Decentralized blockchain ecosystem Polkadot has announced the Thousand Validators Programme that aims to improve security and decentralization. The Programme is being launched with the help of Web3 Foundation, the operator of Polkadot, the new program will help users onboard to the protocol and host nodes. The news was announced in a blog post on December 4.
Created by former Ethereum CTO Gavin Wood, Polkadot is a next-generation ecosystem that offers interoperability and scalability. Designed to bring what Ethereum developers have promised for such a long time, the project is slowly becoming active with new developers and projects partnering with Polkadot every month.
In the blog post, the team notes that decentralization is a major hurdle that creators have to overcome when developing blockchain networks. Whales often purchase large amounts of cryptocurrencies and thus earn the ability to control the network or even destabilize it to some degree. Because of this, retaining decentralization represents a major goal.
Polkadot features an innovative mechanism that prevents whales from gaining control, but to leverage it the ecosystem requires more validators. On that account, Web3 Foundation launches the Thousand Validators Programme for Polkadot which encourages more network participants to join.
Previously, Web3 Foundation utilized the same program on Kusama. In motion since February 2020, the program has increased the number of validators from 25 to 700. The foundation notes that the network will soon reach 900 validators after implementing certain changes. With that in mind, we can see that the incentive succeeded in attracting new network participants.
Polkadot to consider users with less than 10k DOT
Now, users can become a validator on Polkadot as long as they meet certain requirements. These include responsibility, reliability, and technical skill per the article. Specifically, an individual must have experience as a validator on Kusama as well as a verified identity on either network. Validators have to stake at least 10,000 DOT as well and complete a one week monitoring period.
Polkadot also plans to consider validators who have less than 10,000 DOT. As long as they have ‘good intentions’ and have previously contributed to the project, the team will consider them on a case-by-case basis.
While 1,000 validators may not be much compared to other blockchain networks, it is still a good start for a relatively new project. We also note that Polkadot enforces much stricter requirements and validators must be long-term contributors. If the project succeeds in attracting a thousand validators in the near future, the team will prove that there is indeed strong interest in Polkadot. But whether it will turn into a real ‘Ethereum-killer’ is yet to be seen.
Governance bug
As Defiye reported in November, the Polkadot governance model faced a minor bug. Applicants for the council positions had their staked candidacy bonds prematurely slashed. In order to apply for a council position, users have to provide these candidacy bonds in the form of DOT tokens. If a member wins, he will regain the staked assets. Otherwise, the governance fund takes these funds.
Due to a recent bug, the candidacy bonds provided by runner-ups have been forfeited ahead of time. The protocol held no vote for these runner-ups, who still had a chance to earn a position in the council. Despite this, a bug that is now fixed caused their assets to transfer to the governance’s fund. However, Polkadot implemented a mechanism near the end of November that reimbursed these users.