I agree that we should be careful about creating unintended incentives, but I disagree with the idea that running a validator should inherently be incentivized based on how much promotion or onboarding that validator does.
To me, running a validator is first and foremost about securing a network you believe in. If it’s profitable, great—that’s a bonus. But if we believe in TX and want the chain to succeed, bringing new users into the ecosystem should be the goal. Period. Not only bringing them in when it directly benefits our own validator.
Not everyone has the time or resources to spend hours onboarding, hosting Spaces, creating content, etc. Some people support the network by owning a validator, covering the costs, and helping secure the chain. That contribution still matters.
And speaking only for myself, hitting a cap would not suddenly make me stop onboarding people to TX. I’m not going to say, “Well,
@DEGENLABS_CO can’t gain any more voting power, so I’m done growing the ecosystem.” That’s simply not going to happen.
I regularly host Spaces with other validators and have done so many times where the DegenLabs validator benefited the least from the conversation. And I genuinely don’t care. Would I love to see us grow? Obviously. But I’m also happy when my counterparts grow because the ecosystem growing is the point.
I also regularly advocate for smaller validators that contribute to TX. Maybe they don’t contribute in exactly the same way you or I do, but they still contribute. And I know plenty of validators who are actively growing and moving up the rankings while still educating people about proper staking distribution and encouraging delegators to look beyond themselves.
That’s healthy behavior.
And I think there’s an important real-world example here: look at how much the top validator has continued to grow. Where is that validator in the community? Not here, from what I see. Yet it continues growing.
That tells me there is an underlying problem that has very little to do with who is working the hardest to onboard users.
The problem, in my opinion, has always been education and concentration. New users naturally gravitate toward the top validators because they don’t know any better. That creates increasingly top-heavy voting power, potential network-security implications—which we’ve already seen become relevant during situations like the chain halt—and a governance problem when 3 validators out of 53 can effectively determine whether a proposal passes or fails.
Those are legitimate issues that need to be addressed.
I don’t particularly want to tell anyone who they can or cannot stake with. Ideally, education and better staking distribution would solve this organically. But we also can’t pretend the current level of concentration is healthy simply because some validators worked harder than others to grow.
If a cap isn’t the right solution, fair enough. Then let’s participate in these conversations and find a better one.
But I don’t think “I contribute more, therefore I should be entitled to more voting power” is the answer either.
The goal should be a successful, secure, decentralized TX ecosystem—and all of us should want to keep building toward that whether the next delegation lands on our validator or someone else’s.
Side note…you are doing a hell of a job on boarding! Keep it up! 💞👏🏻🟢