the comment the internal comment was that we are no longer going to ever participate in any of these NFTs giveaways or collaborations you know we've had like four others approach us since then.
We've turned them all down I just said no I'm sorry we're not we're not into like cherry picking or any of that.
We are the same way right when in the past when people have approached us for NFTs giveaways we say we're happy to give away you whitelists but we won't give it to just our delegates right we say we'll give it to anyone who already.
Disappear and you know going along that line and it's not like I don't even if I do it I don't even I try not to make people have to follow me or anything like that or just say like you know whatever.
But you know this is a lesson for us and I totally agree with sentiment wasp and we probably won't do anymore anymore either because we basically I feel seeded a community to someone who has gone and done the thing that we don't like.
We hold ourselves out and then yeah literally gave power to the exact thing that we're trying to prevent so.
But we did it at you know we did it thinking that we were you know doing good for ourselves so we have to we have to look at me to we totally own it and yeah.
Yeah.
And if we change our practices in the future we can we can do that knowing that we fucked up.
And you know at the end of the day if that's if that's the business model they want to roll with we just have to accept that and hopefully we can all agree on some sort of controls in the future but you know there's nothing we thought we would dump this was in the past after we managed to like across a lot of networks get a minimum commission implemented.
And taking the high road on minimum commissions with it not implemented on networks is certain death to yourself.
Yeah but we do it anyway because you know we want to do what's right for other validators other people don't give a fuck.
So at the end of the day the victim goes.
And just do what is in their best interest right so you know.
We sort of we know that going in and unfortunately it's going to it's going to be like a way to run their ankle when when other people come in and just do the things that we sort of don't do because we think it's bad for the network but you can't control that and it's
there their choice and it's a decentralized.
Universe and they can do whatever the fuck they want. Right yeah exactly and it just comes down to you know sticking with your own morals and ethics and what your team believes in and that's just what we've decided internally moving forward you know we are going to be opinionated.
What we're also going to stick to a code of you know this is just how we're going to do on every network and regardless what anyone else does this is just our code of conduct internally.
I think there might be we had a couple of conversations before I think when Sonny was on and and some other ideas around some other ways to like kind of skin this cat right.
I think there one thing that Sonny mentioned before I think people forget about and is the idea of easily staking to multiple validators.
It always kind of seems like it's a you know I fucking dump everything in or beliefs even though I need 10 of most to earn a mint or something right like like there's no necessarily massively high bars here in terms of steak and so like I and maybe it's this the pain in
the ass of having to collect and then you know redelegate and so maybe there's some UX UI work there to similar to restake restake which would but not necessarily all chains obviously support off see those types of things and not everybody understands that and some people just do not like that idea which I totally get like I'm with that.
And so maybe there's something core to how this process happens where I can pull rewards and then instead of just having to stake to one validator in that I can pull rewards and then just distribute it back out based on what I have state right.
And so we can do that manually kind of similar to what Tom and EcoStake is doing from a from an Aussie perspective right because I think maybe some UX work in there and that would be core then maybe we have the idea of and Sonny brought up the idea of like validator groupings where I might have sets of validators that kind of
are grouped together based on some sort of ideal or maybe based off of like like we're pushing right now into this wildlife fund which I'm building and also like what what Tom is doing with EcoStake in terms of like driving that to be like a zero zero carbon footprint type thing like there might be some things that you could do and kind of like picking validators from different
types to build a portfolio. And so maybe maybe that's maybe that's maybe a better solution to all this I think the the cap thing is really tough because then you get in this situation even like even with these nft drops and whatever else then you have this race to get into that and like I don't know
if you see more projects just doing nfts then because you know you would right because yeah because now now you know I keep picking on the apes but like now instead of having all this type structure now there's 17 other nft drops and they're all at 4% because now now it's
a popularity contest right now it's not how good your marketing is it's just I can get something else out there and I'm just I'm not competing against them anymore because they're maxed out so if they're maxed out and now it's a brand new open area I don't need to compete as much blah blah blah blah
right so now I have to your point like exactly goes if 15 of these projects right the start because it's so much easier to be able to to kind of get in that piece so I don't know what that I don't know what this overall solution looks like but man put a tough problem.
It's difficult and you know that's why like this approach and trying to get you know the big goal here has to be been like bringing in more teams and more foundations and just everybody in together so that we can get this collective feedback.
You know when and I'll name drop your but one put most first joint I mean he was very.
Power hungry group trying to steal power from those that already had power so you know with a lot of discussion in the discord and a lot of great feedback from many people that's where that revised model of okay it's no longer going to be like a ranking scorecard it's going to be more of a.
Service that just shows hey this is what people are contributing right you know just based on that and I love the idea of like you just mentioned that you know Sunday said groupings or.
You know based on your beliefs or what they're contributing you know I you build a little portfolio and it literally just spreads your stake out through them.
Yeah yeah I think that whole thing like just taking one value I'm not sure if people understand that you can do that multiple I'm not sure if it's just the just the UX of it being a pain in the ass because it is a bit of a pain in the ass right I'm going to take 20% here 10% and.
But once you collect you just get it just dumps in the wall right I can't then I do the same thing again okay then who am I what's my low on and blah blah blah unless you're using obviously off see and restake which which is kind of what he's been doing Todd just said if the liquid seeking groups.
Did what I was talking about instead of focusing slowly profit would benefit the networks yeah I maybe I don't know.
Because.
Oh so good.
No it's just gonna say so what we keep talking guys in the in the chat please ask questions if you want to.
Want us to talk about anything before we wrap up today because we probably got about 20 minutes left before we get to the outside of where we should be we've discovered that people don't like the watches talk shit three hours it's more like an hour hour and a half so.
People don't go all day man.
I got nodes to build man but.
Yeah well I mean I could talk all day and it's like that you know you keep it's easy to put off work and do things you like like talking to people right.
And then you just have to fucking do it later so yeah no when everyone's asleep.
Yeah when you're eating pizza and drinking whiskey at 3am.
So actually what we got here we don't well we don't have any questions but Adam Burke did mention a while ago you said believe.
Cardano has a similar softcap concept to your idea now basically after validator goes beyond the saturation level.
I'm putting that in all delegators can earn less rewards first delegating to a validator under a saturation so the more the more rewards you get.
I'm sorry the more valid the more delegates you get the less rewards they get over a certain level.
That's interesting so that kind of sounds like Leonor's idea with the Osmosis where there's like that curve you know delegating to smaller validators would give you more rewards for delegating to a higher ranked validator.
You know just someone who has more VP.
And it's like a quadratic solution I guess.
Right and something that idea like the other half that would be that maybe the larger the validator or the more percentage of VP the deeper the slash cuts are.
So if somebody if somebody gets slashed and maybe maybe we can change what those rules are so it's a little bit more strict because I think most chains us like the slashing rules are pretty pretty meaningless but but but maybe that as VP grows there's higher risk right or at least for the delegator or something
something similar that there's a I mean you could probably do a combination of these things to be able to try to even that out.
I don't know if it gets past the free shit thing because you might say I don't care but it might it might look at instead of people to say I don't doesn't matter nothing here makes a difference.
I'm just going to delegate it all to to this free shit validator.
Maybe somebody says well what's the minimum well maybe I'll put 100 of the X on there and then maybe I need to be more thoughtful about where I'm putting these other tokens right.
That's that's interesting because we have seen you know Binance and I think a couple big other ones get slashed on like you know Cosmos hub and there was another one recently.
That was a pretty big slash out of nowhere so yeah I think that's an interesting approach you know whether it's actually yeah there was a really big one lately it was on a double sign over on check the ever stake it was during the central.
Oh yeah and yeah they double they double signed and.
Like the message that went out through the check the discord didn't even say it was a double sign they just said due to a technical error.
They would be gifting back 5% to their delegators and like to go resix and you know they got tombstone.
Double sign they screwed up somewhere I mean if I listed that we would be crucified you know.
Validator upgrade redelegate here.
Yeah exactly we're upgrading you know and the ever take is massive so right we're changing invalidated keys because we're upgrading up for upgrading keys please redelegate here.
Yeah just move on yourself and you'll get your 5% that you lost back that's right yeah as a bonus.
And a short bonus.
Literally the message like I should copy paste there and I was in the check the discord as an official notice from check the it was funny.
So I have a question for you so one of the groups I'm sitting in on maybe attending.
It's also kind of like a validator structures validator commons which I know you've we've linked we've talked about here it's been in the show notes here previously.
And they're working a little bit closer with the with foundations right and an actual chain and chain ownership if you want maybe a bad project ownership whatever it is right.
And they're they're trying to figure out more from the the governance structure of what a foundation has ownership of after a chain is launched versus maybe the validator set or the delegators to say maybe based on direction or the types of things and it's kind of like.
I think it started it might be paraphrasing here a little bit but it started a bit as like is what that balances between foundation control and like the natural direction of what a delegated group of individuals would say right where we want to be able to go with this.
So from from that perspective and kind of as we've talked a little bit with them that idea of have you guys talked about that at all in terms of like the the role of say foundation delegations in this and trying to help chains make better decisions on I know this is no
favorite topic is foundation delegation but but is there anything if you guys had that conversation all within this group to say what is the role of the of the chain have with this.
So there hasn't been as far as I've seen too much talk about that there are we do actually have interest from the ICF.
We do have I think let me say there are like eight or 10 different advisory groups.
So looking at the group right now.
Yeah, 20 different advisors, a couple of them are on the same teams of course.
So we are working with that in terms of validator comments I believe if I'm not mistaken five word was actually in contact with them.
Yes, don't quote me on that.
You're right.
Okay.
And then.
Let's see.
Yeah, so I mean that that's an avenue. Yeah, that's it hasn't been talked about as much in this discord, but I believe that, you know, we there's no reason we couldn't collaborate and bring the two groups together to merge both ideas and go OK how can we implement this you
know whether 10 different teams make their own interfaces or services whatever to provide to the community or only a few do but at least together this data aggregate it and say OK, you know, it's all available here.
No, I do you think do you think like say the most team has any obligation or ownership of of the validator structure and say basically what that Nakamoto coefficient is so like if if it if you know it's most of those jumps from what was it like 17 it jumped on to like
15 to six yeah so I do to a degree just a correction there I think they changed the way it was calculated.
Someone mentioned yeah I saw revision it was like seven to six or seven to five or something like that but let's say let's say an utmost of most at six right now or kava it's to like what ownership is like three yeah
three what ownership do you think those like the what ownership does the chain have in terms of taking action on that or do what can they do or is it like what is in their interest to do that.
Well, if I mean if it's foundation delegation is going out that are literally pumping people to the top then yeah there is.
I feel like there's responsibility there because they're putting their own chain at risk by doing so.
They're centralizing it themselves I mean for example and you know we literally have a delegation from asset manual so this is not a knock on them but if you look at their chain it's the top last somebody check the top four nodes were all foundation nodes.
And they control over 50%.
So Adam Burke says where can I go to see foundation delegations for each chain is there a list with each foundation's wallet address and not that I know of Adam know and that's actually a great question and something that this is where like community researchers or you know just people analyzing things putting
things together these Twitter threads breaking stuff down and tracking things down we need more people to do this stuff and put the time in on that you know and having these interfaces up would be valuable I guarantee there would be foundations or teams or projects that would either be willing to put up grants some sort of you know.
He's a grant to let's slow.
And so I think that's what I provided to the community and say hey you know like this is these are the live legit metrics do so with them but this is the accurate data.
And so I think that's the best way to do this is to get the information out of the foundation nodes right now between them all for them except for one have 9.9% of the VP.
Exactly but I mean everyone else in the set did their thing you know and we're one of the teams in the set and they just yeah chain was like halted till they business.
And that's different to like there's not a ton of chains that run their own foundation nodes right I mean they obviously take foundation delegation but.
And they started out worse than this it was higher than 50% and they said that over time they'd be phasing out but I mean if you look at it it's 100% commission on all four nodes.
Yeah.
You know it's just been an interesting approach and like I said I'm not trying to knock on them we get a foundation delegation from them.
You know but at the same time this is still not something that I support or these foundation nodes controlling all this VP I don't think that's beneficial to the network at all they mentioned that it was a stability.
You know that helps stabilize the network but it's been out for a while now.
It's a funny thing right so not everybody who builds a blockchain is a blockchain guy right they don't necessarily fully understand all the nuances of a blockchain.
Right what they some of these teams do know is that they've thought of a good product that they want to build and they need a blockchain to support it right and Cosmos SDK makes that easy.
Now that comes with some you know depending on where they're coming from and who they've talked to about this it comes with some you know preconceived notions about how to stabilize your blockchain and how to control your blockchain right.
Case in point is firm a chain.
So when they launched they had five foundation nodes right with which basically control the network and I had a foundation delegation as did just about everybody else who's Genesis validator and I raised to them I changed my.
Commission from 10% to 20% and when they asked me I said well you're my only staker and there's no one else using the network and you guys are just soaking up all of the the.
Inflation with your with your foundation notes and I said why in the fuck do you need them and they said to me.
That you know it's it's our like we believe that the stakers see that as a positive for the chain stability.
And I talked to them quite a bit about it and then they said well what we're going to do is we're going to you know.
Educate our community and talk to them and let them know that now that we've launched and we have all these good validators that we're going to shut down all of our foundation notes and so what they ended up doing after some time was shutting down all of their foundation notes.
Around about the same time is when they were so they kept a couple of them open I think to make sure that no validator got too much power and then after some state got spread around after they did the token swap from.
I was probably a theory or something to to their blockchain through some sexes.
No tokens to other people but the point is that they shut them down because you know they had a different perspective from people who are involved in their work so all I'm saying with that entirely long explanation is that.
They may think they're doing the right thing when they know.
And I totally get that but and that's also why we you know these past few Osmosis proposals you've seen and as a man was one of the tokens on the list of you know tokens to be de incentivize from Osmosis matching incentives and they you know reach out to us as this why we voted the way we did and just said look you know for the health of Osmosis itself it's a separate chain.
It has nothing to do with this and at the same time you know I truly believe that a chain should have some sort of like MVP or you know something to show before they go and ask for money from Osmosis we were very happy to do just give incentives to everybody over the past months.
Anytime anyone asked a pretty much got passed for almost every single LP didn't matter we matched incentives and now we see you know the effects of that and these cutbacks while I think they're great.
I think they're too little too late.
You know but.
Yeah I just I think we're going through the big reset at the moment in the Cosmos ecosystem from this maniac that we had now you know people realize the money's not unlimited and you can't just keep buddy you know given it because you know people take profits in a bull market right and eventually you get to people taking profits and it just crushes the market so you know unfortunately and I say this around.
I feel like people don't like it that much but you know at the end of the day if you're taking a profit it's coming out of someone else's pocket right.
Every dollar in is a dollar out of someone else exactly exactly.
Exactly so whether that be so if it's some sort of shit going with absolutely no purpose and people are speculating on price right well well they're speculating service.
They're putting that into the black box and then someone else is taking out the black box on the other side and then basically you know.
That so it's some things have used other things don't write some things make you worth money in the future other things may not be worth money in the future projects that.
Real start a blockchain release token pipe the fucking thing and then just take money out as people are putting money in and people are putting money in and locking it in the staking and they're fucked they can't get it out.
And the people with big ass bags who started the bloody network are sucking it out the other end and they're taking everyone for a fucking ride and.
It's painful to see and this without being crushed yourself you can't get out there and scream it from the hilltops as well probably get crushed for saying it right.
That's you know one of our team members commented on a Twitter throw the other day about.
Pretty much this exact same thing is that as a validator it's very hard to say something a lot of times without literally risking your own financial I mean this is a business while running a business here.
So you don't get in or you beat yeah I do you know just basically take your compliance and just go along with the ride and.
You know go forward or do you actually stand for something and say you know okay look this isn't right even if it's gonna cost me I'm still gonna say something because I just don't believe this is right and more often than not.
People tend to agree with you and I feel like. You know being allowed to have your own opinion even as a validator.
And going out there and saying something is truly the way to go you know not everyone will agree with me of course on that but.
At least in our team we've all agreed that we're allowed to have our opinions even if they don't even match our own internally you know as long as we're not obviously going out and starting.
Blatant wars for no reason right you know just yeah we started this we started podcast you bitch about everything.
So so Ramas says to those listening it's good to see more validators coming in speaking up for what's right yes and I fully expect to get fucking crushed.
Honestly after you know my last little asset mental yeah I know I get it you know.
But at the end of the day I just if something doesn't look right then yeah I mean more all in this together and it's not just us there's an entire massive community out there.
Callum there's more balls on the table so I guess what and I've been talking about this for a while and I am working on it in the background but it's quite a complex thing so.
What we're doing as a company is we're developing policies to work around right so one of our policies is network selection.
And that goes you know selection of the network goes along with the with the you know selection of the token that we want to you know validate with so.
What this means for us and what we hope it means to our delegates is that we have at least done like our policies to at least do some sort of due diligence and only go into networks that we think may have a future it's no guarantee there's no big fucking stamp on it that says Nulls guarantee that you're going to.
Be Lambo in two weeks but it does like we want to be we want our brand to be associated with quality networks so that might mean that we might have to shut down on a couple of networks as well once we release that and that's you know if that's what we have to do then that's what we have to do.
But we want to do like a due diligence report on all the networks that we joined and there's a lot of fucking labor involved with that.
And it might be to our own detriment again but I think it's important and I'd like to see other people go down the same path.
It's tough though because I was getting a really bad feedback.
I thought that was me.
I apologize.
No, it's tough though because a lot of times you don't know the potential of a network until round two round three round four and once you realize that you're not getting in right like you already.
So I think I like I totally never I totally agree with you because I want to be able to I'm really large on utility chains and change that have like kind of very purposeful purpose not just maybe mixing tokens around.
I mean, there's a lot there's a lot there's enough there's enough chains and there's enough bridges and LPs and this and that like how many ways can we mix this the ingredients of this cake right but at some point we got to bake something that actually has some really good utility and has like some really strong value.
And everything up between that point is giveaways and this and drops and we're mixing all this shit and blah blah blah blah.
But in the end that does that's not sustainable.
Like it's just not it can't you can't have it just be constantly be and you can have some of those be successful like us most of us I think is going to be long term successful.
But there can't be there.
I don't think there's enough to support six or seven of those types of ideas right.
So but that to that point you don't really know what is actually has good utility because some things pivot and then it takes some time and the development team grows and blah blah blah blah blah.
And either you have to take a I'm not saying it's a bad thing if take a polka-tube approach which I think is like get involved in early on everything and automate and be there and then maybe get selective over time and say I'm going to read and look at that stuff but at that point you're kind of in it so why would you it's just money coming in so it costs are there.
Or you kind of start hedging bets and you recognize which is what we do which is you pick things that you think have the right team the right involvement kind of you're making obviously making like an investment in organization.
And some of those are winners and some of those are losers right and just hopeful that's what a couple of those work out and maybe you only need two or three right you like I always look up to Frey at needlecast I mean they're they've got to say they're huge.
From a development perspective but I think they were on two networks right and you can be successful running on two networks if you have the right approach to it but I am with you I always get worried that.
That I'm always picking the not not the right ones are the ones I get into it's not and I'm not really a say picking sometimes you just luck out right you just you just happen to get into something where you know we miss out on kujiro which is this is we weren't really big on the other side right.
So but we miss out on that but which I think has good utility to it and and like I get it.
But I don't know it's it's tough to be a validator.
To sum up.
We've honestly literally just had this conversation last week at whisper note internally it was OK we need to be more selected moving forward we may not cut any existing chains or we're absolutely setting guidelines and you know what we're looking for in the team.
You know what their timelines looking like what they look what their team actually looks like tokenomics all of this sort of stuff.
Yeah you know we're going to be a lot pickier moving forward you know there's the spray and pray method like you said the book to and he just is everywhere and you know hey it works.
It works very effectively.
Yeah.
You know but but it's also a lot of management depending on the size of your team you know we're a small team and I'm essentially the one managing pretty much the majority of our notes.
Yeah most of the time so you know I can only do so much.
We have a few tests that's running that look promising but then again you know it's just testing it.
Those are as a validator I feel like tests that's a kind of a great way to gauge something you can run them cheaply and then also you will probably get a delegation out of it.
So yeah you know.
For anyone that's thinking about being a validator test that's.
We are coming up on 90 minutes by minus two minutes so unless anyone likes and final thoughts they just want to put out there real quick I'll say we probably wrap this up.
Do we solve governance.
I think we solved it right.
Always so we always solve every week we solve governance.
Stamp it and solve everything.
Every week I get in trouble from the fray if you're going over.
So.
He's not even here though.
Dad's angry.
No you just tell me a text he's like.
Wrap it up.
My music.
Old Chappelle's get with the wrap it up box.
So thanks everybody for coming.
Thanks for coming on.
It's been productive talk about the whole issue with like you know voting parents stuff on networks.
It's not going to be one way to skin the cat and it's not going to be an easy thing to tackle in the end but I think with a multi pronged approach I think we can find a way there eventually just.
Lots of people need to have a say on it and we need to do it the right way without penalizing people who also just want to sign blocks.
So.
Yep.
In any case thanks to our five viewers for coming to watch us today.
We really must figure out how to get more viewers because you know I think people need to hear what we've got to say because I think what we've got to say is important.
To be to be fair our YouTube views are go up and our podcast is doing really well.
So there are there are people just a lot the live piece is not that is whatever who cares we get the.
I have I have ideas and I'd be willing to come on more often so free shit and maybe.
And a teardrop.
Yeah no totally men not just so it just so it.
I get some free servers.
I got a contrabah for you.
All right guys thanks a lot thanks for coming.