Hello, governoooors.
I think it’s time to suggest a final version of this proposal! This version will stay open to comments for 24-36 hours before being submitted to an on-chain vote!
What do you propose?
As a final proposal, Marinade would implement a voting system on validators stake using on-chain gauges through MNDE for 10% of the total Marinade stake (a governable parameter in the future).
The requirements for a validator to be eligible to a gauge would be:
- The validator is not part of the superminority
- The validator is not blacklisted for cheating with credits or changing its commission before the end of epochs
- The validator has a commission equal or inferior to 10%.
As long as a validator respects this set of criteria, his rank (depending on the on-chain score calculated by the Stake-O-Matic) would not matter for the gauges.
This implementation will take into account the credits observed for the epoch (an on-chain metric) to guarantee the minimum performance of the validators getting stake through gauges. If a validator has less than 20% of the average credits observed for all validators, it would lead to an emergency unstake that overrules the stake obtained by the gauges. If the validator performs on the next epochs, it would get back the stake it should get from gauges.
Gauges would be a “Set & Forget” approach to stake delegation, meaning they would only require changes when a user gets additional MNDE or decide to change their allocation. The creation of those gauges would be permissionless and would not require a separate governance vote.
Gauges would not allow to go above the Marinade limit on stake attributed to a single validator, which is currently set at 1.5% of the total stake.
What is the rationale behind the proposal?
As explained in the original post, this proposal would bring another way to validators to attract stake as well as provide utility to MNDE. I invite everyone to read the original post and the discussion to get more context on the proposal.
What is the expected positive impact of this change?
We expect that those gauges allow validators to look for support from MNDE holders or acquire it themselves in order to secure stake their way in a sticky manner.
We also expect that this change will allow validators that are currently struggling to get into the top 300 in terms of score to unlock some stake from Marinade and start building towards a more performant validator.
We can also estimate that those gauges will allow MNDE holders to build or support new validators on the Solana blockchain, helping its decentralization and censorship-resistance overall.
Finally, this proposal has the additional impact of bringing validators to Marinade and make them part of the DAO, as they have financial incentives to hold MNDE.
Any other considerations?
The community brought up a lot of good ideas, which can be implemented independently of this proposal, and I would like for some of them to keep being discussed. I specifically think about Marinatoooor’s proposal on linking the ability to gauge voting above a certain threshold to the amount of SOL converted to mSOL, or on the proposal to limit gauges even further to smaller validators. I believe those ideas deserve to be discussed on their own forum thread and explored individually.