We are pleased to announce the launch of the first cohort of the Decentralized Nodes Program!
The response from both within and beyond the Polkadot community has been exceptional. We received an impressive total of 276 applications, for 241 Polkadot nodes and 452 Kusama nodes. After a thorough selection process, we nominated 63 Polkadot nodes and 152 Kusama nodes. These nominations became effective on November 15, 2024, and the term for this first cohort will run until March 15, 2025.
The evaluation process began on October 1, 2024, and took over a month to complete. The main goal was to select validators who could provide strong support to the community and enhance network security. We focused on the operators’ technical skills, the performance and security of their nodes, and the geographical spread of nodes in each network. We also considered how actively the operators were involved in the ecosystem beyond their role as validators.
Based on these goals and feedback from the community gathered through a survey in July, several tangible and quantifiable selection criteria emerged:
- Operations: We examined the operations applied to the management of the nodes, including its security, updates to the client and OS, monitoring, and the existence and management of high availability setups.
- Technical expertise: We considered the technical expertise of the operator, as derived from previous experience in running nodes as part of or outside the Thousand Validators programme, running collators, running validators in other ecosystems, and their professional experience in DevOps areas.
- OpenGov engagement: We looked at the operator’s participation in OpenGov through voting or delegating, through proposals, and general engagement.
- Ecosystem engagement: We looked at the operator’s overall engagement and contributions to the ecosystem, both at a technical and social level. Furthermore we looked at their strategy for attracting nominations from the community in order to become independent of the program by the end of their term.
- Node performance: We evaluated the performance of the hardware to be used to ensure that the node can adequately perform the validation tasks without problems, as well as the type of server and its upscaling capabilities.
- Decentralization: We paid particular attention to the location and the provider used by the node, to ensure that selected nodes contributed to the geographical decentralization of the active set.
Due to the large number of high quality applications we received, we were able to nominate only a single node per operator for Polkadot, giving as many operators as possible the opportunity to participate while decentralizing the active set. Similarly, nearly 100 different operators were selected for Kusama.
The selected nodes will be nominated continuously for four months. However, there will be periodic checks to see if any of them have accumulated enough nominations to validate independently of the program, in which case backup validators will be called to take their place.
The complete list of selected and backup validators is available on the Decentralized Nodes website.