We’re close to our 2nd anniversary validating for Harmony and we learned and observed many things during this time. Ill try to gather here some of the aspects that we think that are good and bad for each proposal and what we think about that. When I say WE , Im talking about the brazillian community, since we discussed about that and I share some of their concerns as well.
1. Enhancing network performance through sharding and node optimization.
We all agree that having 4 shards back then was a big marketing, and brough some attention to harmony. But since it wasn’t properly used and the escalation didn’t ocurred as expected, having them is causing more problems than bringing solutions. So the infrastructure could be reduced to 2 shards and once the need arise it could be expanded again, provided it would be an option. We believe that it would be the best aproach regarding the shards issue.
2. Ensuring long-term sustainability with a reduced token emission rate.
Our main concern with the “long-term” sustainability is that its a broad range spectrum. It can engulfs anything. We have bad past examples (DAOs, RPCs, 1Alliance, etc…etc) that harmony didn’t managed very well their treasury. And it still didn’t learned the lesson if we look into the R1 issue brough by @TrickLuhDaKidz where he digged enough to uncover all of this. So, the community is genuinely worried to pay for something that won’t work, and its fair, they already had their share of pain. Their trust on harmony is damaged. Can’t stress enough how it is. Many of my delegators keep asking IF harmony will recover someday. I try to keep them calm and expecting positive things. But then, some bad info about something happens (was the R1 recovery plan this time, after that quoc shitshow). So, unless we have soke detailed info about that, on HOW the rewards will be spent, for how long, etc…and etc. I’m pretty they wont agree. Also, one of their worries was about the sell pressure that it would fall on the token, since a the staking APY will fall hard. How the staff plan to remain competitive with other protocols? Right now, 8% is not enough to attract a lot of investor, due to the past happenings. It could, but the hack was not solved yet, the funds are long gone by now. So HOW, in this world ( maybe in another parallel reality it could work), half or less APY than the actual will help to bring more investors?
3. Increasing validator rewards by reducing the number of nodes and redistributing rewards.
This could be a positive point. We would have been stressing the need for limiting the BLS keys and avoid the Lower Bound Divings, long enough. The fact that at least I’m not seeking for larger rewards. The leveling aspect of this proposal is positive in our point of view. Just can’t agree with this 200 slots limit, unless it means that it would be run entitely by validators, without internal nodes. Than it would mean we would have space for more external validators, having the network even nore secure and decentralized.
4. Encouraging new validators to join the ecosystem and fostering healthy competition
This is a point concerning the community as well. We saw many arrangements made by harmony staff within validators that didn’t helped or were present at the community, did lower bounds diving and harmony wasnt exacly clear about that arrangements and how it was benefiting the network. So, unless it is more detailed on how the pre-requisites for selecting the so called “network empowering validators” would be chosen, if these validatos would be required any performance to be remain elected or would be needed to be evaluated by the community every X months. Something would be need to be enforced to empower the community. Can’t have the staff spending at his discretion only.
So to finish this, I believe this proposal need to be more discussed AND enable more safeguards to be in place that make the community in charge of the changes not as a passive watcher.