Since the upgrade to akashnet-2 in February 2021, software soft upgrade in early April and enablement of IBC transfers at the end of April, the Akash Network has shown impressive stability and performance in the operation of active deployments.
In the search of continued decentralisation, and due to the large number of competent validators currently sitting outside the active set or waiting to launch their validator, Bliss Dynamics believes it is time to start the increase of the maximum number of validators allowed in the network.
As described in the paper āAKT: Akash Network Token & Mining Economicsā released on 31st of January 2020 by Greg and Boz in:
Section āII. NETWORK OVERVIEWā
->Subsection āA. Proof of Stake Based Consensusā
ā>Clause ā1. Limits on Number of Validatorsā
We see that āwe can support enough validators to make for a robust globally distributed blockchain with very fast transaction confirmation times, and, as bandwidth, storage, and parallel compute capacity increases, we will be able to support more validators in the future.ā And also that āthe number of validators at time t year will be: Vn(t) = [log2 (2t) Ā· Vi,0]ā where Vi,0 = 64 Validators which is also graphed in Figure 2 (page 4):
For those not so familiar with logarithmic functions, the formula suggests a maximum validator cap as follows:
Network Launch (25/09/2020), t0: negative (assume 64 validator starting set)
Today (31/05/2021), t0.68: 28 validators (assume 64 validator starting set)
1 year (25/09/2021), t1: 64 validators
1.5 years (26/03/2022), t1.5: 101 validators
2 years (25/9/2022), t2: 128 validators
As the formula does not well describe the early stages of time, t, and to avoid a large step change and having to increase the number of validators by nearly 60% in a 6 month period (from 1 year to 18 months), we believe it would be worthwhile for network stability to increase the max_validators parameter in the network from 64 to 75.
Bliss Dynamics have reached out to a number of community members and validators both inside and outside of the active set, and believe there is not only sufficient support for this proposal, but also a sufficient quantity of capable validators to immediately fill the slots.
Now we wanted to open the topic up to the wider community for comments and discussion prior to submitting the proposal on-chain. Please let us know your thoughts in the next 2 weeks.
Note: After roughly 2 weeks of discussion, then 2 weeks for the proposal voting period, the parameter change is expected to take place around the beginning of July.