Foundation Delegation Program: H2 2023

This article is a summary of the upcoming Foundation Delegation program administered by the Quicksilver Foundation. Applications for the Program will be open from May 22 — June 4, 2023. The link for applications will be posted in Quicksilver’s Discord & Telegram.

Introduction to the Foundation Delegation Program

The Quicksilver Foundation believes that the long term success of the Quicksilver chain goes hand-in-hand with fostering a vibrant and resilient validator ecosystem.

Validators are the backbone of the Proof-of-Stake environment and play a critical role in ensuring the performance and security of the network.

The key objective of the Foundation Delegation Program is to delegate the Foundation tokens to active validators who make significant contributions to support the Quicksilver chain and ecosystem.

We last opened applications in mid-2022. The distributions of the QCK tokens for the Foundation Delegations occurred during the launch of Mainnet in December 2022. It is now is time to reopen the program for a second round.

Each iteration of the Foundation Delegation Program is considered independently of previous rounds. Validators who received tokens in the past must apply in this round to maintain their delegations. Grantees from previous rounds may receive more or less tokens than before based on scoring. New validators and validators who did not receive Foundation Delegations in the previous round are encouraged to apply.

Criteria

The following are criteria that will be used to evaluate validator applicants:

• Performance: uptime, slashing events, running the latest version of Quicksilver, etc.
• Decentralization: avoiding concentration in data center providers and locations
• Operations & Security: configuration and architecture, server specs, monitoring tools, key management, security setup, hosting providers, etc.
• Community contributions: contributions made to growing the Quicksilver ecosystem, such as building, maintaining, or adminstering IBC relayers, public RPC nodes, testnet nodes, dashboards, explorers, developer resources, and community tools; supporting other validators; creating educational content, actively contributing to the community, etc.
• Governance record on the Quicksilver chain: participation in past governance votes on Quicksilver

Pre-Requisites & Ongoing Requirements

The following are must-have requirements in order to receive and keep a Foundation Delegation. Failing to maintain any of these requirements may result in the removal of a Foundation Delegation.

Pre-Requisites & Ongoing Requirements for Eligible Validators:

• Ongoing participation in the active Quicksilver Testnet.
• Maintaining commissions at or below 15%.
• Cloaking of RPC endpoints (as in, RPC endpoints are not exposed to the public).
• Validator’s security address on-chain is set.
• After the distribution of Foundation Delegations, a validator becoming jailed will result in the removal of Foundation Delegations. A validator who received a Foundation Delegation and had it removed due to being jailed will be ineligible for the next round of Foundation Delegations.

In the spirit of decentralization, the top 5 validators (thanks to self bonded assets or delegated assets besides Foundation Delegations) will not be eligible for Foundation Delegations.

Application Process

• Applications will be live from May 22nd — June 4th, 2023.
• Applications will be taken via Google Form, announced on the Quicksilver Discord & Quicksilver Telegram.
• Fill out the entire Google Form to be eligible.
• The Quicksilver Foundation will review all applications based on the criteria.
• Recipients of Foundation Delegations will be announced to the community.

Timeline

• May 22nd, 8 AM UTC: Application start
• June 4th, 8 AM UTC: Application end
• End of June / early July: Foundation Delegation distribution

Disclaimers

• Foundation Delegation decisions are final and cannot be negotiated.
• No applications submitted outside the application period will be taken into consideration for any reason.
• Foundation Delegation distributions are at the discretion of the Quicksilver Foundation. Validators who are found to be exhibiting bad behavior, including unsafe business practices, unsafe key management, governance manipulation, or behave in a way that is detrimental to the protocol and/or ecosystem, may have their Foundation Delegations removed. Such validators may also be barred from future Foundation Delegation applications.

Good luck on your applications.

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