Proposal - Adjustments to the Stride Teams' $ATOM Distribution Program

TL;DR - Stride Team should reconsider their Distribution Program, as the previous delegations are having more centralized impact on the Cosmos Hub chain. As many of you might know ATOMs distribution program by Stride Team happened weeks ago. Stride has distributed their fund tokens (425,638 $ATOM delegated) to the total of 32 different validators. And at a glance it might seem as a very good decentralization, but let’s look closer to this situation. So, 32 validators sound fair enough to split the stake and create decentralized delegations, but unfortunately looking closer it doesn’t seem to be so… There are some crucial points before any decentralized delegation should be done and first all its existing voting power. Exactly this metric should be considered before any possible Delegation Program, as the delegator (in our case Stride Core Team) should keep in mind the possibility of network centralization in case of supporting already well grounded validators. There should be paid more attention to details, which could solve issues related to the question of centralization of the network. And really sad to mention this but we already have examples of this issue…

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Thanks for the comments! Riley here, a core contributor to Stride.

You raise some good points that we agree with, for example that we should make delegations across the set and further decentralization. The specific method used currently delegates proportional to the current set, excluding exchange validators and validators with 0% commissions and commissions above 20%. This is a temporary solution.

We’ve been working hard on a more fair, democratic and transparent process. We’ll be releasing full details on Wednesday, which we think will address your points and more!

Thanks for the response. Sounds good. Certainly exclude top10-20 and CEX validators anyway.

ICF is doing lot of work currently to have fair delegations. Easiest would be just following their delegations later this month. Let ICF do the heavy work and use the results with your own weighting.

Really like the idea put forward by @Bro_n_Bro to incentivize validators on cosmos to validate stride also by only including those who validate both chains for future delegations.

Also going to link a commonwealth discussion on stride for those who have not seen it yet as it is directly related to this conversation: Commonwealth

Good idea from @Bro_n_Bro
Even though we are not validating on Stride, we still prefer to see the delegation goes into the validator who contributes on both chains rather than to the top 10-20 validators.

Many liquid stake protocols are on their way, so hopefully, they can give much thought to the delegations. Ideally, the delegator should choose the validator themselves.

Great post. Why on earth would Stride further centralize the Cosmos Hub on purpose? Disappointing, but hopefully your post will spur positive change.

We’d be against any favoritism and would fully support a delegation strategy that spread Stride’s stake across the entire active set. We would want to see a formula that gave more delegation to lower ranked nodes and less delegation to larger nodes.

If they care about the hub, spread out the stake.

We would fully support the idea to spread a weighted stake across the entire active set, with disproportionately more ATOM going to smaller validators and less ATOM going to larger validators. Great idea that nobody could vote against.

Thanks for the write-up @Bro_n_Bro !

It is indeed the exact same discussion we are having on the Stride Commonwealth, which is already mentioned by @SilkNodes

I would not go as far to only include validators which are both on Stride and the Hub, because having decentralisation goes further than only voting power. We have to think about geography, VPS providers, but also to the parties behind the validators. We need more different teams, so having this as a prerequisitie would only mean that the Stride set would become almost equal to the Cosmos Hub, which is not what we must try to chase imo

Thanks for putting this up!!

I support the suggestions made to the Stride team to reconsider

Yeah, the main difference, that we raised this question before any announcements from Stride team. So, possible, we have this thread on Commonwealth due to this and we are really happy be a part of this change.