Ability to switch validator stash without loosing nominators

Hi everyone,

I am a validator on Kusama and Polkadot networks and I thought about the fact that the current way of changing our validator stash is by:

  • Chilling on the previous stash
  • Setting up a new stash
  • Setting session keys and validating

This has the effect of removing all the nominators because there is no process that exists to automatically move nominators from the previous to the new stash. The only way to keep your nominators is to make announcements, or direct messages when possible, to ask them to nominate your new stash and hope that they will do it.

Changing the stash might be needed for a few reasons (compromised account, compromised passphrase, switching from a hot to cold wallet, switching accounts in a ledger, setting up new account with a passphrase, …).

I would like to discuss about the possibility of implementing a system where we could change our validator stash without loosing nominators. I was thinking of something that could let us validators initiate a migration action and move our nominators to a new stash.

What do you think about it? Would it be useful? Possible?

Thank you for reading.

Best regards,
Ech0

I don’t think nominators would appreciate such a “feature”.