Validators approved to participate in the RENEC Foundation Delegation Program are eligible to receive a “baseline” delegation of 150,000 RENEC from the RENEC Foundation. 

In order to receive this delegation, each eligible validator must meet specific criteria, which are polled regularly. If any of the criteria are no longer met, the delegation will be removed until the validator meets all the criteria, at which point the delegation will be re-applied.

As changes to stake delegations require a transition period on RENEC, there is often a delay between a validator becoming eligible for a certain level of delegation from the Foundation and those stake tokens becoming active. This delay is often 1-2 epochs or up to 4 days.

The “bonus” delegation amount will be informed to the validator case by case. As more validators join the program and earn delegations, the size of the bonus per validator will decrease. If a number of validators leave the program or fail to earn a delegation from the Foundation, any tokens previously delegated to them will be redistributed among existing validators who continue to qualify for bonus delegations.

Vote credits are earned when a validator submits a consensus vote on a block that becomes finalized by the network. Each vote on a finalized block earns one vote credit. Voting more frequently and on the correct fork, a validator earns more credits. Voting on an incorrect fork or failure to submit votes on time or at all results in fewer vote credits. The RENEC reward issued to a validator and their stakes is proportional to the number of credits earned over an epoch.

In order to receive or maintain a stake delegation from the RENEC Foundation, a validator must earn no less than 35% fewer vote credits than the cluster average for a given epoch. For example, if the cluster average for the last epoch was 100,000 vote credits, a validator must have earned at least 65,000 credits to meet this criterion. 

A validator’s commission, or fee, is the percentage of total rewards earned by an individual validator in an epoch that is deposited into the validator’s vote account. The remainder of the reward is distributed to the stake accounts that have been delegated to that validator’s vote account.

A validator must maintain a commission of 15% or less to meet this criterion. One commission rate must keep for at least three epochs, and the next 3-epoch commission rate should be announced publicly on the validator’s information page 1 epoch beforehand of the change.

A validator must have less than 3,000,000 RENEC in total stake to be eligible for a delegation from the Foundation.

The release version of the RENEC-validator code that an individual node is running. Validators are expected to consistently update their nodes to the latest stable software release in a timely manner. The minimum software version is updated 48 hours after the supermajority of the network has adopted that exact version. 

Skip rate is the percent of leader slots in which a validator fails to produce a block which is eventually confirmed by the network. Skip rate and block production are two numbers often used to refer to the same metric. Block production is the percent of scheduled slots in which the validator produces a confirmed block, whereas the skip rate is 1 - block production.

A validator must have a skip rate that does not exceed 30 percentage points plus the network average skip rate. For example, if the network average skip rate was 20%, a validator must have a skip rate of 50% or less to meet this criterion.

Whether or not a validator is continually submitting metrics about their validator to the correct cluster(s).Validators are expected to report metrics about their validator nodes in 8 of the last 10 epochs on MB clusters in order to receive Baseline stake. 

To meet the reporting requirements, validators must continually report metrics throughout the epoch. Metric reporting will be sampled multiple times an epoch. Validators on MB would need to report metrics on MB for 8 out of the last 10 epochs (in addition to existing Baseline criteria) in order to receive Baseline stake.

Starting your node means getting your server on MB running, ensuring it can be found in gossip, and starting to meet the rest of the requirements necessary to receive Baseline stake from the Foundation.

To ensure node operators are responsive and monitoring their Delegation Program participation closely, validators will receive a 10-epoch window to start their MB node from their onboarding date. If they do not start their node within 10 epochs, they will be rejected from the program.

To ensure node operators maintain good uptime, are responsive, and monitor their servers closely, validators are expected to respond to critical network events (e.g., restarts) within 24 hours.

Recommendation on cloud computing specifications

To ensure the validator node runs stable, we need minimum specs with a CPU of at least 12 cores/24 threads, 2.8 GHz, 128 GB RAM, and 500 GB SSD storage. If you’re familiar with AWS, you can use x2gd.2xlarge instance with ARM chipset or r5a.4xlarge with Intel chipset.