What Makes an Excellent Validator

    Validating the validator.

    1. Introduction

    The goal is to investigate Terra validators and write about what makes an excellent validator. There are a few metrics going to be used as benchmarks to assess the excellence of validators, and these are:

    • Slashing
    • Redelegations
    • Self Delegations

    We will therefore take an eliminative approach to determine who we think the excellent validators are.

    2. Slashing

    Slashing is a punitive action taken against validators to disincentivize violating validator responsibilities such as missing too many voting periods and double signing. We will take a look at how validators are being slashed over the past year. That being said, any validator who has suffered one or more slashes is exempted from our excellence list.

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    3. Redelegations

    A redelegation is an action taken by a Terra delegator to move voting power from one validator to another. This can also be considered as a punitive action meted out by delegators. Basically, delegators are choosing one validator over another based on who they think is better. Undelegations are not considered here because we cannot distinguish users who are undelegated solely because they wanted to have liquid $LUNA. We shall take a look at "out-of-favour" validators based on redelegations.

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    We will use this data to sieve out and rank validators. Preference will be given to validators with fewer redelegations.

    4. Self Delegations

    Our final metric will be based on self-delegations, which is also a proxy for skin in the game. Self delegation shows how much owners of a validator node are themselves invested. Skin in the game will mean that not only delegators will suffer from slashing, but owners of validator nodes are also incentivized to keep nodes in good health.

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    We can see from the diagram above validator nodes are in decreasing order of self-delegation.

    5. Excellent Validators

    Our list of excellent validators is as follows, together with a brief explanation of why we think they are a good pick.

    Chorus One

    Chorus One has not suffered slashing in the past year, it has 0.62% of voting power, with 3.6% being self-delegated. Only 64 redelegations have been suffered in the past year.

    Forbole

    Forbole did not suffer slashing in the past year, it has 0.26% of voting power, with 2.9% being self-delegated. Forbole has suffered only 34 redelegation events in the past year.

    Delight

    Delight did not suffer slashing in the past year, it has 1.71% of voting power, with 0.65% being self-delegated. Delight has suffered only 41 redelegation events in the past year.