Enhancing Governance and Adding 2 More BPs, aelf’s BP Number Reaches 19

Backed by the innovative AEDPoS consensus mechanism, aelf has a governance design that assigns voting power to aelf’s stakeholders. The three main roles: block producers (BPs), candidate nodes, and voters collaboratively safeguard the network and keep it running in a distributed manner. As stipulated in aelf’s contracts, the total number of BPs in aelf network is capped at 2N+1 where N starts from 8 in 2022 and increases by 1 each year.

In early 2022, aelf completed its node election and welcomed its first 17 BPs. Now that 1 year has passed since then, we are happy to announce that 2 more seats have been released. Currently, there are a total of 19 BPs running on aelf network and you can check them out on aelf explorer.

Rewards

Everyone interested in aelf’s governance is welcome to join us. As mentioned above, you can choose among the three roles: BP, candidate node, and voter, and the rewards for these roles differ, as explained below.

All the rewards are kept in a pool and will be distributed in accordance with the diagram. Currently, around 150,000 ELF tokens are released as rewards every 7 days (a term).

• All the BPs can share 20% of the pool, provided that there are no newly-elected BPs in the term. When there are new BPs in this term, 5% will be deducted to reward the new nodes, and another 5% is deducted to reward voters. This is to incentivize voters to vote for different nodes so that the network can be highly decentralized. Apart from these, the BPs also share 5% of the pool with all the candidate nodes;
• Candidate nodes can share 5% of the pool (BPs are included here);
• Voters share 75% of the pool when there are no newly-elected BPs. And when new BPs appear, voters can receive an extra 5% as incentives.

Requirements

The requirements for BPs, candidate nodes, and voters also differ. BPs and candidate nodes need to run nodes and keep the normal functioning of aelf blockchain, while voters use their ELF tokens to vote for these nodes and decide who can become BPs or candidate nodes.

BPs/ candidate nodes

BPs need to maintain the operation and integrity of the network and they have the responsibility for decision-making of aelf. The major tasks include:

• Collect and validate transactions, pack them into blocks, and broadcast data to other nodes;
• Construct and maintain nodes on SideChains to keep SideChains working properly;
• Participate in the adjustment of both network parameters and network resource fees;
• Vote on important issues through the means of proposals, including aelf’s infrastructure upgrades, contract upgrades, contract deployment, etc.

If you want to work as a BP, the following conditions must be met:

1. Be able to run aelf’s nodes on servers that satisfy the basic requirements below.

• Minimum Configuration: c5.xlarge instance with 4 vCPU, 8GiB RAM, 1TB hard drive, and 5 Mbps bandwidth
• Recommended Configuration: c5.2xlarge instance with 8 vCPU, 16GiB RAM, 1TB hard drive, and 100 Mbps bandwidth

Once the servers are prepared, you can follow the instructions in the developer documentation to deploy your nodes.

Important Notice: BPs need to run individual nodes for both MainChain AELF and all the SideChains.

2. Stake at least 100,000 ELF.

3. Rank among the top 2N+1 of all participating nodes.

On the occasion that you have set up a node and completed the staking yet failed to be elected as a BP, you can still work as a candidate node, provided that you rank among the top 5*(2N+1).

Responsibilities of candidate nodes include verifying blocks, substituting BPs, and maintaining the stability of the entire aelf ecosystem.

To join aelf as a BP or candidate node, you can visit here and click the [Become a candidate node] button to start.

Voters

Voters are tasked with staking their ELF tokens on candidate nodes they like and deciding on the BPs. There is no requirement for the number of tokens you must stake, except when you vote via the explorer, the figure should be no less than 1 then.

Please read our tutorial for voting if you are interested.

Join us on TG or Discord to stay tuned and interact with aelf communities:

Telegram: https://t.me/aelfblockchain

Discord: https://discord.gg/bgysa9xjvD