- Polygon Labs has proposed to increase the number of Polygon validator slots.
- The firm has tipped the move to bolster the network’s decentralization.
- Validators, however, believe that increasing slots alone cannot solve Polygon’s centralization concerns.
Over the past year, the Polygon (MATIC) network has announced and embarked on several significant overhauls, from announcing plans to transition to a zkEVM validium chain to upgrading the MATIC token to POL as it expands into an ecosystem of interconnected zero-knowledge Layer 2 chains.
Against this backdrop, Polygon Labs, the development team behind the network, has suggested yet another fundamental change, with a proposal to expand the network’s validator set.
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Can this proposal help tackle centralization concerns?
More Validators, More Decentralization?
Seeking to further decentralize the Polygon network, over the weekend, Vasanti Rode and Parvez Shaikh, members of the Polygon Labs Validators Support Team, submitted a proposal to increase the network’s validators slots.
In the proposal, the team members argued that increasing the validator slots would allow for a wider geographical distribution of nodes, decrease stake concentration, and improve the network’s Nakamoto coefficient, which calculates the minimum number of validators needed to compromise a network.
Setting a maximum target of 125 slots from the current 105, they detailed that their proposal will see the network increase the validator slot count in phases of five. They explained that this approach would allow for proper monitoring of the effect of these increments on the network.
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Per the proposal, incumbent validators will not have to make any changes during this process.
The proposal has elicited responses from members of the community who argue that while increasing the validator set is good in itself, there was no clear indication that it would address the problems it set out to solve.
Trying to Fit a Square Peg in a Round Hole?
According to Smart Stake, Polygon’s main problem was poor stake redistribution not too few validators. Citing Smart Stake Analytics data, the platform noted that the bottom 70 validators controlled less than 10% of the network voting power, with the bottom 40 controlling only 1%, indicating a significant concentration of stake in only a few validators.
The platform stressed that stake redistribution had hardly changed over the past year and a half. According to Smart Stake, increasing the validator slots would likely do little to improve the network’s decentralization if nothing was done to incentivize stake redistribution to smaller validators.
Another validator corroborated Smart Stake’s comments, arguing that the proposers had the “logic inverted.”
On the Flipside
- The proposal can be amended in response to community feedback.
Why This Matters
In the Polygon 2.0 roadmap, validators would validate transactions across multiple blockchains, not just Polygon. Failure to address centralization concerns now could have significant implications for Polygon and the fate of the multiple blockchains comprising the Polygon ecosystem.
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