Staking Defense

Staking Defenders will start this new dialogue and empower its participants to engage in meaningful action. The intention is to counter staking’s trend toward centralization. Anyone with an interest in keeping stake decentralized is welcome and encouraged to join the Defenders. My sense is that, at least initially, the Defenders will attract a set of smaller, dedicated and capable independent validators. The idea is that by pooling resources, we can better compete with the larger, heavily funded staking operators/companies. Hopefully a few them who support the vision will contribute too. It’s a discussion forum, built on the open source Discourse platform. Sign-up, introduce yourself and add a discussion topic or two. I’ve chosen this forum format as our starting place. Soon I’ll be sharing a project management tool to track our activities. The goal is to make this an active, thoughtful and action-oriented group. My initial suggestion is for the Defenders to focus on these key areas: 1 - Education We’ll work to educate the staking community in areas like - The risks inherent to centralization, How to best choose validators to delegate to, Bigger doesn’t mean better. 2 - Visibility We’ll combine resources to make ourselves more visible to the staking network communities. For example, we can promote the Defenders as a set of capable validators, rather than trying to promote ourselves on an individual basis. We can collaborate on outreach, to counter the trend of a small set of large validators dominating the conversation. We can make sure smaller validators have a voice in online media, at conferences and on panel discussions. 3 - Partnerships We’ll coordinate partnerships with larger validators, grant programs and other partners. We’ll be in a stronger position to negotiate together, rather than alone. 4 - Resources and Tools We’ll pool resources and develop open source tools to make running our systems more efficient, secure and reliable. For example, I’m working on alerting and monitoring tools that I plan to open source when they’re ready. We’ll do this ourselves and apply for grants on behalf of the Defenders to do this.