200M ONE Staking Disbursement Discussion

Governance Validator DAO
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Harmony has committed to staking 200M ONE and allowing the community to decide how to utilize the rewards earned. The discussion on the disposition of the earned rewards will be a seperate thread. The target validators to receive this bootstrap will be a mixture of unelected and smaller sized validators who are at risk of un-election.

I will be the Harmony team member who spearheads this initiative. I am looking for feedback on how this should be accomplished and look forward to inputs from the community. The details we should nail down are the following but not exclusive:

  • Number of un-elected and danger-close validators to bootstrap
  • Amount staked with un-elected vs amount staked with danger-close validators
  • Period of time the stake remains in validator until it is pulled in order to bootstrap new one
  • Fee details/limits
  • Reasons to lose stake
  • Key management criteria

Here is the link to the old bootstrap program the VDAO had proposed; feel free to use it as a reference/starting point. This initiative is time sensitive and I want to move out on it ASAP so let’s work together to come to consensus. I will check back on this post in 24 hours to see where we are at, and will be available any time for any questions.

Thank you all for your motivation and remaining dedicated to securing the network. We see you and understand without you there is no us.

LET’S GO!

Tim

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It’s a good initiative Tim. Thanks for your work.

I will indeed need support from some kind. My two servers are ready, synchronised. Two redundant servers, from different providers on two different countries.

I subscribed to Harmoforce support so it will be my turn soon, but I will definitely need more support to reach stable situation.

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Hey Tim,

Great initiative to start this thread to discuss things.

The target validators to receive this bootstrap will be a mixture of unelected and smaller-sized validators who are at risk of un-election.

As much as I like the statement above, we have to be smart and thoughtful about future developments. With rising energy costs (and probably most other assets RN in eurozone countries/western world) I strongly believe that some validators just won’t make it due to sheer size of scale /inefficiency.

Therefore I would like to focus more on Mid-sized validators and strengthen those as these validators (in my humblest opinion) have less risk.

Always been a fan of the VDAO Bootstrap program, and believe most of it is still usable.

Staking funds with validators (there are unfortunately a couple of bad actors out there…) should be a smart mix of risk-safe validators (doxed) vs the riskier ones (small, high fees, undoxed). a healthy 80/20 seems ok to me.

Validators contributing to this initiative have an obligation imho to report on results on a weekly basis. these are a lot of funds we’re talking about and I would love to see the commitment from the validator side as well.

I know we shouldn’t be discussing the rewards/earnings here. however, it would be a neat possibility/chance to have these staked ONES work for creating buyback pressure for lost bridge assets.

All in all, keep rockin!

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The Bootstrap program that was designed by the VDAO could be a great start to this 200m funds. IMHO, the funds could be used from the bottom list of uneleced validators and rising until there are no funds left. The normal threshold to remain stable and elected usually was around 3.5 mil ones. So it could be done in steps as despicted below:

  • 3.5 mil ones to all unelected validators and all the ones that are below the 3.5 mil threshold.

  • if there are no validators left in the list above, another round of 3.5 mil stake should be done to fill up all spots left, again from bottom to top, with the 1.5 EMS being the threshold, if all validators already achieved the 1.5 EMS, then another round would be done until all slots are filled. So by the end of the 1st round, we should not have any unelected validator. By 2nd round, no validator with singlekey left, by 3rd round no validator with 2 keys left and so on.

  • the VDAO rules would apply (only to be override if there’s no unelected validator left)

  • if there’s an unelected and eligible validator on the list and no funds left to be spared, the validator who has the most stake amongst the supported validators will have it undelegates and then it will be redelegated in order to elect this unelected validator. If the undelegated stake is not enough, another top supported validator will have it stake redelegated and so on.

  • the VDAO could help monitoring the supported validators and listing the adjustments that could be made or giving a report once a week

  • any community member that spot some inconsistency with the list could highlight it to the VDAO and it could be verified.

  • the rewards received from this Bootstrap program could be used to :

a) Fund the core daos(Community dao, Validator dao and Developer’s dao)

b) As suggested above, part of the rewards could be used to buyback the stolen assets and restore the peg of the stable coins and backup the trustless bridges

c) Another portion could be restaked and increase the bootstrap list.

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If I’m not wrong, 200M staked can be 1M per month in rewards. Even more at first with newly elected validators.

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Good to see the “bootstrap” program starting. I’d really like to see the funds from staking going to the VDAO like the original plan.

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We need to get these funds out asap, so we don’t lose anymore Validators on the chain. However, we need to balayage this with Well thought plan.

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Honestly the VDAO plan was pretty good. I wrote the first draft with @Maffaz @nickv @Wenneson and @easynode so I’m a little biased :joy:

Our idea:

Situation:

Harmony Protocol has mandated the Validator DAO bootstrap and expand the Validator Corp in order to create 1000 diverse Validator profiles.

Intent:

Bootstrap active new Validators into election utilizing the Harmony Foundation coins until which time they can operate without sponsorship from the Harmony Foundation.

Key Tasks:

Identify and sponsor active and capable community Validators.

Determine the thresholds by which funding will be delegated and undelegated.

Track and report on the status of sponsored Validators and provide transparent reporting to the Harmony Foundation.

Scheme of Maneuver:

The Validator DAO identifies a list of Validators that reach a threshold of .45 X Effective Median Stake (EMS). Example: EMS is currently 5.45 Million ONE coins Delegated. This would put the threshold at 2.45 Million ONE coins already delegated.

The Validator DAO observes activity levels of the Validators within the community to determine long term viability and alignment with Harmony Protocol core values.

Bi-weekly the Validator DAO provides the Harmony Foundation a by name list of Validators that meet the threshold for sponsorship. The sponsored Validators would be delegated .45 X EMS effectively pushing them into stable election and allowing them to rapidly accumulate delegators for a period not to exceed 100 epochs.

The sponsored Validators will be coached and mentored on best practices for marketing and managing their Validator. The sponsored validators will participate in a validator orientation. The Validators will be required to operate on testnet for a term no less than 10 epochs. During their time on testnet, they will be required to spin up a redundant node, add and remove keys and change shards without falling out of consensus. Once all tasks are completed the validators are added to a first in first out list.

The sponsored Validators will be informed they have a limited amount of time to reach 1.35 X EMS at which point the Validator DAO will inform the Harmony Foundation the sponsored Validator has reached the threshold for un-delegation and provide the name of a replacement Validator to be delegated to.

Requested Support:

Request the Harmony Foundation earmark 60 Million ONE coins for the purpose of bootstrapping new Validators. This would allow between 15-20 Validators to be sponsored at a time.

Conditions for Revocation of Sponsorship:

The Validator DAO will provide all sponsored validators with a list of action items we will monitor during their sponsorship. All sponsored validators are required to act in good faith during their time in the sponsorship program. Any council member can initiate a review of a sponsored validator at an upcoming meeting if they feel a sponsored validator has failed to meet the expectations and action items from the VDAO.

Reasons for review may include:

  • Not reaching minimum consensus (66.66% uptime) and remaining unelected for 1+ epoch
  • Community Engagement levels
  • Validator acts in bad faith towards delegates
  • Validator acts in bad faith towards fellow validators
  • Validator reaches 100 epochs of sponsorship without reaching 1.35 X EMS to gain stability with 1 slot

Now I know VDAO is not funded anymore and the amount of bootstrapping funds is higher than we hoped for so there would need to be adjustments, but the framework is solid.

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Finally! Hopefully this time this won’t be protracted. I wonder if they’ll require some sort of promotion effort from the validators (Community Engagement levels, as mentioned by @Jimbo_JCR.one ); to have them periodically announce that they’re being supported by Harmony in order to keep the stake, or if meeting the node requirements will suffice.

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Other than the .45 minimum EMS I think we should roll forward with what you wrote. I think a minimum of ~2.5m ONE will exclude a lot of validators with plenty of experience (myself and some other previous VDAO governors included) who lost their wallet 19 support or got other large undelegations. Given how much more funding there is (200m rather than the original 50m from the proposal) we would easily have enough to pull up a bunch of the people in the 100k range.

Tbf I’m also biased having worked with term 2 on it, but I really think we should use this sort of framework as an initial approach given how quickly the team wants to move on it. Plenty of thought and effort went into that initiative with the exact same goal of supporting the validator ecosystem, though we were only expecting 50m tokens at the time so this has significantly more potential.

Also as a final note I’d personally prefer no testnet requirement - no need to make things more difficult to manage for those running the program. You didn’t mention it in your post, but I recall getting a bit of pushback on the bootstrap proposal about it. Tbh I’m still not sure why the bootstrap thing stalled out but I’m optimistic that we’ll see some sort of movement here.

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Great to see the engagement so far! Keep in mind the entire community will be voting on the rewards disposition so please try to stick with the topic :slightly_smiling_face:.

Also, the intention is to come up with a relatively nimble strategy so we can implement ASAP. I don’t want us to get bogged down and at the same time want us to get it right. Keep the discussion going!

Tim

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Thank you very much Tim! I’m just concerned with how will the entire community be able to vote without fear of Sybil attacks? Is it going to just be a 1 wallet 1 vote on snapshot.org? Will so many votes be needed to be considered a community vote?
Sorry to play devils advocate. I just know that’s been one of the hurdles with community voting.

This is huge and much needed for the validator community. I’d really like to see these funds helping all the core DAO’s.

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I agree the EMS ratios will need to be adjusted. We should absolutely pull up some that have been waiting to get elected while simultaneously bootstrapping those that lost delegations. Maybe set baseline at 1 mil currently staked. And anything below that would depend on community engagement.

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That’s the nimble type of solution I’m talking about.

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The system should change and aim to remove the gamification.

To just gift delegation to undelegated pools would not be fair on validators that worked hard to build up their pools by adding real value in addition to running a pool.

This could lead to people coming for free crypto and add sell pressure as they don’t support Harmony.

for these reasons I think it would be better to change how it all works.

Maybe the cost of running all pools can be included and then Rewards are gained on top (For everyone) This will encourage real project supporters to work on building up their pools without the cost impacts.

Remove the gamification and even out the rewards (not based on pool size) would be a step I would take.

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I will add that I feel that some of validator community has become very toxic IMO - We (Cheeky Crypto) Keep getting called out on twitter in a negative way, In December just gone there was an organised attack on our pool where validators delegated to our pool over some time and drained it just before election in the hope to get us unelected.

I don’t feel this community should be calling out each other on twitter.

I am at the point now where I am questioning why I am even here supporting the validator community.

With all that said there have been a very small list of validators that have been supportive.

This might be the last post I write here

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Just want to remind everyone that this is a big topic. There will be many sides to this conversations. Please respect and consider everyone’s opinion regardless of whom they are. The Goal here is to come to a compromise that benefits the Harmony network and it’s users. We cannot please everyone but we can discuss the Pros and Cons of all the ideas listed here. I hope we can all have a cool headed discussion and come to a conclusion. Let’s do our best :innocent:

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I will add one more thing.

When you click on the Harmony – Open Consensus for 10B page it only shows elected pools

maybe that should be changed - I mean it doesn’t encourage people to delegate to unelected pools.

Fuck me I am so fucking helpful

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Funny you mentioned that. This is something that should have changed a long time ago and the staking dashboard needs more updated information to educate delegators. At this point we can’t do anything about it because it’s on Harmony court. All we can do is point at the issue. We can’t even pass a vote at the moment.

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I will be short.

80% of the stake funds should go to elected validators with 1 BLS key. Also I believe that the right criteria should be how long the given validator has been with the community, because NO TWO VALIDATORS ARE EQUAL.

Why? Because there are validators with 1 BLS key running at a loss for many months, paying out of their pockets without crying about it just because they love Harmony. And on the other hand there have been many validators who bailed out in the first month seeing that it’s not profitable. If a new validator gets elected and start running at a loss we can’t know for how long she would decide to stay knowing it’s not profitable. They need to prove they loyal at least. Let’s not forget how many projects took grants from Harmony when everything was candy just to leave after the first issue.

We have those heroes of validators who showed to the community that they are here for the community and not for profit. They have been running Harmony for many months at a HUGE loss just because they love and believe in Harmony.

Those people need the most of the funds - they have proven their loyalty and their honest and unconditional support for this ecosystem. The other 20 % should go to new validators.

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