Hey Jack,
We are thrilled that our forum proposal discussion received so much interest. That’s awesome.
Most of this proposal looks great, but I do have a few concerns…
- Why is it that rewards have to be automatically distributed? Reasons given “Rejected due to spam concerns — adding fees for manual claims would be impractical given the small amounts involved, yet feeless claiming could be exploited.” Every other Cosmos chain I use has no reward claim minimum and a fee. Average Joe waits to claim until it makes financial sense. I don’t think I’ve seen an attack on any chain through reward claiming, so I really don’t understand this argument. If delegators are fee-sensitive, they wait to claim until they’ve accumulated more.
Additionally, when validators use the REStake docker for automated compounding of delegator rewards, we validators pay the fees.
- “the 32 IP threshold for staking amounts and 0.1 IP threshold for staking-related operations still provides meaningful barrier against spam, and economic costs remain prohibitive for attackers.”
I’m not sure I understand how attacks can be made by staking. Attackers flood the network by staking less than one IP token from a million addresses? Not that it can’t happen, but I don’t believe I’ve seen such a thing on any other Cosmos chain.
If the minimum to add to one’s initial stake is 32 IP, this still makes it tough for the little fish delegator. They have to potentially wait a long time before they can compound rewards, especially since the trend for long-term staking reward APY for all chains as they mature is lower.
We understand the accelerated state-growth and devnet benchmarking comments though, so perhaps down the road the staking minimum could again be reduced, from 32 IP down to 1 IP.
A happy medium to discuss might be an initial stake minimum (say 32 IP so state growth can be somewhat controlled) but no minimum when adding to one’s initial stake. That seems like it would protect the network from attacks and still allow Average Joe to compound his rewards, either manually or by using a validator that has set up a REStake docker. In turn, it also allows validators to grow quicker.
Thanks for all the hard work the team has put in on this.