Dear DOT community,

Feels good to be writing here again, since our last post was when Polkadot was transitioning to NPoS. Thank to all the nominators that made it possible for me to enter the validator set. Since then it's been a pretty smooth sailing as a validator on the Polkadot network.

Reason I'm writing this informative post is that after long consideration I will be opening up a 2nd validator on Polkadot. This post will contain the reasons for why I will and how and you can nominate us.

Why a second validator ??

What has stopped me from conception to start a 2nd validator was because that I didn't want to be the type of validator that was milking the system and killing someone elses chance of entering the list. Smaller independent validators would mean more decentralization, but this has not happend since the start. Looking at the Polkadot network now, there is a huge over subscription for low commission pools. The nominators clearly prefer a pool with cheap commission, this is noticeable from the Polkadot.JS interface when you sort them on commission. See the screenshot below

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Screenshot of Polkadot.js sorted on commission

As the commission increases on the list, you see the nominators amounts drop. But commission isn’t everything, there is still a big difference between different low commission validators and you as a nominator play a role in this. A good example is the Zug validator which has 100 validators registered on the Polkadot Network, which all have 0% commission set. This would mean that he could run at the moment if all his validators were selected more then 50% of the Polkadot Network. The thing with 0% pools is, whether on the waiting list or active in the validator set haven’t shown their true commission yet. This has been a discussion point on many different networks and it’s not sustainable and the centralization of stake could harm the network security.

Reason 1: Be a counter weight to the centralization of stake.

As a nominator you might be surprised by finding your validator suddenly charging premium commission what was once 0%. Staker Space validator commission was set to 1% from the beginning and this has been sufficient to cover all hardware running costs, bandwidth and our time.

There are more professional teams out there that have wider reach, better branding or use the validator rewards to support other activities in the space. Each validator will have their reasoning with their own cost structure in mind, this is completely understandable. But the commission compounds quicker than being just a nominator. I’m also a nominator and I have been surprised by some validators noticing the the royal position there in and increasing 200% their commission (from 1 to 3%)

Reason 2: Being a fair validator, no surprise increases and not taking a too big slice of the pie

When starting to be a validator on the Polkadot network I didn’t think I would in the validator set, seeing the votes come in and the network going live. Thought I would be on the waiting list until the validator set was 500. Currently the validator has 913 votes and is over subscribed

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screenshot of substrate-debug-kit/offline-election

Reason 3: The demand for the Staker Space validator is high and since I don’t know 99,5% of the nominators I think a 2nd will also serve well under the Staker Space subset and trying to satisfy what might be needed.

Last reason being a tiny 2nd pillar that will validate this network, but we are not trying to hug it to death. I'm also hoping to deploy one day as a parachain or parathread to the Kusama or Polkadot network and want to see it succeed.

Technical Set-up of validators :

• Both validators are running at different service providers in different geographical regions.
• Bare-metal – premium machine, clearly overkill for the current requirements.
• Redundant servers are running archive nodes to jump in when required
• Alert managers and monitoring are deployed and working.

The new validator address:

14N5nJ4oR4Wj36DsBcPLh1JqjvrM2Uf23No2yc2ojjCvSC24

Under the name STAKER SPACE /2

https://preview.redd.it/7bpvhz32zvp51.png?width=191&format=png&auto=webp&s=a0e0bda16a23383e17ca44f8015a3e2551b4a66c

In case you want to reach out, you can find our Twitter, Riot and email in our identity of an explorer. Thank you for reading and looking forward to your nominations.

Ilhan