Open Call for Validator Working Group

The validator community is a critically important part of the NEAR ecosystem. Validators operate the blockchain and without them, every project would grind to a halt. Historically, there have been some attempts at organizing NEAR validators around a common objective of making NEAR more decentralized––which would make the network more secure, resilient, and antifragile––but none has yet achieved traction.

In the meantime, Pagoda assumed a lot of responsibility in building a healthy validator community, including collecting feedback, conducting NPS surveys, organizing various meetings to discuss important issues and updates, and identifying opportunities to grow the validator community.

For stronger decentralization of the NEAR ecosystem, it makes sense for the NEAR validator community to self-organize and create a governance structure to represent the interests of validators. There are already other working groups in the NEAR ecosystem that serve as the governing body for protocol, standards, contract standards, wallet standards, and tools.

I propose the formation of a Validator Working Group that focuses on the health and growth of NEAR’s validator community. More specifically, the validator working group should:

• Collect feedback from validators about their experience of operating a validator node on NEAR. This includes bug reports, feature requests, common problems that validators run into when operating their nodes, etc.
• Regularly communicate with the Protocol Working Group to relay the feedback, understand the development roadmap of the Protocol, and what the upcoming changes mean for validators.
• Advocate for running a validator on NEAR and growing the NEAR validator community, especially with the recent edition of chunk-only producers with the launch of Nightshade phase 1. This includes improving documentation for validators, organizing events, and producing relevant content to advocate for NEAR.
• Have a dedicated point of contact who can handle requests about NEAR validators

The validator working group should consist of validators who are passionate about NEAR and growing the validator community. There are good incentives for this to happen among the validators themselves, in addition to the obvious one of validator rewards: validators supporting one another and recruiting new validators will result in a more resilient and valuable ecosystem. Similar to other working groups, there is no monetary reward in principle for working group members, but one-off efforts such as event organization may be reimbursed through Developer DAO.

To the rest of the NEAR community: the opportunity to become a chunk-only producer and join the validator community is more accessible than you may realize. The cost in NEAR and in terms of hardware requirements is lower than ever, thanks to the evolution of NEAR’s sharding and network architecture. Earning rewards while increasing the decentralization of the network and helping to maintain its security will all make NEAR a stronger and more valuable ecosystem in the long run.

If you are a validator on NEAR and are interested in organizing or joining the validator working group, please comment on this post to express interest.

Hello,

We would be interested (readylayerone_staking.poolv1.near) in participating.

-Joe, Ready Layer One

FreshNEAR is willing to participate.

Hi all. Will be pleased to join this working group as a new chunk only producer (idtcn4.poolv1.near).
Best regards,
Mario

I m enthusiastic about participating in the group.

@FreshNEARs @Balda @mariozito @olive and any other interested validators, a telegram group has been created by @denysk:

NEAR Validator Working Group

Thank for this topic. Already in. The most validator we have the most ideas,feedback we will have, let’s join

I ‘m interested to join this validator.
( isaaczara.near )

-Isaac from HumanGuild

Hello,
Thanks for topics.
I’m interested to join Validator Working Group
(monresearch.poolv1.near)

It’s great to see so many people expressing their interests! I think the next step is to figure out how the organization of the working group will work. In other words, it would be great if someone could propose how the working group is going to organize itself and make decisions.

Hello I’m super interested in participating in the Validator Working Group.

@blaze I could not join in th group. Can you please provide alternate link or message me invitation

The telegram group is here: NEAR Validator Working Group

The telegram group is here: NEAR Validator Working Group

If you can’t DM me your Telegram name

Tkx for sharing. Joining now

I’m very much interested in being part of this group.

It’s very interesting, I’m all for it! (chain0ps.poolv1.near)

Hi,

I am Didier, the co-founder of Pikespeak, a data and analytics solution built on the Near Protocol.

On behalf of the team, I would like to be involved in the Validator Working Group.

Following feedback from the community, we have recently released many data points relating to validators, such as:

• Historical number of delegators and total staking amount per validator
• Staking repartition
• Timeline with major staking/unstaking events per validator
• Top delegators
• Etc.

Here is a brief analysis that we have done recently with our partners at NEARWEEK: Twitter Thread.

We would be glad to keep supporting the validators and ultimately help them to:

• have a better understanding of their user base
• produce accounting and operational reports
• monitore their business

We fully support the establishment of a Validator Working Group.

We also think that Didier’s suggestion of providing better analytics is very constructive.