Hey all! I’m Wesley, a Rust dev from Brazil. I’ve been building a small, focused monitoring tool on the side, and I’d love to share the idea and get your feedback before I take it to a treasury referendum.
This is a draft for discussion, not a finished funding ask. I want to know whether the problem resonates, whether the scope is right, and whether something out there already covers it.
The problem
When you nominate a validator, you’re trusting it to play fair. Several abuse patterns are well documented in the community, and a nominator has no way to be warned about any of them in real time:
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Commission flipping: A validator advertises a low commission to attract stake, then quietly raises it toward 100% to keep the rewards.
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Identity changes: A validator changes its on-chain display name after you’ve already staked on the strength of a name you recognized.
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Compliance drift: A validator’s self-stake or commission slips below the network threshold, making it permissionlessly chill-able and putting nominator funds at risk.
Today you usually find out after the fact, once your rewards have already shrunk.
The idea
The tool follows the chain in real time, watches the validators a nominator cares about, and sends an alert via Telegram, email, or webhook the instant one of these patterns shows up. It subscribes to finalized blocks on Asset Hub for staking and the People chain for identity, decodes the relevant pallet events, and runs each through a dedicated detector.
The goal is a heads-up while you can still act on it. You don’t have to watch a dashboard or run anything yourself, the alert just comes to you.
What already exists
I’ve built and self-funded a working foundation, and it’s open source (Apache 2.0):
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It connects to Polkadot Asset Hub via subxt, subscribes to finalized blocks, and detects commission changes on mainnet for a watched list of validators.
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It establishes a baseline the first time it sees a validator, then detects changes against it.
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It persists validators and their full commission history to PostgreSQL, and self-hosts with a single docker compose up.
What I’d build with treasury support
The work I’d want funding for turns that foundation into something any nominator can actually use:
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Alert delivery across Telegram, email, and webhook, with per-event deduplication so nobody gets spammed.
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Identity-change and compliance detection wired into the live pipeline (identity via the People chain, compliance via a per-era check).
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Per-user accounts and subscriptions. Sign in with a Polkadot wallet signature (no passwords), manage your own watch list and alert channels over a small REST API.
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A dynamic watch list so the watcher tracks every validator any user subscribes to, updated live without a restart.
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Kusama as a second monitored chain, with the chain name shown in every alert.
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A minimal web UI so a non-technical nominator can connect a wallet, add validators, and set alert channels without touching a server.
The end result is open-source public infrastructure that makes the validator set safer to nominate. Self-hosting always stays supported, and a hosted public instance would just be one deployment of it.
I’d like the community to tell me whether that gap is real and worth funding, or whether an existing tool already covers it (or could with a small addition).
On hosting sustainability
A public hosted instance has ongoing costs after any grant ends. My current thinking is that self-hosting always works (the public instance is just one deployment), and the hosted instance would be covered by a modest runway buffer plus a possible follow-on maintenance proposal rather than open-ended treasury spend. I’d like to hear how the community would prefer this handled.
What I’m asking the forum
Is this useful? Is the scope right, too big, or too small? And have I framed the comparison to existing tools fairly? I’d rather hear it now than after a referendum is live.
Thank you all for reading it, I appreciate. I’ll take any feedback about this project in consideration before creating any proposals.
as opposed as the classic Grafana, Alerts, etc. that validators use. Quite useful for delegators however and new validators, node operators, RPCs and so on.