One other consideration is that the increase in bond was also an attempt to prevent a strategy that was seen whereby a node operator would buy their way into the set, and slowly decrease their self-stake until enough was reclaimed to buy in another node (via shifting delegations), and could effectively be done many, many times over time. A higher bond that needs to be locked in blunts this strategy. That said, I still support the decrease to 500 MOVR for bond.
Yes, that’s correct.
I feel like the risk on Moonriver is quite low given current market conditions. Would you agree?
Yes, absolutely, just highlighting it for awareness more than anything else.
I have mixed opinions on this topic. I understand the point of lowering the bond so that more collators are enticed to join the active set. Nevertheless, current market conditions also make it easier to enter with a higher bond.
Moreover, if you look into the current collator list, there are 5 collators that have a stake of 18k MOVR. This means that with the 10k MOVR bond, they need to get 8.8k MOVR just to be in the active set.
IMO - For the short term, we could think of reducing the collator set from 72 Collators to 64. This will boost by a tiny amount collator rewards among the remaining 64 collators, but still ensures the collator set is decentralized enough for the network.
IMO - This is the easiest short term solution for the problem, and then we can think of other more long term solutions to boost the collator set back to 72 after analyzing the impact of lowering the bond, etc.
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Hey everyone–I have to side with Alberto’s suggestion on this one. Reducing the active set temporarily to 64 until we have a firm actionable plan makes the most sense to me. I strongly believe we should clearly state that the reduction is temporarily and provide a timeline so everyone can expect when the active set will be expanded again and have ample time to ensure their nodes are fully functional. I do want to stress that this suggestion shouldn’t be considered as an attempt to become more “centralized”, that is never the intent.
I am also in favor of the min bond reduction but personally don’t agree dropping to 500 MOVR. Back in Feb 2023 it was increased to align with the market price that was required when MOVR first went active. However I think the time has come that we no longer need to peg the min bond to the Day1 launch price anymore. I was thinking 2,000 MOVR, and no I don’t have any data to justify that amount. Its what I feel is a low entry barrier to encourage new user adoption but not too low to create a disaster in the active set.
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Im 100% all for this, much easier to keep the active set healthy
A couple of things to note on this. At least in the linked discussion below, the view at that time from @artkaseman was that the diff between active collators between Moonriver and Moonbase shouldn’t be more than 8. If the number was lowered on Moonriver below 68 it would violate that previous view, but maybe it would be considered acceptable now.
Without speculating on price, looking at the economics of collating on Moonriver is an important aspect of this.
Currently a collator will expect to earn around 100 MOVR / month in rewards, or somewhere between $400-$500. This just about pays for professional grade bare metal server + 1 backup in a top tier data center, and says nothing for labor. We don’t know the reasons why P2P and StakeFish are ending their services, but I think it’s reasonable to assume the economics was a factor.
The point I’m trying to make is that if we don’t speculate on price, the economics of running a collator today would likely only be attractive new collators that are hobbyists with the technical skills to run a collator, who also happen to have 10k in bond available.
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I don’t think the self bond is so important from the reason you’ve mentioned (quantity) since the amount to become active is much higher
Whether its 500 or 10000 MOVR self bond, you still need to raise about 20k MOVR in total to become active
However it is important from the complexity perspective by forcing new collators to lock 10k as self bond. This is a significant entrance barrier due to the fact that those 10k should be always locked
I mean if someone buys 10k MOVR and manage to raise another 10k somehow, and let’s say he is also a tech savvy, I’m not sure he’ll decide to launch a collator when he has to permanently lock his 10k as self bond (better to stake it, be liquid and without operational node hassles). Honestly, I don’t think if anyone of the current collators (except foundation of course) hold more than 10k MOVR (or similar amount), so expecting new collator not just to buy 10k MOVR but permanently lock it is too much I believe
Therefore, I recommend to reduce it back to a lower number (maybe not 500, but around it)
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Everyone has made some really good points here but I’m not sure where this leaves us. I would say the window is rapidly closing if we want to get a change to the min bond in RT2600.
It sounds like everyone agrees that 10K MOVR is a lot of capital to put up relative to the income it generates and so it would make sense to lower it to something. Perhaps we can agree on something but higher than 500?
I believe we can change the active set size without a runtime upgrade so we can always do that later after the run time upgrade.
My (personal) thinking is that we lower the bond and observe. If we don’t get takers we can chill any problematic collators and then figure out if we should reduce the active set.
As @Jim_CertHum pointed out, I don’t think we’d want to shrink the active set too much as Moonriver serves to alert us to any potential scale challenges.
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A quick poll I think would be the best way forward to judge the option with the most support.
I propose that the the option with the most votes gets moved forward, and if an alternative option (via comment) gets enough support, that one is implemented. I’ve tried to capture all of the views expressed so far, but I think a bias towards action is needed here, too, and so limited the poll to close in 24hrs.
There are 72 active collator slots on Moonriver, and in the near term, 8 of those will be taken by inactive collators (it’s unclear is P2P will manually remove themselves as a candidate). This has a negative impact on block production. What action (if any) should the community take?
- Do nothing - leave minimum bond at 10k, with RT2600 Stakefish nodes can be removed, as well as P2P if they don’t act.
- Proactively reduce minimum bond to 500 MOVR, opening up the possibility for more collators to become eligible.
- Proactively reduce minimum bond to 1000 MOVR, opening up the possibility for more collators to become eligible.
- Decrease the active set by <8> active nodes, leaving everything else the same.
- Decrease the active set by active nodes, leaving everything else the same (I’ll comment on what should be)
- Some other option, and I’ll comment below.
0
voters
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Voted. For sure something needs to be done.
Appreciate the input from those that voted. It looks like the preferred option is to lower the bond to 500 MOVR so this will be added to RT2600.
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Separately, we still have the issue of stakefish collators that are offline. We could wait for RT2600 on Moonriver and then do a governance action to enable the “enableMarkingOffline” feature.
However, the updated target for RT2600 on Moonriver is November 28th and only then can a referendum be made to enable the feature so we’re looking at the better part of a month where the stakefish collators impact block production.
Should we do something sooner?
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Let’s shortcut that with an root-track referendum to dispatchAs stakeFish some scheduleLeaveCandidates . 
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Looks like we have 4 more from P2P in 3 days.
NOV 11
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But P2P did an excellent job so far.
They announced a clear timeline on their socials, set an targeted exit date and they even renamed the collators with a hint to make delegators aware (I really liked that one).
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agreed bud, hope they exit gracefully
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agreed so far they are setting a great example of sunsetting out of the active set. Should be a standard for future entities…hopefully no more.
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