Thanks for bringing these pieces of tech to light:
This would be similar to what Obol and SSV Network are doing on Ethereum. Examples of what a distributed validator cluster look like on Ethereum can be found here…
IIUC, this provides a validator with some redundancy - the motivation being that they could avoid some penalty if their infrastructure falls over at a point in time when they are expected to produce/validate a block, etc.
Rather than reinvent the wheel… I wonder if this is a starting point or shared functionality for validating across relay chains?
For motivation I’ll note that some very rough and preliminary calculations suggest that for an equilibrium state you might need in the order of 2K-3K participants. What is the best definition of a participant? Who knows. But for current purposes, let us say it is validators. The good news is that number is not 1 million, the bad news is that number is not 100. For context see these figures from @burdges:
The pertinent observation is that for more that 1K validators you are likely looking at more than one relay chain.
Unfortunately some obstinately refuse to acknowledge the focus of development really needs to be the relay chain.
Any thing you can do to move the ball forward would be great - even if all you do is establish what won’t work or won’t help.
You might wonder if the recent gray/JAM paper improves matters. While it does make several assertions about the economic security, and it does correctly (in my view) acknowledge the critical role this plays. It is, on this topic, unfortunately, another example of crypto-obscurantism. As best I can tell does not provide anything new on the economic security front. And silent on the critical question of what is the ideal number, and more importantly the minimum number, of participants under different conditions.
I’ll reiterate the preliminary and incomplete nature of what I raised above. And point out the obvious problem of not having data from a system (ETH, DOT, etc.) that we think is capable of reaching a steady state, or we can reasonably conjecture is in that state, and so can be used to inform our parameter estimates - in fact we aren’t even sure we have systems capable of maintaining a equilibrium in the face of adverse events. Also I’ll note that my figures above relate to what I would call a non-speculative token design, while ETH, DOT etc are speculator token designs (aka securities).
Finally, there may be more than one way to skin this particular cat, and it is possible the calculations referred to above are correct and irrelevant - a better alternative being available.