With the start of the Q Mainnet in March 2022, our mission at Q Development AG (in short: Q Development) is to further diversify the ecosystem of Root Nodes, Validator Nodes and applications building on Q.
Blockchain validators vary heavily in size and type. Size usually refers to the amount of total Stake Under Management (SUM) in USD terms (including self stake and delegations) and Number of Delegators (ND).
Typically we see:
- small validators, solo stakers, private individuals
SUM < ~1 million USD, ND ~1 to 10 - same as above but acquired track record in some successful protocols
SUM ~1 million to 10 million USD, ND > ~1k - validator companies, which professionalized out of private individuals, started to hire a team and cover a range of protocols
SUM ~ > 10 million USD, ND ~ 10k to 100k - validator companies, which offer staking-as-a-service to high net worth individuals, blockchain foundations, exchanges, with rather low delegation participation
SUM >~ 100 million USD, ND < ~1k - same as above but with a high delegation participation, by having build up a community
SUM >~ 100 million USD, ND ~ 10k to 100k
Our challenge is to provide interesting onboarding options for all of these validators.
This post will focus on the group of smaller validators, which are interested to learn about validation on Q Blockchain but are unsure about acquiring a self stake ahead of time. This group of validators is looking for various kinds of rewards for their efforts in order to cover costs. Lastly, these small validators are numerous and therefore contribute to a much wider and diversified validator set.
Validator Incentivized Testnet Program on Q Blockchain
TL;DR Register your account, spin up a validator node on Q testnet and receive Q mainnet tokens. There are timelines and potentially KYC conditions.
What: On the Q Testnet, setup a validator node and maintain it with good uptime and correct operation.
When: Registration will start in December 2022 and the monitoring phase will last from 1st January 2023 to 31st March 2023.
Who: The Q Development AG is managing this as an incentive reward for active community members which want to become a Validator on Q Blockchain testnet and mainnet.
Why: To educate about Q Consensus, diversify the validator set and provide validators the utility to run a mainnet validator and take part in Q governance.
How much: The exact amount of rewards in Q Tokens per participant is not finalized. The amount will be selected to cover the cost for maintaining a Q client considering an average cloud provider cost for a series of about 6 months + a buffer for the maintenance efforts.
Phases of the Validator ITN Program
Important Details
KYC: We will monitor the registration, on-chain and off-chain behavior closely during the program. If we suspect fraud, we maintain the right to ask validators that are eligible for rewards to conduct a KYC (Know-your-customer) process at Q Development AG. This will be needed at the end of the ITN program, before claiming the actual Q tokens. Details will be shared with the individual validators.
Rewards: The Q tokens to be rewarded are time-locked for 3 month on the Q mainnet.
- 50% of the tokens will be staked inside the validator contract. It will allow users to start validator nodes on mainnet, activate the stake and start to earn rewards and receive community delegations.
- The other 50% of the tokens will be staked in the QVault. Here, users can delegate to a validator (their own or another community member), earn delegator rewards on top of Q Token Holder rewards.
- 100% of the tokens can be used to participate in the Q governance for proposal votes.
After three months, the total amount of Q tokens are fully unlocked and can be withdrawn to the individual user wallet. Also, there will be 1 Q token provided for handling transaction fees for the activation of the staked amounts. Consecutive rewards obtained from the mainnet validation or from the Q Vault will not be time locked.
Eligibility: Users need to register at https://itn.qdev.li/, where the Q Testnet account will be connected to the Q Mainnet account and join the Q Discord Community Server. Given this, the user needs to run and maintain a Q client acting as validator on the Q testnet.
Quality behavior and fraud will be monitored and tracked for each participant (see monitoring phase below for further details). Only eligible users will be considered for rewards and the potential KYC process at Q Development.
1. Registration phase
Until the 30th December 2022, users can register a testnet validator to take part in the ITN program at itn.qdev.li.
First, connect the website to your metamask account. The registration form will ask the user to provide general information and background, Discord user name, the mainnet address for reward tokens and a nickname identifier for the statistic tracking. Finally, the user must agree to the terms and privacy agreement and sign the registration content with the connected wallet, which is the validator testnet address.
After the registration is complete, the user should use the displayed statistics identifier and setup a validator node on testnet and allow it for a couple of hours to 1 day to find peers and sync the network.
Important: Every user needs to make sure the connected wallet is the actual address of the testnet validator address.
Important: Any nickname can be used for the statistics identifier and it does not need to be live at the time of registration.
2. Monitoring Phase
Q Development will monitor the testnet participation of the registered validators over a time range of three months from January to March 2023.
Important criteria, amongst others, are: valid registration, validator stake in the validator contract (no required minimum), uptime of the validator node >95%, node fully synced and client running with activated mining, latest client version as released by Q governance process, correct signature of blocks (no double signing, forking, etc) and no valid slashing proposal voted on by root nodes.
Peer-to-peer data traffic will also be monitored to identify fraud, sybil setups and attacks. Any detection can lead to a complete disqualification from the ITN program.
3. Reward Phase
After the monitoring phase, the criteria data will be analyzed and aggregated. Every user who successfully and honestly operated their validator node will be marked eligible for rewards.
Q Development will announce the full details for the eligibility check and reward claiming closer to the end of the Validator ITN program. Necessary steps and details will be provided to eligible users via their registered email address.
Some last words
A small anecdote: we announced this upcoming Validator ITN program at the Staking Summit 2022 in Lisbon and collected interest from validators in a typeform, which was also published as part of an interview on the Staking Rewards website.
This typeform quickly leaked into Web3 and Validator communities and we had an explosion of Discord Community users and running validator nodes on the Q testnet. One of the most asked question was “When validator ITN?” and we hope this question is now addressed :-)
We are happy to see that currently almost 500 nodes spinned up in the Q testnet and looking forward to even more particpiants during the official registration. Happy Validating!
