By Connor Smith

Note: This is the final installment of a series exploring different approaches that blockchain networks have taken to achieve decentralization. Part 1 introduced decentralization and the inter-play it has with certain aspects of crypto networks like governance, incentives, and network architecture. If you missed that article I highly recommend going back and reading it here. The remaining articles have been examinations of the decentralization on Bitcoin, Factom, Cosmos, Terra, and Polkadot/Kusama. If you missed those and would like to go back and read them before we dive into Celo, you may do so, here, here, here, here, & here respectively.

Hey everyone, thank you for joining me again as our thoroughfare through varying approaches to decentralization comes to a conclusion. From the first crypto network, Bitcoin, to the new generation of ‘meta-networks’ like Polkadot and Cosmos, we have seen quite a few different ways networks have attempted to decentralize and how that has influenced their design. We have seen how factors like application design criteria and consensus architecture (i.e proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) influence the decentralization of a networks’ resources and participants. Moreover, by taking a chronological approach in the networks examined throughout this series, we have seen the evolution of the crypto industry over the better part of a decade and will be ending with the youngest protocol we have seen thus far, Celo. Aiming to overcome price-volatility and ease of use problems associated with many cryptocurrencies, Celo seeks to bring financial infrastructure and tools to anyone with a smartphone. 

To reach this goal, Celo is taking a full-stack approach and introducing innovations at the networking and application layers with technologies like a lightweight address-based encryption scheme, an ecosystem of stable-value tokens, and novel system architectures. The project is backed by some of the most prolific crypto investment partners and Silicon Valley tech titans like a16z, Polychain Capital, Coinbase, Reid Hoffman, and Jack Dorsey to name a few. The protocol has been making waves over the last few months due to its rigorous incentivized testnet competition, known as the Great Celo Stake Off, the rigor of which was recounted two weeks ago by our CEO Nate Miller. The Stake Off is entering into its third and final phase and the mainnet is slated to launch later this year, making 2020 a big year for the protocol. So without further ado, let’s dive into Celo!

So What is Celo and How Does it Work?

Celo was launched with the mission of building a financial system capable of bringing conditions of prosperity to everyone with a smartphone. To create such an environment, Celo has proposed a theory of change to satisfy the following three verticals: satisfying people’s basic needs like access to food & healthcare, the ability to enable an individual’s growth potential, and increasing people’s social support for one another. All aspects of the protocol, from its architectural decisions, to development efforts, and even all technical and community projects support activities tied to enabling these three conditions and ensuring such a system is created. Work on the project began in the summer of 2018 when entrepreneurs turned GoDaddy executives Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski raised their initial seed round of $6.5 MM from some of the Valley’s top Venture Capitalists. The pair had exited their prior company, Locu, to GoDaddy in 2014 for $70 MM, and had since been serving as vice presidents in the restaurant and small business division of the firm. Armed with little more than a white paper at the time, the team got to work and in less than a year the first public testnet was released. Celo aims to achieve its mission of bringing conditions of prosperity to everyone and being a mobile-only payments platform through the following two features: mapping users public phone numbers to an alphanumeric string (public key) needed to transact on the network, and using a network of stablecoins pegged to a basket of different cryptocurrencies to minimize price volatility.

The team believes that creating a price-stable, more user-friendly transaction experience is the only way that a cryptocurrency payments solution will see success, and thus has sought to redefine the entire blockchain networking stack to optimize for these characteristics. Hence, Celo is a mobile-first solution operating as a proof-of-stake smart contract platform based on Ethereum and composed of the following three components: lightweight identity for a better user experience, stability mechanism for stable-value currencies, and systems for incentives and governance to ensure platform stability. An image of the Celo stack may be viewed below.

Celo’s lightweight identity system utilizes a variant of identity-based encryption known as address-based encryption to overcome traditional user experience issues associated with transacting cryptocurrencies. Instead of the canonical having to download a wallet, generate a public/private key pair, and provide whoever is sending you crypto with a long hexadecimal address, Celo’s address-based encryption ties a user’s phone number directly to a Celo wallet. This allows the phone number to be used when a payment is initiated instead of the actual Celo address when a payment is initiated, simplifying the payment process. Additionally, only a cryptographic hash of the phone number is stored on the blockchain to preserve privacy. Celo also allows a user to link multiple phone numbers to his or her wallet address to protect against losing a phone or changing numbers. Celo also utilizes a social reputation mapping algorithm on top of this infrastructure known as EigenTrust. While the technical underpinnings of the algorithm are fairly complex, it functions similarly to Google’s Page Rank algorithm but is designed for decentralized systems. In short, this algorithm defines a given phone number’s relative reputation score based on the number of phone numbers who are connected with and trust that phone number, coupled with the weighted reputation of those connections.

Similar to Terra’s approach to creating a stablecoin network, Celo is also a network of stablecoins pegged to real-world fiat currencies and uses a seigniorage based approach to maintain stability. For the sake of brevity, I am going to gloss over what stablecoins and seigniorage are, as I discussed them at length in my post on Terra, and instead, dive into how they work in the context of Celo. Celo is designed to support an ecosystem of pegged stable currencies alongside the native token of the protocol, Celo Gold (cGold). The first, and currently only, stablecoin on the network is the Celo Dollar (cUSD), which is pegged to the price of the U.S dollar. cGold has a fixed supply and is held in a reserve contract where it is used to expand or contract the supply of cUSD to maintain a stable price through seigniorage. The network relies on a number of external oracles to provide feeds of the cGold price in USD and then allows users to exchange a dollars worth of cGold for cUSD and vice versa. When the market price rises above the $1 peg, arbitrageurs may profit by purchasing a dollar’s worth of cGold and then selling cUSD for market price. Conversely, if the price of cUSD falls under the peg, arbitrageurs can profit by purchasing a cUSD for market price and exchanging it with the protocol for a dollar’s worth of cGold and then sell the cGold on the market. Thus, network participants are able to profit in nearly any market condition. A more thorough examination of how Celo’s stability mechanism works may be found here.

Celo also goes a step further to ensure stability and has implemented a constant-product market-maker model to prevent against the cGold reserve from becoming overly depleted when the price of cGOld supplied by the oracles does not match the market price. The mechanism dynamically adjusts the offered exchange rate in response to the exchange activity and will update a new constant-product market maker to trade cGold and cUSD whenever the oracle price of cGold is updated. Hence, if the oracle price is correct, the exchange rate determined by the constant-product market-maker will be equivalent to that of the market and no arbitrage opportunity will exist. However, if the oracle price data is incorrect, the rates will differ and an arbitrage opportunity will exist until exploited enough by users to dynamically adjust the quoted exchange rate and erase the opportunity. 

Celo’s Network Architecture

Consistent with their full-stack approach to creating a mobile-first financial system,  Celo implements a novel tiered network architecture to optimize the end-user experience and maximizing physical decentralization. Similar to other Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) proof-of-stake networks we have seen so far, like Cosmos, the core network participants responsible for producing blocks and verifying transactions is the validator. Unlike other proof-of-stake networks that encourage anyone who is willing to run a validator, Celo encourages only professional node operators to run a validator on the network. For example, Celo strongly encourages running validators in a secure data center and has been auditing validators participating in the Stake Off to see if this is the case. In maintaining a secure set of globally distributed validators, the network hopes to maximize security, performance, and stability. Celo has also attempted to implement safeguards against any single validator or organization from gathering a disproportionate amount of the network’s resources by introducing validator groups. Instead of electing individual validators to participate in consensus, validator groups comprised of a collection of individual validators are elected and then internally compete to solve blocks. The actual election process and underlying mechanisms are far more involved and complex, so if you are interested in learning more, as I said earlier, check out this blog post from our CEO, Nate Miller, which explains the process in more detail. Validator groups have their own unique identity and a fixed size to make it difficult for a single organization to manage multiple groups and consolidate disproportionate influence, thus improving decentralization.

While the ability to run a validator is fairly restricted to only professional node operators, there are two other tiers of nodes that anyone can run on the Celo Network: a full node and a light client. The Celo application/wallet has a light client embedded within it that is optimized for mobile devices, so anyone running the software on their phone is running the light client. The requests exchanged across these light clients (i.e sending & receiving transactions on the network) must be processed by full nodes, which receive a transaction fee facilitating the transaction. People running full nodes can set a minimum service fee for processing transactions from light clients and refuse to perform service if the fee they collect will be insufficient. The eventual goal of the protocol is to have these components operate such that light clients will automatically choose full nodes to peer with based on cost, latency, and reliability. However, much fundamental network infrastructure must be laid down first before this is achievable. An eventual flow of what this will look like, including validators, may be viewed below.

So How Does Governance Work on Celo?

At a high level, Celo has a governance model similar to many other proof-of-stake networks, where the respective weight of a particular user’s vote in the governance process is proportional to the amount of cGold they have staked and the duration of their stake. Similarly, Celo also supports on-chain governance to manage and upgrade all aspects of the protocol including upgrading smart contracts, adding new currencies, or modifying the reserve target asset allocation. Changes are currently made through a governance specific smart contract that acts as the overseer for making modifications to other smart contracts throughout the network. The eventual goal of the protocol is to transition from this smart contract structure for on-chain governance to a Distributed Autonomous Organization, or DAO, owned and managed by cGold holders. This could function in a form similar to how MakerDAO operates, however, it is far too early to speculate on how the Celo DAO would actually function. For more information on what a DAO is or how they work, click here.

Any network participant is eligible to submit a proposal to the governance smart contract, so long as he or she is willing to lock a portion of his or her cGold along with it. A proposal consists of a timestamp and the information needed to execute the operation code should it be accepted by the network. Submitted proposals are then added to a proposal queue for a duration of up to one week where they will be voted upon by cGold holders in hopes of passing to the next approval phase. Every cGold holder with a locked cGold account may vote for one proposal per day. The top three proposals for each day then advance to the approval phase, the original proposers may reclaim their locked gold commitment, and they then enter the referendum phase where they are voted upon by users. Any user may vote ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘abstain’ to the proposal and the weight of their vote is tied to their locked gold commitment. While yet to be implemented, Celo also intends on incorporating an adaptive quorum biasing component like we observed in Polkadot to accurately account for voter participation. 

So How Decentralized is Celo?

As I mentioned earlier, Celo has yet to launch their mainnet so this discussion will be framed through the context of what has transpired throughout their ongoing incentivized testnet, Baklava. As of the time of writing this article, there are currently 75 different validator operations participating in the third phase of the Great Stake Off, but 152 Validators in total and 88 validator groups. Moreover, Celo is debating expanding the active set of validators on the network upon the conclusion of the Stake Off. The active set is currently set at 100 Validators, and the original plan was to wind down the number of possible validator slots to 80 before mainnet launch. However, Celo recently announced that they now plan to expand the active set to 120 so long as scale testing shows this permissible given the active engagement that validators have shown throughout the Stake Off. Considering that Celo intends on only allowing Validator nodes to be run by professional service providers, this is a major step in decentralizing their network and ensuring a globally dispersed, resilient network.

When examining the allocation of resources across the Celo network, there is somewhat of a disparity between the highest-ranked participants and those at the bottom. For example, the top elected validator group has nearly 1.1 MM votes, whereas the lowest elected validator group has only slightly over 200K. Additionally, the top elected group has 5 different participants with the largest, whereas the bottom elected group only has one. This illustrates the importance of the validator group, not the individual validator on Celo. The largest cGold holder within the largest elected validator group only has 194k locked cGold, meaning that all members of the group have fewer locked cGold than the one participant in the bottom group. Yet, the group collectively is the highest voted group so its participants are more likely to participate in consensus and gather rewards. Metrics relating to the decentralization of full nodes and light clients on Celo are not readily available since the network is still in the very early development stages. Consequently, it is difficult to attempt to quantify the degree of decentralization of these layers of the network. The Celo Wallet Application is available for the Alfajores testnet on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, with over 100 downloads for the latter. This suggests that there are at least 100+ light nodes on the non-incentivized testnet Alfajores. 

That’s all! I hope you have enjoyed this case study approach to decentralization as much as I have. With the last phase of the Baklava incentivized testnet coming to a close within the next few weeks, mainnet launch slated for later this year, and the protocol’s recent announcement of Celo Camp to incubate and assist startups building on the platform, it is certainly an exciting time to be involved with Celo. The Great Celo Stake Off has been no walk in the park, but it has certainly stress-tested the network technically and from an incentives standpoint. Excluding some economic barriers to entry for new validators attempting to enter the active set, it appears that Celo’s approach to decentralization has achieved its goal, at least physically. It will be interesting to see if this continues once true economic conditions are introduced on mainnet, but I am optimistic about the future of the network. If you are interested in seeing if Celo is the right blockchain for your application, running a Celo cluster, or how staking on Celo, contact one of our LedgerOps experts here. We have been involved with the protocol throughout the entire incentivized testnet and are currently in the second-highest voted group (Chainflow-Validator-Group), so we are highly familiar with the protocol. Thanks again and take care!

By Connor Smith

Note: This is the sixth installment of a series detailing different approaches that blockchain networks have taken to decentralize their network. Part 1 introduced the concept of decentralization and the inter-play it has with certain aspects of crypto networks like governance, incentives, and network architecture. If you missed that article I highly recommend going back and reading it here. The subsequent articles have examined the decentralization of Bitcoin, Factom, Cosmos, & Terra. If you missed those and would like to go back and read them before we dive into Kusama & Polkadot, you may do so, here, here, here, & here respectively.

Hey everybody, and thank you for joining me again as we continue our examination of the varying approaches to decentralization throughout the crypto ecosystem. Two weeks ago we examined Cosmos’ approach to decentralization and the unique challenges the protocol faces in its quest to build the internet of blockchains, and then spent last week studying one of the blockchains building on its platform, Terra. This week we will examine Polkadot, another protocol attempting to build a network of interconnected blockchains. Yet, it is taking a radically different approach from what we observed with Cosmos. However, as Polkadot has not yet launched its mainnet, much of the discussion will be framed through the lens of what has ensued on its ‘Canary Network’, Kusama. If you are wondering what a canary network is or why we will be examining two protocols in this article, don’t worry, I promise I will address these concerns in due time. However, to better discern how Polkadot differs from Cosmos and its approach to decentralization, it is crucial to first understand the history of the protocol and the institutions leading its development.

So What is Polkadot and Where Does Kusama Come In?

The Polkadot whitepaper was released in 2016 by Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and  of blockchain development powerhouse Parity Technologies. Designed to connect all types of blockchains (private, consortium, public, & permissionless) and technologies, Polkadot aims to serve as the backbone of an ecosystem for independent blockchains to seamlessly transact between one another in a trustless manner and enable the decentralized internet at scale. Gavin and Parity Technologies are veterans of the crypto industry and have been instrumental in the evolution of blockchain technology. Many people tend to associate fellow Ethereum co-founder and figurehead of the protocol, Vitalik Buterin, as the leader of the blockchain revolution and bringing stateful programming to blockchains for applications outside of digital money. These assertions are well justified, seeing as he authored the Ethereum whitepaper, and has led the direction of the protocol’s development since its inception. However, many of Ethereum’s core components and widely used technologies are the work of Gavin and Parity. For example, during Gavin’s time with Etherum, he created the Solidity smart contract language that powers all of the dApps running on the network and was responsible for the network’s first functional release in 2014. Parity Technologies are also the lead developers and, until recently, maintainers of the popular Parity Ethereum Client.  The Parity Etherum client is an ultra-efficient alternative to the popular geth node run by many Ethereum developers that powers an estimated 20% of Ethereum nodes and portions of Infura, the open node cluster used by many developers that processes 13 Billion transactions a day.

Needless to say, Gavin & Parity, have been instrumental in shaping the decentralized web and blockchain, thus far. Many of the protocols that followed Ethereum have attempted to build upon or adapt its concepts in some way borrowing from the innovations that these two produced. However, throughout all of the work Gavin & Parity performed for Ethereum, they began to notice that most approaches to blockchain networks were not practical in terms of scalability or extensibility as a result of inefficiently designed consensus architectures. Hence, Polkadot was proposed as a heterogeneous multi-chain framework that would allow many different blockchains, irrespective of consensus mechanism, to be interoperable with one another and overcome the following five shortcomings of conventional crypto networks: scalability, isolatability, developability, governance, & applicability. If you are curious as to how Polkadot views them, check out their whitepaper here. Similar to Cosmos, Polkadot’s heterogeneous multi-chain architecture is hyper-focused on addressing the scalability and isolatability problems, believing that if these two are adequately addressed the subsequent ones will reap tangible benefits and see improvement as well.

Shortly thereafter, Gavin, in conjunction with Robert Hermeir & Peter Czaban of the Web3 foundation, officially founded Polkadot and commenced R&D on the ambitious effort. The Web3 foundation is a Swiss based organization founded with the intent of supporting and nurturing a user-friendly decentralized web where users own their own data and can exchange it without relying on centralized entities. The foundation conducts research on decentralized web technologies and supports different projects building them, Polkadot being the first. In May of 2018 the initial proof-of-concept for Polkadot was released as a testnet and three subsequent iterations that integrated additional features were released in less than a year. Testnets provide an excellent proving ground for networks to work out any technical bugs that could occur at scale before a mainnet launch. 

Starting with Cosmos’s Game of Stakes, the idea of using incentivized testnets to entice developers to truly stress test a network before mainnet launch has become largely canonical as the step preceding the launch of any proof-of-stake network. Polkadot took this a step further and released Kusama, an early,  unaudited release of Polkadot, that serves as the experimental proving ground for the network. Affectionately referred to as ‘Polkadot’s Wild Cousin’, Kusama is Polkadot’s ‘canary’ network, or a highly experimental reflection of what the production version of Polkadot will be like. Kusama allows developers to test governance, staking, and more in an authentic environment with real economic conditions. Thus, developers and those validating on the network can be adequately forewarned of any potential issues that may transpire on Polkadot and correct them before a mainnet deployment. Kusama differs from a traditional testnet in that it is an entirely separate network from Polkadot, with its own token (KSM), and is run by the community. It will exist in perpetuity so long as the community supports it and is not inherently tied to Polkadot aside from inheriting its design and functionality.

So How Do These Heterogeneous Multi-Chain Networks Work?

There are three fundamental components that comprise the architecture of the Polkadot ecosystem: the relay chain, parachians, & bridges. For those of you who have been following along in this series, each of these pieces is largely analogous to the hub, zone, & pegzone concepts described in my Decentralization of Cosmos article. Parachains, or parallelizable chains, are the individual, customized blockchains built on top of Polkadot that gather and process transactions within their own network. All computations performed on the parachain are independent from the rest of the polkadot ecosystem. Thus, parachains can implement data storage and transaction operations in a manner most befitting to the problem they are trying to solve without being tethered to the technical underpinnings of another protocol like its scripting language or virtual machine. Parachains are then connected to the relay chain, i.e Polkadot, which coordinates consensus and relays transactions of any data type between all of the chains on the network. Lastly, bridge chains are a specialized permutation of a parachain that link to protocols with their own consensus like Ethereum or Bitcoin and communicate with them without being secured by the Polkadot relay chain. An image of how these pieces all fit together may be viewed below:

Designing the network in this manner has several key benefits, namely high security and near infinite scalability. Polkadot pools all of the security from the relay chain and the parachains building on top of it, irrespective of consensus mechanism, and then shares that aggregated security across the entire network. The relay chain provides a ground source of truth for the network by handling transactions and arriving at consensus, but any computation performed on the network can be scaled out in parallel across the appropriate parachains. Moreover, parachains can be attached to other parachains to create highly distributed networks for processing transactions. This allows the transaction volume of the network to be scaled out immensely without placing a crippling burden on the relay chain itself and allowing it to maintain the same level of security. Each parachain can maintain its own notion of validity for the transactions it processes, seamlessly disseminate that information to other parachains via the relay chain, and then the network as a whole can arrive at consensus.

However, this is only feasible with participation from the following core network stakeholders: validators, collators, and nominators. Similar to other proof-of-stake networks, validators are the node operators responsible for verifying transactions on the network and producing blocks for the Polkadot blockchain. Equivalently, nominators are those who elect validators on their behalf into the active set by staking with them in exchange for a portion of their block rewards. The new player in this ecosystem is the collator, who is responsible for consolidating the transactions on the respective parachain they monitor into blocks and proposing proofs of those blocks to the validators. This eases the technical burden on validators by allowing them to only have to verify potential blocks from parachains as opposed to processing and verifying thousands of parallel transactions. Hence, the relay chain can arrive at consensus in seconds as opposed to minutes and maintain the security offered by a highly decentralized network. Collators can also act as ‘fisherman’ who are rewarded for identifying parties on the network acting maliciously. An image depicting how all of these stakeholders interact across the different network layers may be viewed below:

It is important to note that I am simplifying significant portions of how Polkadot works at the technical level. The project is highly complex, with a myriad of intricate components at each layer that would take far too long to detail in a single article. For example, Polkadot uses a novel proof-of-stake consensus algorithm known as  GRANDPA (GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Agreement) that separates block production from block finality, allowing blocks to be finalized almost immediately. For more on GRANDPA check out this article, and if you are interested in learning more about the underlying technology of the network, check out the whitepaper here.

Governance on Polkadot

Similar to other proof-of-stake networks, the crux of Polkadot’s governance is hinged on the idea of stake-weighted voting, where all proposed changes require a stake-weighted majority of DOTs (or KSM on Kusama) in order to be agreed upon. However, Polkadot also incorporates a tiered governance structure and unique voting mechanisms in an attempt to decentralize power and governing authority on the network. Anyone holding the protocol native currency, DOTs, has the ability to directly participate in governance on the network. They can do everything from vote on proposals brought forth by the community, nominate validators to participate in the network, prioritize which referenda are voted upon and more. Governance, itself, is completely dissociated from validating on the network aside from the fact that validators can use their DOTs to vote as described above.

Polkadot also has a Council that will range in size from 6-24 members and have prioritized voting rights. Anyone who is a DOT holder is eligible to run for council, and are elected by the community in hopes that they will propose referenda that are sensible and benefit the network as a whole. In addition to preferred voting rights, council members have the ability to veto incoming proposals if they believe they are harmful to the protocol. However, after a cool-down period, the proposal may be resubmitted and, if the council member who vetoed it originally is still present, he or she will be unable to do so again. To protect against council members becoming negligent in their duties or abusing their governing power, members are elected on a rolling basis, with the term of each council member being equal to the size of the council times two weeks. An illustration of this may be viewed below.

To combat the fact the total community participation for voting on any referendum is unlikely, Polkadot implements what is known as Adaptive Quorum Biasing to change the supermajority required for a proposal to pass based on the percentage of voter turnout. Consequently, when voter turnout is low a heavy supermajority of ‘aye’ votes is required for a referendum to pass or a heavy super majority of ‘nay’ votes is required to reject it. Yet, as voter turnout approaches 100% the system adapts and only a simple majority either way is required to account for the greater number of total votes. DOT holders votes are also weighed proportionally based on the amount of DOT they own and the amount of time they choose to lock those tokens for after the referendum has ended. For example, any DOT holder voting on a proposal must lock their DOTs for at least 4 weeks, but they can instead choose to lock it for up to 64 weeks to place a greater weight on their vote. All voting also occurs on-chain, so any approved proposals have a direct and immediate effect on how the network behaves.

So How Decentralized is Polkadot?

As mentioned earlier, Polkadot has yet to launch its mainnet so this discussion will be framed through the context of Kusama. As of the writing of this article, there are over 300 nodes supporting the Kusama network and 160 active validators distributed around the world. Moreover, there is currently a proposal to increase the active set from 160 to 180 validators up for election with significant support from the community, suggesting that the network will become even more decentralized in the near future. The Council has 13 members with a combined backing of over 1 MM KSM and 264 voters. Of the 8.380 MM KSM issued so far, 2.641 MM, or 31.51%,  of it is staked across the active set of validators. Similar to the other proof-of-stake networks we have observed so far, the top 10 Validators control a significant portion of the staked KSM on the network, albeit far less than that of networks like Cosmos and Terra. Of the 2.641 MM KSM staked on the network, only about 18% of it resides within the top 10 validators by amount staked. Especially when considering that governance is completely decoupled from validating on the network, this is all the more impressive. Of the total possible voting power on the network the KSM held by the top 10 validators by stake only amounts to only roughly 5% of the overall voting power.

Given the scope of Polkadot to not only serve as a network of heterogeneous multi-chains, but as a platform for connecting private to public blockchains and create a truly decentralized web, having a sufficiently decentralized network across in all aspects (architecturally, economically, and from a governance perspective) will be hyper-critical to its success. If how decentralization on Kusama has materialized is an adequate proxy, then the future looks exceedingly bright for Polkadot. However, it is difficult to tell how this level of decentralization will carry over from Kusama to Polkadot. Kusama was launched to test out the different technical parameters of Polkadot and simulate what a live environment would be like for those validating on Kusama. Consequently, it has been an exceedingly open community and encouraging of people to participate, which has likely led to the magnitude of decentralization observed on the network. Considering that 50% of genesis rewards from Polkadot have already been distributed via a token presale that occurred over two years ago, it is difficult to say with certainty that this level of decentralization will occur on Polkadot come mainnet launch. While many of those on Kusama have been involved with the project for a long time and intend on participating in Polkadot, the crypto world has evolved tremendously over the last two years. Therefore, there is some inherent possibility that the old money that entered two years ago has very different interests than the newcomers who have become involved since. However, the team behind the project is a force to be reckon with in the crypto world that has worked hard to make Polkadot a reality and the community grows more and more everyday, so I’m optimistic that its launch this year will exhibit decentralization in a manner more aligned with how Kusama has evolved.

That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the article! I know we unpacked quite a bit of information here, but, as I said, Polkadot is one of the most technically advanced protocols making waves right now and I really just scratched its surface. If you’re interested in learning more about Polkadot or Kusama, seeing if its a right fit for your application, or want to get involved in staking, feel free to reach out to us at Consensus Networks! We are actively involved in the community, have run Validators for both Kusama and the current Polkadot testnet (Alexander) for some time, and are gearing up for Polkadot mainnet so we are highly familiar with the protocol. Contact one of our LedgerOps experts here with any questions you may have about the network and we will get back to you as soon as we can. We are excited for the future of Polkadot and the impact it could have on the decentralized web, and eager to help you access the network. Thanks again for reading and tune in next week as I conclude my examination of decentralization with Celo.

We’re about a month into the Great Celo Stakeoff and it is definitely the most dynamic testnet launch I’ve ever been apart of. I’m constantly checking vote totals and running election calculations. On Discord, groups are frequently asking for new validators to associate with and are chatting late into the night. And already, many of the validators (myself included), who had a slow start, are already unable to meet the minimum threshold required to become elected as a validator – but we’re all trying to get back in the game!

I’ll be the first to admit I had only a basic understanding of how the Celo election process worked and didn’t have anything more than a basic uptime strategy coming into the testnet launch – which is probably why we were quickly out of the running. The top validator groups figured it out quickly and were able to take advantage! So, for the rest of us, here’s how the Celo elections work and some strategies that may help you get back into the game if you’re already out or thinking about running a validator on Celo in the future. 

Celo uses an election algorithm called The D’Hondt Method. The Wikipedia page has a decent explanation and I’ll use that to demonstrate how the elections work for Celo. Celo validators currently have two areas to vote: for their group and/or for their validator. For each one to have a chance to be elected, the group and validator must have at least 10,000 (10k) cGold staked. For each validator in a group, the group leader must have an additional 10k locked in the group address (4 associated validators means 40k cGold locked).

From an election standpoint, the amount staked to a validator, as long as it’s at least 10k cGold, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the total amount staked to the group and its validators. When an election occurs, Celo identifies the group with the highest total and elects a validator from that group first. It then starts to apply The D’Hondt Method, which means first dividing the total of the top group by two (for election calculations) then looking for the next highest total. If that first group still had the highest total, even after halving their total stake, they would elect a second validator. If not, the next group with the highest total would be elected (and their effective stake would drop by half as well). This process continues until 100 validators are elected. Each time a group has a new validator elected, their effective stake (for the election only) drops by an increasing factor. So a group with 100k would go to 50k the first time elected; the second time elected, the original total would be divided by 3 to 33k; the third time, divided by 4 to 25k and so on. If that’s confusing, I’ve got an example below:

For our test case, we’ll start off with 4 validator groups, 6 electable validator positions, and 10 total potential validators. Group A has 4 validators, Group B has 3, Group C has 2, and Group D has 1. The total number of network votes is 1,825,000 divided among the groups as seen in the chart above. An election would go as follows:

On the first pass, Group A gets the top spot since they have the highest total. Group B wins a validator in pass 2 because Group A’s effective votes drop by half. Now for pass 3, both Group A and B have been halved, but Group A’s votes are still higher than the rest so they win a second validator and their original votes are now divided by 3 to 233k. In pass 4, it’s Group C’s turn to win a validator. This continues until 6 validators are elected. Some things to note: Group D does not get a validator elected! Even though they have the highest ‘per-capita’ validator (tied with Group B) at 200k. Group A actually has the second lowest per-capita votes (average votes per validator) at 175k but still elects 3 validators. 

Ok so what’s the strategy here?

First, the validator total staked (or locked) doesn’t really matter. A validator with only 10k locked can be elected over validators with higher totals as long as the sum of the group total is higher. What this means is group leaders (the only ones who can lock gold for their group) should only be sending rewards to their group address and locking it. This will allow them to add additional validators and consolidate their votes.

The D’Hondt Method favors the largest groups (as demonstrated above), so groups will probably want to consolidate their group totals by adding additional validators to improve their chance of being elected. What does this mean in the long term? Currently, transactions are not allowed between third parties, so it is up to the group leader alone to save and add validators. But once the network goes to mainnet, what’s to stop people from creating super groups of 10 or more validators? And does it matter? We’re already seeing consolidation, there were over 100 groups when the games started last month and we’re down to less than 50. This will probably be amplified on the mainnet. As these groups consolidate, will that affect the decentralization of the mainnet? And again, will it matter? If validators are free to join groups as they please they can obviously leave a group that is misbehaving. This is similar to Bitcoin mining in the sense that although there are a small number of mining pools, miners can move between pools as desired. The remaining question to be answered then is how much power do the miners actually hold? In 2017, we saw the Bitcoin miners bow to users and SegWit2x failed, will Celo users wield the same authority? Once the mainnet launches, token holders will be introduced to the mix and we will see how they chose to allocate their capital to help ensure decentralization.

So far, so exciting! For those following along, the stakeoff will continue until Feb 19th, with Phase 3 starting Feb 5th. There is some talk of expanding the number of allowed validators beyond 100 to allow those who have already fallen out of the running back in – but that remains to be seen. Additionally, the Celo foundation is performing security audits on those validators that request it for their seal of approval and bonus stake. You can take a look at the current state of the network here as well as the validators participating here.