[TIP-1] Increase Max Validators to 23
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[TIP-1] Increase Max Validators to 23
Summary
This proposal seeks to increase the max number of bonded validators on Switcheo TradeHub to 23 from the current 17.
Description
Increasing the number of validators will increase decentralization, and also allow for a number of popular but unbonded validators to be re-bonded. The number of validators was initially low to ensure the stability of the network. However, after running for > 1 month, there has been no downtimes and the block time has remained steady at ~2 seconds.
We propose to increase validators to more than the number of currently bonded plus unbonded validators, so that there will be empty slots, which may encourage new, potentially semi-anonymous, or "self-hosted" validators to join the network and increase decentralization of the chain.
Risks
- While block time has been tested to remain low, we have not seen how the chain performs in a production environment with heavy trading. Increasing validators slots may potentially increase block latency due to additional p2p network requests.
- On the other hand, if such an issue already exists, increasing the no. of validators by just 6 should not exacerbate the issue by much.
- The issue of block latency can also still be improved later if it turns out to be a problem by further optimizing the core chain code.
- Scaling solutions like Marlin may also be potential solutions too.
- A last-ditch mitigation of lowering the block time to ~0.5 (wait for txns for 500ms only), can also be employed so that the overall block latency is kept low.
- While block time has been tested to remain low, we have not seen how the chain performs in a production environment with heavy trading. Increasing validators slots may potentially increase block latency due to additional p2p network requests.
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On-chain proposal submitted: https://switcheo.org/governance/proposal/1?net=main