Unofficial Recap on “Game of Chains”
Cosmostation validator had participated in “Game of Chains” since phase 1 to the end. Here’s a short & informal recap of Cosmostation’s journey.
# Game of Chains Review as a Validator
The design of GoC that strongly encourages validators to actively participate in governance is what makes ICS strong and lively. It has a great potential to make Cosmos governance the most active governance system in the web3 world.
Game of Chains had 3 phases over a period of one month. As the phases progressed, there were more and more complicated and attention-requiring tasks being given to the participating validators. The validators were encouraged to actively participate in the Interchain Security network governance in order to get points. In other words, validators can lose points for not paying attention to current events on the governance community space.
Phase 1 was a simple onboarding period set to get validators used to running provider and consumer chain nodes. In phase 2, validators had to do more than simply submitting accepting consumer chains to on-chain. Each validator participating in GoC had to audit metadata(genesis hash value, chain client program, spawn time, and etc) on its own. In phase 3, validators had to make a lot of proposals and discussions on Discord in order to onboard new consumer chains to the provider chain, because onboarding new consumer chain requires certain amount of voting power from other validators.
So the main difference between GoC and other testnets was that GoC requires all the validators to actively participate in on-chain governance discussions on Discord because missing consumer chain onboarding governance could result in slashing.
Such difference in the operation method will definitely increase validators’ active participation in governance, but it can be an overwhelming burden on some validators shoulders at some point.
For example, in phase 3, there were more than 40 proposals lying around Discord as each validator was trying to onboard multiple consumer chains at the same time. There were many chains halting in a few hours. The validators had to keep on running and stopping new consumer chain simultaneously.
In addition, this type of network operation method can make validators feel like the node operation cost grows exponentially. Running a new consumer chain can be much more difficult than running an ordinary Cosmos chain. Basically, a mismanagement of any consumer chain can result in problems on all the other connected chains. In terms of key management, it can cause a security concern because provider chain’s key is deployed on all the other instances. (One key is continuously deployed on and deleted from many instances.)
Later when ICS goes live on mainnet, the exponential burden added on by onboarding a consumer chain can be a catalyst to make validators actively participate in governance to filter out incompetent chains that are unlikely to add serious values to ICS ecosystem. Historically, CEX validators have been inactive in governance, but they might be forced to keep up with the governance in order to save themselves from slashing when ICS kicks in.
GoC took place in a relatively controlled environment, so following manuals was enough to get the node running. However, ICS has much more possible point of failure compared to the normal network environment. So there should be many tests and debugging before it goes mainnet. For example, how are we going to deal with a situation where a consumer chain suddenly halts after slashing because of some arbitrary cause? In terms of product supports, there should be additional research about visualization of node validation process through IBC.
There’s no such thing as panacea. ICS will shape the Cosmos governance into a lively agora. In doing so, it might scare off some validators who just want to do the bare minimum to earn staking rewards. ICS is scheduled to launch in Q1 of 2023. Until then, Cosmostation will fully follow up and support ICS from testnet stages. Cosmostation has been and always will be the most active Cosmos validator out there.
About Cosmostation
Cosmostation has been a web3 infrastructure team contributing to more than 50 protocols since 2018. Our suite of products include Mintscan block explorer, Cosmostation non-custodial crypto wallet, and node validator service. At Cosmostation, we bootstrap networks and onboard end-users.
Links
Mintscan | Extension | Android | iOS | Web Wallet | Spacestation Bridge
