Validating Wanchain
No surprise to most of you reading this, but we are also going to validate on Wanchain. Our founders have been long-time supporters of Wanchain and one of our founders (Tyrion70) has done a lot for the Wanchain community by developing MyWanWallet, WanMask and Trezor support.
Today I want to take you through some validator basics that most validators already know, but might be good to know if you want to run a validator yourself.
Slashing
Validation on Wanchain currently has no slashing implemented. That means there is no punishment for downtime or double signing. It is to be expected that this functionality will be added in the future once mainnet has run for a while after the start.
Even without slashing, uptime and double signing are things you want to prevent as a Validator. The way Wanchain works with validation is that if you miss on of your selected slots you get no income, and if you double sign the consensus algorithm counts that as being inactive. This means you can’t simply run two validators at the same time to create more uptime. Also you need to protect your validator from ddos attacks.
Sentry and relay architecture
We decided to run our validator the same way we run our Cosmos and Tezos validators with a sentry with relay architecture setup.
Simply put our Validators run an active passive setup on two different physical locations. Both our locations have two separate Wan networks as well as an LTE(4G) backup. The validator has a connection to our sentry servers and three so-called relay servers that each use one of the three internet connections (Wan1/Wan2/LTE). The relay servers in turn connect to the sentry servers located in different cloud providers. The sentry servers are “normal” Wanchain nodes connected to the rest of the network. The number and location of Sentry servers can be changed depending on stability, security or other needs. This setup gives us high availability on our networking as well as flexibility in upgrading our servers and services.
Maintenance
Wanchain has a small maintenance window every day and on the days that you are not selected for work. If this is not enough we can switch work from our primary to our secondary validator although we like to prevent that because double signing will cause you to miss work currently (even if there is no slashing).
Economics
Economics for Wanchain are similar to Tezos and Cosmos. There is a fixed amount of rewards every year that is divided over staked coins. The expected rewards are currently around 11%. There is also a ratio that determines how much coins you can have delegated to your validator. That 1:10 ratio means that you can get 10 WAN delegated to you for every 1 WAN you have staked.
The smallest possible node needs 50k WAN which means a maximum of 500k WAN delegated. With a 10% fee that 500k WAN will get you 11% * 10% * 500k rewards = 5500 WAN. At current prices that’s around 1300$ per year in rewards. Considering the cost of a validator node, running one only makes sense if you have a lot of WAN yourself or if you manage to run a big node. Luckily we have and intend to do both. At the start of validation we will have roughly half a million WAN at our disposal for staking. That means we can validate up to 5 million WAN!
We hope you trust your WAN to our node and are looking forward to the future of Wanchain!
Some excellent reads
https://forum.cosmos.network/t/sentry-node-architecture-overview/454
https://medium.com/wanchain-foundation/wanchain-proof-of-stake-consensus-technical-deep-dive-pt-1-84d14a2523a2
