Applications for the Celo Foundation Voting Program are now open for Cohort 10!
To encourage financial inclusion and the participation of secure, reliable validators, the Celo Foundation will vote for validator groups according to the updated Foundation voting policy.
Validator groups that are selected as part of this cohort, will retain Foundation votes until July 1, 2023 (~10 months after votes are cast around the end of August, 2022), following the updated Foundation voting policy.
NOTE: This new cohort round includes the criteria that you must have at least 150k CELO voted for your validator by an entity that is not the Celo Foundation. This ensures that validators are engaging with and receiving votes from the community.
The application deadline is July 21, 2022.
Cohort 7 validators who are subject to having their votes expire will simply need to opt-in to renew their application here.
New validators NEED to apply on the application form here. As well, please complete the self-audit checklist prior to starting the application.
Both Cohort 7 validators and new applicants will be evaluated on their validator performance. Celo Mainnet uptime will be used for validators currently receiving votes. Baklava testnet uptime will be used for new validators interested in receiving vote.
You must be running both a validator and attestation service, on Baklava testnet or Celo Mainnet (for renewing validators).
All application details can be found in the docs here. Docs on running a validator and attestation service on Baklava testnet can be found here.
I have some questions since we are struggling for a while to rejoin as an elected validator. Here is a bit of background:
We are Moonlet, a key node operator from the blockchain ecosystem, and we’ve joined Celo starting with Celo Stake Off incentivised testnet in early 2020 where we got the 10th place.
Everything worked well for many months, until we had a reorg and we faced some communication issues not only with you, but in general.
Due to this unforeseen situation, which we are fully responsible for, our node was removed being tagged as unresponsive.
We tried to apply for Cohort 9, since we have fixed all issues on our side, but we had no traction and it seems that things moved very slow in the past months. However we are still seen on your recordings as non-responsive, as far as we are aware, but this is a bit strange since we have been very active once the issues were solved.
This tag that we receive is outdated, imho. As a matter of fact we opened a new Celo node for Wormhole since we are one of their 19th guardians. Beside that we are activating in 30 networks already. So this “unresponsiveness” tag needs to be removed or updated reflecting the current status of Moonlet within Celo. Hope it makes sense.
My first question for you is how we should proceed further since we are eligible to apply for Cohort 10 having 795,298.34 CELO votes on our nodes. Do we need to fill both forms as you mentioned here?
Second question is how we can overcome this situation since having this “unresponsiveness” tag is kind of hurting our business being perceived as a trust less player, which is kind of weird due to Celo - Wormhole active node and our continuous efforts to contribute to the development of blockchain ecosystem as a non-custodial service provider. See Moonlet and TIEXO, two of our core products
Thank you to all the applicants and re-applicants. We have 23 validator roles to fill for Cohort 10. With the re-applicants and the new applicants we should be successful in fulfilling the roles. We are still on track for the end of August.
We are adjusting our uptime and attestation evaluations to take into account the mainnet stall and baklava downtime.
We are working through responses and communicating with individual validators as needed. We appreciate everyone’s efforts in this process!
