Cudos Labs: Cudos Validators, Block Earnings, Staking & Hardware Specs

This is part two of a three-part technical breakdown on Cudos Validators. If you have not read part one yet, please read that here

Block Validator Earnings

Validators are the ones who include new blocks in the Cudos PoS blockchain, and as such, they earn the transaction fees. After the mainnet is launched and the network gains traction, staking rewards will become a secondary source of revenue, and network fees will become the main one.

We are still finalising the exact economics with our ongoing research and development efforts, running simulations and producing a series of PoCs to create a solid network. What we can already illustrate though are some of the staking reward amounts that would be earned in a plausible scenario. Following the same example as above for staking distribution, and assuming there are 20 validators in the network, all with the same amount of delegated stake, on average the earnings in tokens would be:

• 180k+ CUDOS on the first month
• 155k+ CUDOS on the second month
• 135k+ CUDOS on the third month

We will be sharing specific numbers on our network soon, once we have verified and triple checked all modelling. After a period, network fees are expected to dominate over staking rewards, which we have outlined above.

Delegated Staking

As detailed above, both in the Ethereum staking before the Cudos Network is launched and in the layer 2 itself, the Cudos network will support delegated staking through the validators. The validators earn a fee on the rewards of the users who delegated the stake through them. This fee is freely choosable by each validator, however, it will always need to be above a minimum predefined value, which is set for security reasons. This minimum will be set to 2% to start with.

Rather than staking all tokens in a validator hosted by the project, Cudos will stake some tokens delegating them to other validators in the network, to further enhance the revenue streams for these validators. We will share more details on this shortly, but it is expected that the project will delegate an amount of the same order of magnitude to the minimum stake for a validator.

Minimum Hardware Specs

Validators keep the Cudos Network secure and ensure high availability for a wide variety of retail and enterprise blockchain use cases uploaded onto the network to be monetised rapidly. They join with special full-nodes that participate in the consensus process (implemented in the Tendermint Core protocol) in order to add new blocks to the Cudos Network blockchain. Cudos Network Validators join by meeting the network’s minimum hardware specification in order to successfully interact with other stakeholders. Once this requirement is met, validators can then proceed to set up a full node in order to stake or be staked to, as part of the network’s block processing mechanism. As the network evolves in its goal to offer ever higher compute performance, the Cudos Network Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) will vote to adjust these in order to achieve the network’s core objectives.

The following are the minimum hardware requirements Validators will need to run in order to successfully join and operate on the Cudos Network for the Testnet and Mainnet (Version 1) stage:

• Intel Xeon (‘Skylake-SP’ or newer) processor with SGX support ‑or‑ AMD Epyc (‘Naples’ or newer) processor with SEV support — Minimum model ≥8 cores at ≥2.0 GHz required (≥16 cores preferred)
• 1Gb/s internet connection (≥2.5Gb/s preferred)
• 32GiB ECC system memory (≥64GiB preferred)
• >2TB NVMe SSD — RAID1 or better resilience required (RAID 1+0 performance preferred)
• Publicly accessible IPv4 address (additionally IPv6 recommended)
• Anti-DDoS protection strongly recommended
• ‘Four‑nines’ availability target or better
• Linux Debian 10

As the network evolves and the Cudos community receives more feedback on the above, we expect these figures to be updated and communicated to network stakeholders on an ongoing basis.

This is Part 2 of a three-part overview on Cudos Validators, Rewards, Delegated staking, Hardware Specs and Setup, find part 3 here!