To apply to the Kusama Thousand Validator Program - sign up here To apply to the Polkadot Thousand Validator Program - sign up here
The Thousand Validator Program is a joint initiative between Web3 Foundation and Parity to help prospective validators achieve nominations to join the active set.
The Thousand Validators Programme operates on both the Kusama and the Polkadot networks. In order to start validating on the Polkadot network, you should start on the Kusama network first.
Requirements for prospective validators on the Kusama network:
- 10 KSM self-stake.
- Signed up on the form and has received approval.
- Connected to the private telemetry.
- Seven days of online validator infrastructure.
- Must have an identity set and verified by a registrar (instructions).
Please see the blog post for more information and requirements for entering the program.
Requirements for prospective validators on the Polkadot network:
- 5,000 DOT self-stake.
- Preferences set to pay rewards to "Staked" (rewards must be automatically bonded).
- Rank 25 or above in the Kusama programme.
- Signed up on the form and has received approval.
- Connected to the private telemetry.
- Must have an identity set and verified by a registrar (instructions).
For either programme, validators must operate nodes themselves, they may not be operated by third parties or staking providers.
The 1k-validator-be repository houses the backend code for the services that
run the nomination process of the programme. It handles the configuration of
adding new validators to the program, and keeping track that they perform their
duties correctly. It performs the nomination of the validators on the basis of
a CronJob that is run every 24 hours. It is also planned to contain a Matrix
notification service that will bubble up the issues that it finds with different
validators and will explain the reason why they were skipped from nomination.
- Database - A simple persistence layer that can store information across restarts of the service.
- Monitor - Routinely checks the latest release that is tagged on GitHub and ensures that all connected validators have updated. If they have not, it marks them as not good until they upgrade.
- Nominator - A wrapper class over the nominating logic.
- Scorekeeper - The orchestrator of the other components that spawns nominators and has the ability to start and end nomination rounds, incrementing or decreasing the scores of validators in the programme.
- Server - Exposes a REST API for getting stats about the validators and nominators in the programme.
- Telemetry - Logic for connecting to the telemetry backend and handling new connections.
The tests are run using yarn and the testing framework AVA. After installing
the dependencies, run yarn test to run the unit tests.
Warning: The custom "fast" build of Polkadot is currently very outdated.
The entire system can be spun up using a custom "fast" build of Polkadot
that starts a new Era every 6 minutes. Move the config.sample.json to config.json
and start the proccesses using yarn docker.
To enable the matrix bot you will need to create an account on Element or a similar service and acquire an access token. Enter the access token in the configuration file and specify the room that the bot should send the messages in. Make sure you invite the bot to the room before you start the services.