Update: Polkadot validator set size increase

Governance
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As scaling up Kusama to 500 para validators is smoothly progressing (currently 400), it is time to start the process for Polkadot as well.

Impact

With an active set of 500 validators the total core count can be increased to 100, while security and decentralization is further improved.

Plan

The current plan is to increase set size in just 3 steps as detailed below. Given that currently we don’t have max_validator setting limiting the number of parachain validators we always maintain a max 33% of total bad actors in parachain consensus.

Also, there have been discussion about increasing the set in even more granular steps like a few validators per era: Increase maximum active validator count to 500

  1. Prerequisites enacted (Enable approval voting protocol improvements | Polkassembly )
  2. Wait some time to gather data
  3. Referenda to increase set size to 400
  4. Referenda to increase set size to 450
  5. Referenda to increase set size to 500

What would a more sensible scale up plan look like once 1 is completed ?

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Quick update: [Whitelisted Caller] Increase validator set size to 400 was enacted and Polkadot now has 400 validators !

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Bumping this thread with some more good news. We tested the new approval voting implementation on Kusama and got very good metrics with 600 para validators.

These approval voting improvements have been included and deployed to Polkadot via the latest node patch release 1.17.2 on over 50% of the active validators. If you have not, please upgrade to the 1.17.2 release.

The referenda to increase the active set size to 600 is up for voting. Once enacted Polkadot will be become even more resilient and secure.

I have no idea how to compute the updated Nakamoto coefficient @ 600 validators. It should be higher. Can you guesstimate the new number ?

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