Speaking as a governance delegate here - pretending I’m the CFO of “Celo Incorporated”:
@alex_Verda If the goal is to save money, what’s the rationale for not reducing validator count to zero? This would 1) maximise the goal and 2) affect everyone equally.
If there are other considerations what are they?
Could we not be having the same conversation in 6 months to pull the band-aid off completely? Given the tighter pace of action and decision making in the market right now, it feels like we’re baking in tech debt to have to revisit this entire conversation again.
Here’s a framing that I think makes sense for this proposal:
- Marek clearly wrote in detail that decentralized sequencing is clearly in the exploration / would be nice to have / maybe there’s another future for validators zone.
- Renee has recently started a tokenomics working group so nothing is off the table right now.
- Validators aren’t needed now and times are tough - we can’t be leaking money for “nice to have folks running the stack and testing out cLabs’ tooling”.
- Non-validating RPCs are a commodity in 2025 and if Celo needs infrastructure urgently we’ll pay an enterprise who specializes in this to do it in a normal B2B deal through CICLOPS
Therefore, this proposal aims to reduce rewards to zero (first priority) and optionally (better experience for validators) reduce unlock times.
Speaking more personally:
Mixing in all these other changes like reduce elected groups and number of validators is difficult to justify any one number over another. Why not 60? Why not 35, 42 etc etc? Especially relevant given some of the questions around the accuracy of calculations in this thread.
Taking it to it’s extreme, we don’t even need technical governance for this, you could run a temperature check requesting the Score Management Committee to reduce everyone’s scores to zero and set the owner of the ScoreManager contract to the burn address (or cLabs, or the security council). Likewise, the Score Management Committee could enact the same financial impact of reducing to 55 validators by simply scaling everyone’s scores equally down by 50% under the current uptime / performance-monitored system.
Couldn’t we also just re-configure the 80-90cUSD per validator-epoch reward to be 50% of the current value? I don’t see any reason why we can’t impact everyone equally especially since the number 55 is just “half of current number”. The only argument I heard against this idea was from @LuukDAO who said “that would reduce the ROI per individual validator as their operational spend ratio woud go up” - which is true, but I think that’s fine. It’s actually a good side effect: the most efficient providers will keep going (likely to be operationally mature), and those who want a higher ROI will make that decision independently and we might have a staggered / organic unlocking of groups over time who want a different capital efficiency elsewhere.
If there’s another consideration at play to keeping the top groups by stake weight around we should hear this out also (it could be a good reason).
Obviously myself and others would be affected by this however it falls, but clearly shouldn’t be anyone’s consideration here.