New ICF Delegation Policy ~ Draft

63110e8f91ae43109ddaa8c4 1000×1000 70.4 KB Hihi Cosmonauts, Below is the first draft of the Interchain Foundation’s new Delegations Policy . First, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to its creation and invested their time in the initial review process. In particular, a special heartfelt thanks to Syed Choudhury, Lexa Michaelides, Leoonor Bitcanna, Leonoors Cryptoman, Kevin Garrison, Heejin Lee, Hwang Seung-gon, Adriana Mihai, Gavin Birch, and Abra Tusz who passionately helped review this first draft and provided extremely valuable feedback. Below you will find more about the process we will follow and related timelines to implement this new Delegations Policy: • Thursday, 1 September (Today!) - Post the draft of the policy on the Cosmos Forum, to receive the Community’s feedback • Wednesday, 7 September (6pm UTC) - Community Call on the draft policy - Cosmos Hub Twitter Space • Friday, 16 September - Cut off for feedback from Community on the forum post • EOW ~ 25 September - Final version of ICF Delegation Policy is released and the Application form for Cosmos Hub validators goes live • Friday 7 October (12am UTC) - Validator applications close…

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Great job, I’m sure this will drives the ecosystem toward a bright future.

catdotfish:

• Are not a centralized or custodian entity

Can we strike the word centralized please?

I think all validators are centralized, together we make a decentralized network.

Or maybe it should say “centralized exchange” - not sure intent here.

Many thanks for sharing the initial draft! Here is our feedback: -For the Public Good and Community Ecosystem/Cosmos hub there is no point limit indication, just that ‘1 point is received for each eligible activity/project’. The big issue we see here is that the amount of time/effort/costs between one project and other can be very different so awarding both with 1 point doesn’t seem fair. Example: being active in this Forum would earn 1 point, and also organising Cosmoverse or producing our bi-weekly videos would earn equally 1 point. I think we can agree the amount of costs/time/efforts differs vastly. -Also, a community project could be supporting the Cosmos hub, the ecosystem and be a public good at the same time, so how would this be evaluated then? -I think that big projects in terms of resources required and value added to the ecosystem should be evaluated differently. Projects such as Cosmoverse or our news videos is really a lot of ongoing work daily and huge costs involved, I don’t think big projects like this can be just awarded 1 point -Also, there are mentions about releasing content weekly, I think this is also a bit misleading. Some may release something…

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I think this is a fantastic start.

“Centralized exchange or custodian” would be a good change in verbiage.

Would also recommend just establishing a clearly defined minimum (i.e. 1%) for Foundation delegations. I could foresee a world where a validator would say “My 0.1% commission isn’t technically 0%” and sort of nullify the whole criteria.

Other than that… looking forward to seeing this puppy in action!

catdotfish: #1 Engineering (Ecosystem) A validator may receive up to 6 points in this section, 1 point for each item below: • Wallets: Wallets that support Governance and lower barriers to end-user adoption • Dashboards: Dashboards that promote engagement by supporting Cosmos-specific features such as governance, ibc, etc. • Explorers: Pages that display ecosystem data, and provide utility to users • Relayers: Operators that facilitate cross-chain IBC relaying in the ecosystem • Core Stack Contributors: Teams that actively support the development of the core products in the Interchain Stack - IBC Protocol, Tendermint Core, Cosmos SDK • RPC Providers: Public RPC providers • L1 Builders: Building a Cosmos SDK Chain Forgive me, I’m not sure I understand the criteria. We’ve not designed a wallet for the ecosystem. People delegate to our node using Keplr, Cosmostation or Trust wallet mainly. Am I understanding this correctly? Dashboards: Does this mean if our website had some sort of dashboard our delegators could log into? Explorers: Does this mean we’d get points if our website had mintscan info readily available on it? Bravo on the policy overall! I was…

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To see this come out is great!! Thanks to everyone who made this a reality. A few points: -like mentioned by others, better clarification for the centralized entities -are white label operations going to be eligible for this? For example, can the provider get foundation delegations for multiple instances? -a situation where someone has more than one validator, are they eligible? -will supporting consumer chains, or participating in the ICS testnet be criteria that increases the likelihood/amount of delegation? -if I have a dashboard on my website for user to stake, does that count? I think we need more clarifications on what qualifies and is expected with this category. And if it was previously grant funded, that’s not eligible right? -anyone who has gotten a grant for for things they’ve built, cannot use those things in consideration for this? ie RPCs, monitoring tools, and other apps? Is this including grants from any chain or entity? How can we ensure this is fairly/consistently enforced? -if you’re going to allow one jailing for downtime, maybe make that 1 jailing over a 12 month period or during the delegation period. -is there a policy for voting from these…

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Hi, it’s BlockPower and we translated a Chinese version for your draft delegation policy.New ICF Delegation Policy ~ Draft-Chinese 中文版

catdotfish:

Are not in the Top 20 validators on the Cosmos Hub (by voting power) at the moment of the submission of the candidature. The ICF wants to favorite a decentralized and healthy growth and support smaller Validators

With regards to this I believe rather than just blocking out the top 20 you could also delegate using a sliding scale on where where a validator falls within the set/% voting power which would give an objective metric for The Delegation Team to use in deciding the amount to delegate. This could be used in the scoring system where validators lower down the set gain more points or added as an addition guideline to The Delegation Team.

This will surely help around decentralization!

Initial feedback: This looks great, we are looking at the details more closely, will share any findings/improvements

catdotfish: Must be active in Cosmos Hub Governance and vote on all the governance proposals ~ at least 80% of your votes must be Yes/No/NwV Thank you for posting this. It looks like quite a bit of thought went into it. We’ll be posting more feedback later and attend the Wedensday call, yet for now, the first comment I have is on the above. While I support active governance participation being a key criteria, I feel “Abstain” should be included, not excluded. At Chainflow we feel Abstain is a legitimate way to vote, particularly for smaller, resource limited operators. Delegating to these types of operators seems to be at least the partial focus of this program, i.e. “not in the Top 20 validators…(by voting power)”. Forcing a Yes/No/NoWithVeto vote may force delegation recipients to make decisions they’re not fully comfortable making. Depending on the level of discomfort, some may choose not to vote at all, which goes against the goal of this criteria. For example, at Chainflow we feel that code audits should be completed by a group of third-party developers from the Cosmos community, i.e. not the developers who built the code. Validators could then choose whether…

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BlocksUnited: Forgive me, I’m not sure I understand the criteria. We’ve not designed a wallet for the ecosystem. People delegate to our node using Keplr, Cosmostation or Trust wallet mainly. Am I understanding this correctly? Dashboards: Does this mean if our website had some sort of dashboard our delegators could log into? Explorers: Does this mean we’d get points if our website had mintscan info readily available on it? I think the answer is no to both those specific questions - IMO of course, it would be the Delegations team that would have to clarify in detail. But the criteria is saying “if you are a validator, and you also happen to have created a wallet for use by everyone, you will get a point”. So for example, Cosmostation would have received an Engineering point for making Cosmostation Wallet (engineering project, open to all, not just their delegators); an Engineering point for building Mintscan; and maybe a Public Good point for maintaining Minstcan too. (but of course Cosmostation isn’t eligible for actual delegations since they are in the top 20). However, that example also illustrates some of the issues @Cosmic_Validator identified:…

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First of all, thank you to all involved in composing this draft policy, as it greatly helps with understanding what is required to qualify for the upcoming ICF Delegations program and lays out a clear path for all Just to echo a couple of points already raised: White label validators: I would like to see white label validators being a reason for disqualification from selection and added to the Mandatory Criteria section of this draft Reason: we feel white label operators (and any awarding of ICF delegations to same) would go against the whole ethos of this policy 2.) The inclusion of clearly defined MIN and MAX percentage of foundation delegations for each tier and score on any matrix would also be good 3.) Not directly related to this draft, but… Staking rewards claimed by the ICF could be channelled back into a type of incubation program/fund for new validators. There is no doubt that the bar will be raised and standards improved on with this new policy (and rightly so!) thus getting into the active set I imagine will become more difficult for the type of newcomer required (and desired) in the validating family that would help ‘decentralize’ the chain more To…

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Good decision

Appreciate it.

Syed: And yeh, that’s not fully fair -since the assessment is based on quantitative measures - but how could it be improved? Bearing in mind that the ICF wants to be confirming / redelegating every 6 months, so ideally “subjective analysis” needs to be kept to a minimum, right? Let’s take an example: a validator ranked 21# is eligible to apply, they are well funded and with lots of resources to invest in building wallets, explorers, etc., they will get many points and likely one of the top delegations, which won’t really have much impact to them since already well funded and large validator. In contrast, a validator barely staying in the active set but that is creating huge value for the ecosystem in some engineering or community project, with very low resources, since not enough funds are available to do many projects in parallel then not many points will be received and hence a low delegation. However, a good delegation to this smaller validator may allow them to boost their project and add additional huge value to the Cosmos ecosystem In 2020 Tendermint re-delegated ~19M ATOMs to new Cosmos Hub Validators and delegations were organised by tiers (100k, 200k, etc.). I…

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Are not being paid/receiving a grant for the same work you’re indicating in your candidature

Why should this be disqualifying criterion? First of all, grants are varying in size and often times just enough to cover development expenses and not make a hugely long-lasting profit. Also, grant applicants might have not included support and maintenance of the project leaving small development teams fixing bugs, adding improvements, and updating projects out of pure enthusiasm without any monetary support.

This is a great start!

One point I’d like to highlight is section #1 Engineering (Ecosystem)

I believe there should be an additional section for open source contributions. As an example, we have:

• GitHub - blockpane/tenderduty: Notification tool for Cosmos/Tendermint validators, sends alerts when missing pre-commits that Block Pane created, but a ton of us use.
• GitHub - polkachu/cosmos-validators: Ansible Script for Cosmos-based blockchain validators @Polkachu’s open source ansible scripts which many of us (33 forks and 45 stars) have forked and used ourselves
• GitHub - Reecepbcups/pyibc: Chain APIs, queries, and helper functions which @jacobgadikian’s team created (among many other python modules!)

These are all extremely valuable contributions that should be rewarded a point, but don’t fall under the selection criteria.

schultzie:

These are all extremely valuable contributions that should be rewarded a point, but don’t fall under the selection criteria.

Yeh, they are valuable tools. If not part of the “#1 Engineering (Ecosystem)” [I think it’s in the ‘spirit’ of that section though], these tools would fall under the the “Public Good (Ecosystem)” category - these are valuable tools.

Love the tiered idea

Thanks for your well-thought response. What do i think? I think I’m glad people who are smarter than me are involved! You make excellent points. The tiered delegations or sliding scale seems to make sense, but then there would be other nuances to consider and I’m not sure what those are.

Yeah I think that could be a good middle ground.

Like 1-20 get x% of delegations to split and so on

Or

1-20 has a max cap of x delegation

Great! Really hope that it will bring more decentralization to Cosmos Hub!

I have 2 questions:

1. Currently, we have a commission of 12%, with max par set to 20 at inception, over 2 years ago. If we will lower the com to 10 in the next few days will we be able to qualify for the application?

2. Last time (1.5 years ago roughly) when ICF unboded tokens, some validators, like ourselfs (that are dependent on ICF delegations) got kicked out of the active set and members of the ICF publicly said that this should have been taken into consideration. Any update on this?

One more point that might be relevant:

Contributing to bug fixes (github issues) on Cosmos-SDK, Ignite and similar core features.

I see a lot of good additions with respect to sliding scales, sharpening definitions, etc.

I have had the luck to give insights in the previous phase already, so I will follow this thread closely with all contributions coming.
Keep 'm coming!

Looks very good. We like it.

Just use clear numbers so there won’t be confusion.

For example:
" * Charge a commission higher than 0% but with a max of 10%"
=> " * Charge a commission of at least 1% but with a max of 10%"

Also sliding scales would be good and more support for the bottom validators.

Support the active validators who deserve it and need support.

Thank you very much for this long and detailed post! Just a little feedback on our side: It seems that the engineering part Ecosystem and Cosmos Hub is quite redondant on Wallet/Relayer/Dashboards parts that give 6 points when it’s natural to have both of them if one is designed for Cosmos Hub and should be only 3 points given there (or a better adjustment). Also, relaying works only if done with the ecosystem, but this part is VERY important, so I think giving more points exclusively to it would be more related (2 points only for Cosmos Hub part with the ecosystem, not what’s done in the ecosystem excluding Cosmos Hub) Dashboard and Wallets are for us not well described. Wallets should only be for wallet provider => giving the possibility to create and account or use an hardware wallet Dashboards should be only the front provider part => giving the possibility THROUGHT a wallet provider to use governance or such wallet management stuff Wallets should have more points, as it’s something crucial for users to interact with the ecosystem Dashboards can be easily replicate and engage less ressources as it’s only a use of the Wallets without the cons. Something like 3…

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We have a question from the discussion in the community call (from the first part of the call actually, then the discussion got a bit lost in other topics with Jimmy lol ). It is mentioned that the total amount to be delegated will be divided by the total amount of points given and then proportionally per validator. We see an error here, since validators outside the active set will be able to apply, there will likely be a lot more applications than the 155 eligible validators in the active set. So from all the applications will only the top 155 by points be considered and then the method applied only to these applicants? There are two issues that many seem to agree with as well. Firstly, that 1 point is given equally for all projects, but some projects have a very different amount of efforts/costs involved, so this equal point allocation seems unfair. Also, the sliding scale, not only because smaller validators need the delegation a lot more, but because the big validators have a lot of resources to invest in many projects so they have an unfair advantage to get more points. Another issue is that some companies or projects whose core business is not validating, are using their…

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I would love to know if and when there is going to be a call dedicated to the discussion of the policy. Seems like yesterdays call had a very different agenda. Thanks guys

For sure there will be another call, but probably after that the final doc will be released.

To be fair, at least 45 mins were about the policy :3 I kept trying to bring validators on stage for the whole call, but almost none was accepting. I would also like to remind people that community calls are about everyone and, with proper limitations, all should be able to express themselves. Degens are part of Cosmos as well and a healthy laugh sometimes is needed to break the seriousness of topics as the policy was. Let’s be inclusive and open with facts, not just words

Sounds like a great policy. We need to hire some Engineers at Whispernode to really start making a bigger impact!

Agree with @schultzie that open source contributions should somehow be measured and incorporated.

There is lots of work being done that’s hard to measure, and I want to commend ICF for taking it upon themselves to attempt to do so in a fair manner.

Hello guys - first of all thank you for the draft, a new chapter is about to start in Cosmos.

Some points we’ve noticed when reading the draft:
1/ Very glad to see that community activities are greatly rewarded, this is as much important as Engineering activities in our opinion. Even if you have the best tech in the world, you need people that are able to talk about it, onboard newcomers and help current users. We tend to forget it so thanks to @catdotfish and those who helped to create this first draft.

2/ Validators that are not on the active set can be eligible for ICF delegations, therefore the governance points can be a bit tricky as it would result in 0 point for them in this particular category.

3/ Regarding the shortlist and the different notations, will it be publicly available?

Thank you for the excellent work you’ve done, looking forward to the next community call!

Hi, thanks for the initiative, we are very excited about it. Our 2 cents of feedback: The 3 ideas TL;DR: • Hub validator set is special and unique • A good validator set is expensive • Hub validator set decentralization can be improved Regarding hub uniqueness, we have noticed that new networks that are flourishing have a very different kind of validators than the hub. When the hub was formed during GoS times, most of us came from techy computer science. We find in our set very highly skilled operators coming from data centers, network architects, network security and skilled coders What we see now is that new successful validators come from the social media environment. We have validator sets full of youtubers , podcasters , twitters … It is natural. They have a great audience. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they are learning fast and the hard way, the average validator set quality of new networks is far from what we have at the hub. Not a problem when networks are running smoothly. But what we objectively observed is that they tend to double sign at the first chance the network is in difficulties . We have seen this repetitively on many network events…

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Thank you to all those who contributed to the draft of the delegation policy. Really happy to hear that there will be new delegations to validators! My overall concern after reading through each of the criteria, is that it seems that more established and financially strong validators might be rewarded by the re-delegation while less established and smaller validators that actually need the support are punished by lesser points (lacking wallet, dashboard, and explorer requirements). I would like to suggest a few ideas that would make the final considerations a bit more fair: • measure validators based on their past performance in running the validator and the overall ‘health’ of the validator (% uptime, signing checkpoints, % commission, slashing history) • identify which validators are growing and contributing to Cosmos, yet need extra support to build out and contribute more such as building a wallet, etc. There should be different categories and allocations to consider for the different validators out there. • the point values may need to be reconsidered, as ‘Translating Cosmos documentation in a local language’ may NOT weigh the same as building a ‘Cosmos SDK Chain’…

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I wholeheartedly agree with @derfredy 's points in New ICF Delegation Policy ~ Draft - #35 by derfredy regarding the transition in technical expertise of validator operators from expert to beginner, and that good sys admins are expensive. OGs should get a point. I know several validators that don’t use sentry nodes. How are you going to measure • Mandatory Criteria for Selection • Security of the infrastructure? There’s no excuse for being slashed. Any validator that has been slashed should not be eligible for the first round of delegations, just like one of the criteria for maintaining an ICF delegation. Including wallets, dashboards, and explorers in two categories doesn’t seem right, IMO. I put some thought into an algorithm for distributing delegations. The authz module could be used to redelegate as frequently as a monthly basis and would entirely liberate multisig signers from the tedium of manual delegations. The algorithm would use strictly objective metrics to determine the delegations, which would minimize complaints to the ICF. Of course, all ICF ATOMs allocated for delegation wouldn’t necessarily need to use the algo, but, say, 40% could and the…

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Hey, so, I think that this policy is better than no policy. I also think it is likely too complex, with the points system, and likely undervalues engineering work. No mention is made of audits, security reporting, etc – and I am concerned that this can lead to a passive validator culture. flip side of my criticisms There is immense and real value in community building activities. These were also undervalued under the old style. therefore We should proceed with this, largely unchanged, maybe fixing the line about centralized organization or custodian (notional is 100% centralized, and I think that most validators are). with a single caveat I think that it should be necessary to at minimum declare that you’re not using a white label/third party service in order to qualify for delegations. Personally, this year I made it alligation to a user of a white label provider and even though the team I delegated to is very transparent about this practice, and I don’t see their practices in specific as harmful to the networks they validate, I must honestly say that I likely could have chosen better. ICF should exclude users of white label providers from delegations, and…

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Finally, here we go!

Interchain Foundation

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to contribute to the new Interchain Delegation Policy.
I am truly deeply moved by the support you have shown us, and proud to be part of a community that firmly believes that the heart of everything is the word [collaboration].

I look forward to taking the steps to this next with you and together expanding the reach of Interchain beyond all limits.

Delegation coming before EOW!

Cat