Hello Validators!
Agoric OpCo is happy to share our delegation Policy for the 2023 Delegation Program!
Validators interested in applying please take time to review the Policy, and if you have any questions, comments or feedback post them here in the forum or reach out as described in the policy.
An application accompanied by a questionnaire will be available in the coming weeks. The 2023 Delegation Program will be open to new applicants, and participants from the previous round of the program must reapply to retain their delegations.
Agoric OpCo Delegation Program Policy
In a Proof-of-Stake network, token delegation is an important way that token holders can put their assets to use by helping to secure the network. For example, to support and encourage healthy decentralization in the ecosystem, the Agoric Systems Operating Company (i.e., Agoric OpCo) delegates its token to validators who operate nodes on the Agoric network.
In total, the Agoric Opco received 12.5% of the total supply of tokens from the community at network genesis, and it intends to use them to decentralize the distribution of stake across the validator set as the network grows and matures.
Delegation Activity
During an initial round of delegation in February 2022, the Agoric OpCo delegated 34 million BLD tokens to validators in the Agoric community. This delegation was made from an account with the following address agoric1euw2t0lxgeerlpj0tcy77f9syrmgx26ehdx3sq and details are visible via block explorer.
In 2023, Agoric OpCo is updating the delegation program, and will reissue delegations based on a new round of applications. Agoric OpCo intends to (re)delegate 34.5 million BLD tokens or more to validators, and the delegation will be made from agoric1u86zfawtef6a7cmulfq34sjtet4nrtnc2tt3pe. Details of the delegation transactions will be visible via block explorer once they have taken place, Agoric OpCo intends to delegate the same amount of stake to everyone that qualifies and is approved for the program.
Eligibility
In order to participate in the Agoric OpCo Delegation Program, validators must complete the 2023 program application form which will be shared via Agoric OpCo’s social media accounts, and in the dedicated validator channels of the Agoric Discord. Any node operator who is interested in receiving delegation can apply, even those who may not have participated in the incentivized testnet program in advance of mainnet-0 launch.
The information gathered in the application will help Agoric OpCo determine the operational and security maturity of the network, and the application period will be open for one month.
Terms of Delegation
In order to receive and maintain delegation, validators should meet the following baselines for operating a node and supporting a robust, resilient, Agoric mainnet.
Those baselines include:
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Detailed hardware baselines for operating a node on the Agoric Network
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Maintaining an uptime of at least 95%.
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Setting a reasonable commission rate between 3% and 10%.
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Committing not to exceed 10% voting power.
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Actively participating in network governance.
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Documenting and publishing the reasoning behind voting decisions for on-chain governance for delegators and participants in the Agoric ecosystem.
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Actively participating in routine and emergency network upgrade coordination.
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Capturing metrics, data, and artifacts to help diagnose and troubleshoot software issues.
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Reporting security bugs through the process outlined in the Agoric Coordinated Disclosure Policy.
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Configuring and maintaining a functional, up-to-date security contact email address in your on-chain validator profile.
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Creating and maintaining a validator profile on the Agoric Network Community Discourse.
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Notifying impacted parties in the event of a node outage.
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Ability to withstand U.S. sanctions screening.
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Contributing to the network by completing at least one task from each of the following categories:
Category 1: Infrastructure
- Run a testnet node, and participate in testnet coordination
- Run a public RPC endpoint, and share information about it in the Cosmos Chain Registry directory for Agoric
- Collaborate with community members to support or set up IBC connections.
- Run a relayer, and share information about the canonical chain connection and channel in the Cosmos Chain Registry directory for Agoric
- Run a Chainlink oracle node that supports the Agoric network.
- Build a block explorer, validator dashboard, or other visualization that provides a tool for the community to interact with or reason about the Agoric chain.
Category 2: Ecosystem
- Develop community documentation that supports the needs of various constituencies across the Agoric + Cosmos ecosystems.
- Develop specialized validator tools to support the operation of the Agoric network.
- Develop smart contract components.
- Develop chain-specific validator tools that enhance the experience of interacting with Agoric technology primitives (e.g. petnames) for the wider community.
- Create educational content about building a node or contributing to the development of the Agoric Network.
- Present at an event on governance proposals, validator experiences and best practices, or provide other relevant community updates.
Throughout the year, Agoric OpCo will monitor for compliance with these operational baselines and contributions to the ecosystem, and will check-in directly with validators as part of standard delegation program operations.
If your validator is jailed, for example for falling below the 95% uptime threshold, your delegation could be at risk. In order to maintain delegation after jailing, slashing, or another adverse chain event, you must reach out to the Agoric OpCo team at delegation@agoric.com within 3 business days of the event taking place. In the interest of transparency and to provide a learning opportunity based on the findings of the adverse event, we ask that you as a validator make a public retrospective post on your validator profile page on the community forum explaining the following:
- What happened that caused you to be jailed or to have an adverse operations incident on mainnet, e.g. root cause analysis.
- What are you going to do to ensure that you won’t be jailed in the future, e.g. operational or infrastructure improvements.
- How are you going to demonstrate that change to prevent future jailings, e.g. sharing network diagrams or best practices.
We ask that validators make this post publicly available for both yourself and the broader validator community, and in the event that a software bug in the agoric-sdk or Cosmos layer of the chain is the root cause for the jailing or adverse event, you will not be required to publish a retrospective. Please post the a link of the retrospective post about your adverse network event on the internet #validator-peer-support channel on Discord. If you have any questions, please reach out to delegation@agoric.com.
At any time, the Agoric OpCo may undelegate, redelegate, or change the amount of token delegated to a validator for any reason including but not limited to failure to meet the established baselines listed above. Additional delegations to improve decentralization of stake or to reward node operators who demonstrate leadership as testnet coordination leads or ecosystem contributors may be made at any time, and Agoric OpCo may maintain separate additional delegations for business purposes. As a US-based software development company, Agoric OpCo will adhere to the laws, regulations, and guidelines relevant to its business operations.
Emergency Security Coordination
In the course of operating a node on any network, security incidents or adverse conditions will arise. During these times, whether the issue is a platform bug or a vulnerable dependency that requires emergency patching through an off-chain coordination process, it is important to have a rapid response plan in place to facilitate coordination between node operators and core protocol developers.
In order to support the operation of a robust, secure, decentralized network, the Agoric OpCo security team maintains an on-call rotation and monitors network health. Additionally, there are several tools and resources to support community-led off-chain network coordination. These resources include:
- A vulnerability disclosure process that lays out how to discreetly report a bug or security issue directly to the Agoric OpCo security engineering team.
- A network coordination distribution list that all node operators can subscribe to by email in order to receive notifications of network upgrades and all security coordination activities. Notifications are sent to validators in the active set, and the list will be tested to ensure that any emails sent to subscribers do not bounce.
- An active set of #mainnet-validator channels in the Agoric Discord to facilitate coordination during upgrades in the Agoric Discord.
- An on-call rotation backed by monitoring and alerting service and dedicated process runbooks to facilitate response.
- An emergency patch distribution process for coordinating with core Cosmos developers, when necessary.
- Validator runbooks that provide insight into coordination processes and operational considerations that impact the chain.
In the event of a security emergency, Agoric OpCo is committed to providing all node operators with equitable access to information, and the security notification distribution email list will be the primary contact tool to inform validators of recommended coordination activities to mitigate or remediate security risk to the network. While core developers are troubleshooting an issue or working directly with validators during upgrades, we will not be able to respond to direct messages and will aim to share information in the channels dedicated to validator collaboration. Once the security risk to the network has been mitigated or remediated, a retrospective of the incident will be published as a Discourse thread and may be shared on-chain as a signaling proposal as a way to document off-chain coordination on the Agoric chain.
Token Distribution Communication Policy
As part of a broader community, the Agoric Opco encourages everyone who participates in the ecosystem to act in the best interests of the community. To foster a culture of cooperation and collaboration, we encourage everyone with a role in the ecosystem to do their own due diligence, give the benefit of the doubt to others, and continue to actively participate in important conversations in our shared community forums on Discord, Discourse, and elsewhere about issues that impact the health and resilience of the Agoric Network.
With respect to token delegation, the Agoric OpCo and the Decentralized Cooperation Foundation (i.e. the DCF) are separate entities, and they do not communicate on behalf of one another. Only the Agoric OpCo can speak authoritatively about the details and activities of the OpCo delegation program, and only the Decentralized Cooperation Foundation can speak authoritatively about the details and activities of the DCF delegation program.
As the Agoric network continues ramping up to mainnet-2 launch and beyond, many entities and individual token holders will begin to participate in staking. The Agoric network and ecosystem are permissionless, and though transactions are shared on a public, immutable ledger,
- We believe token holders have a right to privacy of their holdings and delegation decisions.
- We believe that the community should not expect token holders to link their identities with their public addresses.
- We believe that the community should not attempt to identify token holders, unless the owner or entity associated with an account chooses to disclose information about an account or transaction on their own.
- We believe that the community should not engage in speculation that attempts to attribute motive to transactions on the network.
Communications
If you have questions about the delegation program, or if you would like to verify information about the program that you have learned from another source, you can reach out via Discord in the #opco-delegation channel or email delegation@agoric.com to learn more.