Cosmos Hub Validators Rich List

I have analyzed the monthly revenue of each of the top 100 Cosmos hub validators with the current staking ratio, effective inflation, atom price and commission. I then also organized the results using the 4 validator categories from my previous article. These are the results:

First analysis:

Poor validators -In red

Validators from 76–100 I consider they are not getting enough monthly revenue to even cover running costs + salaries (unless they are getting close to 100% commission because most of the delegation are their own atoms). In also depends in which country the validator is based, because cost of living in Switzerland/San Francisco is very different from Bulgaria/Vietnam for example.

0% fee validators -In red

These validators are also not getting enough to cover running costs except maybe some that are trying to get some donations (but so far not enough) or running servers for free in some university. Some atom whales may be happy to run validator at 0% because they are earning staking rewards with no commission and get more proposer bonus in case of large voting power.

Yellow/Green validators

These validators have enough revenue to cover monthly costs and some are in the “green category” because they have higher commission.

Update: it seems that validators in the yellow category are actually also running at a loss because costs are infrastructure + salaries, this is a comment from a “yellow category” validator:

“When you consider if a validator is covering cost or not, How much do you think it is a mean 8h/day salary for an operator?

At a first glance, numbers dont match in my case… Unless you are considering I work for free… and the rest of my team also… I mean, we are far from covering cost. So maybe yellow is very optimistic colour.”

Rich validators -Purple

In this category are validators from 1–18 (except those with 0% commission), and also 2nd only to certus one (position 71).

Important: validators from category one of my previous article (“Almost all delegation (whale or small) from just one/two addresses”) are excluded because they are just getting staking rewards for their atoms, not revenue, unless the delegation comes from a whale not their own atoms (example Jack Zampolin).

2nd analysis using categories from my previous article:

Category 1: “Almost all delegation (whale or small) from just one/two addresses”

Self bonded so no validator revenue, just staking rewards except Jack Zampolin who has revenues of around $21,000/month and he is a tendermint employee.

Category 2: “Good distributed delegation but with 0% commission”

No validator revenue, except some small donations.

Category 3: “Almost all delegation from the Interchain Foundation and/or All in Bits Inc private corporation”

Purple category: 2nd only to certus one with monthly revenues of $10,000, all delegation from ICF.

Green category with over $5,000 monthly revenue: Castlenode (AiB delegation, tendermint employee)), Umbrella after increasing fee (tendermint employee, family of founder), mythos (AiB and ICF delegation, kalpatech (AiB/ICF delegation).

Category 4: “Good distributed delegation and sustainable commission”

Some in this category have large self bond but it is hard to estimate it (atoms from different addresses, etc.) so only the top ones are included with relatively low self-bond known compared to total atoms staked.

Purple: Certus one with $54,000/month (only behind Ion/Polychain “revenues” but as mention it is staking rewards because of their self bond, not really validator revenue, so Certus one has the highest validator revenue), Chorus one $47,200/month, iqlusion/zaki tendermint employee $27,500/month.

Conclusion

Lucky ones: 2nd only to certus one with revenue of over $10,000/month all from ICF (more monthly revenue than all 75–100 validators put together), Jack zampolin with revenue of over $21,000/month from one whale and AiB, Zaki with revenues of $27,500/month from AiB and 2 whales (other 2 whales seems self bond)

Most successful: Certus one with low self bond and monthly revenues of $54,000 and Chorus one with revenues of $47,200/month.

Excel analysis:

As always: if you see any errors or missing info or if you have feedback please comment below or contact me, thanks.