The next time series shows us how the Terra Ecosystem's set of large validators (with stake ~10 million LUNA) has grown and how this set is distributed. The goal of the graph is to check whether the largest validators have too much voting power in the network but also see if the state of affairs is getting better over time.

As we can see, it looks like a health percentage of LUNA has been staked throughout the last year. It does seem like there was a large dip around 15-20 days after the big market downturn and FUD surrounding UST de-pegging but the stake percentage has rebounded relatively healthily going back close to previous all-time highs.

So all in all, it looks like the Terra Ecosystem is relatively healthy in terms of decentralisation and voting power. It's been getting a lot better over the last few months and we'd like to see a similar trend continue over the coming months and years for Terra to truly thrive and be resistant to attacks.

In the beginning, there seems to have only been 1 large validator (in Nov 2020). As we get closer to May/June 2021 we see many validators with 10 million or so LUNA staked. This seems to generally be healthy for the ecosystem but for true decentralisation, we'd like more and more validators to be stood up and have a say in the Terra Ecosystem. Right now the top 10 validators can theoretically take over the network if they wanted to be malicious (which is unlikely but theoretically possible).

From the graph above the growth towards having more network validators seems quite healthy with the ecosystem now sitting at 100 validators up ~100% from Oct 2020!

But another important stat to keep in mind is to check how much LUNA is actually staked. If only a small amount of LUNA is staked then it would be easy to mount an attack on the network. The graph below shows us the total amount of LUNA staked across time:

To do this we divide validators into different buckets based on their size. The bucket sizes are a follows:

1. | 0 - 1k | LUNA Staked

2. | 1k - 10k | LUNA Staked

3. | 10k - 100k | LUNA Staked

4. | 100k - 1M | LUNA Staked

5. | 1M - 10M | LUNA Staked

6. | 10M - 100M | LUNA Staked

As we can see in the graph below, there are about 39 validators with somewhere between 1-10 million LUNA staked and 10 validators with between 10M-100M LUNA staked. These are likely trusted validator operations that run across the Cosmos Ecosystem.

So out of the 100 validators on Terra almost 50 have a reasonable stake in the network. Ideally, we see the other 50 validators be able to provide high-quality services so that more stake can flow from the biggest validators to them and make the network as decentralised as possible. Especially because having some validators with a very large stake (10M+) is a possible source of failure for the network. If we assume we need 100M LUNA to take over the network (33% of all LUNA staked) then it is possible that the top 10 biggest validators could theoretically launch a BCP attack on the network.

Let's first take a look at how the number of validators in the Terra Ecosystem has grown over the last few months. This gives us a sense of how decentralised the Terra Ecosystem truly is. Any PoS blockchain with a small number of validators can easily be attacked because you only need ~33% of the overall stake to launch a Break of Consensus Protocol (BCP) attack on the chain.

Okay, so now we know that there is some level of decentralisation in the number of validators and a large number of LUNA are staked on the Terra Ecosystem. Let's now take a look at how the LUNA is staked across different validators.