Recently, the Meter community released an exciting new proposal that sparked intense discussions among community members. The proposal is summarized as follows:

MIP 15: Decentralized Liquid Staking Validator Application

Proposal Introduction:

Dear community members,
This proposal aims to decentralize liquid staking on the Meter network by expanding the pool of validators supporting liquid staking applications. Currently, only Meter Foundation nodes support liquid staking applications. Expanding this pool will significantly enhance the security, performance, and decentralization of the network.

Background

Liquid staking pools face two major challenges:

1. Providing liquid staking tokens: Ensuring the utility and deep liquidity of the staking token (stMTRG).
2. Maintaining a high-quality validator pool: Maximizing user annual percentage rate (APR) while minimizing the risk of on-chain misbehavior or poor performance.

Decentralized liquid staking operators can reduce the risk for stakers and mitigate potential negative impacts on integrated DeFi protocols and the underlying network, while ensuring high throughput and minimizing the risk of downtime or censorship. This requires validators to operate well under all conditions and possess censorship resistance.

Proposal Details

The overall details of the proposal are as follows:

1. Whitelist:
   a. Number of validators: 10
   b. Priority: 50% professional service providers, 50% community members (community members who have made positive contributions to the Meter ecosystem will be prioritized)
2. Process:
   a. Vote distribution: All validators share equally
3. Minimum staking amount:
   a. 10,000 MTRG
4. Configuration:
   a. Minimum hardware requirements: 4-core CPU, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe storage
   b. Restrictions: Avoid using unstable VPS providers, such as Contabo
5. Communication:
   a. Direct communication with the team for upgrades and rescue within 24 hours to quickly restore normal node operation in case of issues.
6. Expulsion policy:
   a. If a node is not rescued within 24 hours, it will be automatically expelled.

Our goal is to minimize the risks associated with node operator failures, misconfigurations, and network connectivity issues by creating a diverse and robust validator pool with the following characteristics:

• Legal and physical independence of node operators
• Jurisdictional distribution of operators
• Geographical distribution of validators
• Diverse infrastructure
• Avoiding over-reliance on specific cloud service providers and data centers
• Following best practices to ensure the security of execution layer and consensus layer nodes, as well as validator clients
• Strong key management and security practices

Further Expansion of the Validator Application Pool

Before further expanding the validator application pool, we will review the response and operational efficiency of the initial whitelist for at least 2 months.

Potential Returns

The potential returns for the 10 validators in the initial whitelist are:

APR will vary based on the number of validators and the amount of MTRG participating in liquid staking.

Node operating costs are based on estimates from Netcup server 2.

Application Process

Interested users and entities are welcome to fill out the Google form - Meter Liquid Staking Validator Application.

The application includes:

• Node operator: individual or entity
• Previous node operating experience: yes/no
• Experience details:
• Node operating infrastructure: local deployment or cloud VPS
• If cloud VPS, please specify the provider
• Contact information

Applications will be evaluated by the Meter Foundation, which will finalize the professional service providers for node operation. If the number of community applications exceeds the available whitelist slots, community members who have made positive contributions to the ecosystem will be prioritized.

Benefits to the Meter Ecosystem

A more diverse and secure node operating group will benefit by distributing stakers' deposited assets across more independent entities. This will significantly reduce the risk of network downtime and enhance the resilience of the Meter network.

Governance and Voting Process

Forum Discussion Period

From May 31, 2024, 00:00 UTC to June 6, 2024, 00:00 UTC, lasting 7 days.

Governance Proposal Voting Period

From June 7, 2024, 00:00 UTC to June 9, 2024, 00:00 UTC, lasting 2 days.

Users can vote using MTRG, staked MTRG, stMTRG, and wstMTRG, as well as MTRG/wstMTRG and MTRG-wstMTRG liquidity provided in Sumer and Meridian. The proposal will pass if it receives a majority of votes. There is no quorum requirement.

Proposal discussion link: https://forum.meter.io/t/mip-15-decentralized-liquid-staking-validator-registry/61

Additionally, more discussions are published on community discussion threads and social platforms like Telegram. We welcome everyone to join our community discussions and share any opinions or suggestions! Our voting will open after the governance proposal is released, and we encourage members of the Chinese community to vote and support the growth of the Meter network!

About Meter . io

Meter is a high-performance infrastructure that allows smart contracts to interact across different blockchains. The Meter mainnet uses HotStuff consensus and is secured by 327 validator nodes from the community (expandable to thousands of nodes). Meter is also one of the most decentralized and high-performance Ethereum sidechains.

Meter Ecosystem

• MeterScan: https://scan.meter.io/
• VoltSwap: https://swap.meter.io/#/swap
• MeterPassport: https://passport.meter.io/transfer
• Sumer Money: https://app.sumer.money/

Meter Official Website and Community

• Official website: https://www.meter.io
• Telegram: https://t.me/Meter_IO
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Meter_IO