Fetch.ai Foundation Delegations Overview

In late November 2022, the Fetch.ai Foundation announced and released its latest round from the Foundation Delegation program. Since then, we have provided information across our Discord server and Twitter account regarding how delegations were decided upon. In this post, we will dive deeper into the process behind the latest round of delegations.

The purpose of the change:

As many of you may have noticed from our Twitter post, round 3 of the Foundation Delegations used a new category system consisting of two categories:

• Basic Delegations
• Advanced Delegations

Ultimately, our aim with Foundation Delegations is to promote community validators who are actively participating in the ecosystem. ‘Basic Delegations’ are an entry-level tier designed to promote validators who we feel are bringing excellent value to the ecosystem and ‘Advanced Delegations’ are for validators who actively participate in the ecosystem and who go above and beyond other validators. We continuously evaluate our network validators, and these metrics will feed into the subsequent delegation rounds.

How do we select which tier a validator belongs in?

We do not publish our exact set of criteria for selecting validator delegations to avoid the possibility of gaming the system. However, we do want to give the community some examples of traits that we see as beneficial to the ecosystem.

A core difference between ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’ delegations is in the scope that a validator has taken on.

Basic delegations are for those who:

- Aren’t already top voting power validators — we want to promote decentralizing the network and recognize smaller players in the ecosystem.

- Have actively implemented FIP proposals i.e. a minimum of 5% commission — it is crucial that we have a healthy ecosystem and set of governance tools.

- Voted on more than 2/3rds of the governance proposals they have been on the chain for — we need an ecosystem that is aware and involved with on-chain decisions.

- Have maintained consistent uptime and weren’t jailed for more than 48 hours — the network’s health relies on consistency provided by validators.

- Are active and available in our Discord server or easily contactable elsewhere — we want validators that are reachable and make community outreach a priority

Advanced delegations are for those who contribute:

- Relayer services — We want to ensure valuable IBC connections are being contributed to allow the Fetch.ai ecosystem to grow.

- Applications — Creating applications is crucial for our community expansion and for network utility.

- An active social media profile that actively discusses Fetch.ai — Validators who show up actively in the community will end up helping increase the overall understanding of Fetch.ai and its products.

- Utilization of the Agents/AEAs — This shows dedication to exactly what Fetch.ai is striving to build and provides the team with extremely useful feedback.

- Contributions to the Fetch.ai GitHub — As an open-source project, it is crucial to have community developers contribute and have their mark on the project’s future.

- Play an active role in Governance (Voting, creating FIPs, communicating on GitHub/Discord discussions.) — To have healthy governance, we need involved validators who truly care about the direction of conversations and provide their input to help the community best know their interests are being considered.

- Tools, dashboards, etc. — More tools and dashboards means easier accessibility to everyone and contribute to further ecosystem growth.

The analysis process

Before every round, we collect and review data on all of the validators on the network. This includes empirical data such as on-chain data and metrics, as well as collecting data directly by interviewing the validator community.

Once all the data is collected, we compare results across all the validators and apply our selection criteria in order to place each validator into our tiering system. Then we evaluate each validator against others in the same tier to assign the final delegation amounts.

Know Your Validator 2023

As of Q1 of 2023, Fetch.ai has rebooted the Know Your Validator (KYV) program. This time we are dedicating a separate blog post to each of our validators. These are planned to be shared with the community on Fridays throughout 2023. We hope this provides a useful touchpoint with the Fetch community that all our validators will take advantage of, regardless of size or scope. It is a chance for our community to get to know validator contributions directly from the source. If you are a validator interested in this program and we haven’t yet reached out to you on Discord, Telegram or via email, please contact an admin on our discord and we will be happy to send the questions over.