Thanks for coming back to answer this one! Really like the approach of making it permissionless for eligible validators to set up their own gauge. The only other thing I would say here is that there will likely need to be a strong system in place to cross-reference the list of eligible validators and ensure that it is kept up-to-date.
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I do agree with you here @Cerba!
With respect to the 1.5% cap, I went back and did some more research, and I can now see where you’re coming from. If you look at the staking status updates that the team pushes to GitHub for each Epoch, there are only a handful of instances where the amount of algo-delegated SOL even comes close to the 1.5% max cap. (with the exception of Epoch 272 which appears to be a significant outlier).
I spot checked every Epoch published in the GitHub repo and only found ~ 8 Epochs where at least one validator was eligible to receive > 1.25% of Marinade’s staked SOL.
I will, however, still advocate for increasing the 1.5% cap over time as @gekonn suggested. I also think that 0.1% per month would be a great starting point. The more utility the governance token has, the more we all win over the long term.
Curious to see what others think of this idea too!