The Second cohort of the Decentralized Nodes is live!
We are pleased to announce the launch of the second cohort of the Decentralized Nodes Program!
The response from both within and beyond the Polkadot community has again been outstanding. We received an impressive total of 188 applications, for 256 Polkadot nodes and 530 Kusama nodes (a 6% and 17% increase respectively compared to Cohort 1). After a thorough selection process, we selected 104 Polkadot nodes from 63 operators and 210 Kusama nodes from 69 operators. These nominations became effective on March 17, 2025, and the term for this second cohort will run until July 17, 2025.
The main goal of this cohort was to increase the diversification of the participating nodes and, by extension, the active sets. Many blockchain networks suffer from having validators operating in the same regions and on the same hosting providers. This creates single points of failure and reduces their resiliency. Polkadot and Kusama are no exception, but with this new direction of the Decentralized Nodes program we aim to improve that situation.
For this reason we gave preference to operators who were willing to host their nodes in less popular locations and less saturated operators, and furthermore, to those who wanted to self host their nodes. Additionally, we sought to decrease the dominance of AMD CPUs used for nodes by incentivising the use of Intel processors.
Besides those, we focused on similar things as in the first cohort: the nodes’ specs and performance, the technical expertise of the operators, and their ecosystem affinity, and we provided applicants with detailed selection criteria. We also evaluated the performance of nodes and operators that participated in Cohort 1, while giving newcomers a bonus to incentivise new people to join the program. Finally, we also introduced a change compared to Cohort 1: operators could apply with up to 2 Polkadot nodes and 5 Kusama nodes and they would be evaluated as a group for each network.
Most of the applications were of the highest quality, which made the evaluation process very difficult, but allowed us to have a selection of excellent nodes and operators. And the goal of diversification was achieved to a great degree. The following graphs speak for themselves.
Polkadot Cohort 1 distribution
Polkadot Cohort 2 distribution
Kusama Cohort 1 distribution
Kusama Cohort 2 distribution
Europe and North America dominated during the first cohort, but in the second we saw an increase in nodes being hosted in APAC, which became the dominant region in Polkadot, LATAM, and Africa. We also saw an increase in provider diversification, even though the preference to some providers (different from Cohort 1) could not be avoided. As for CPU diversification, on Polkadot AMD’s dominance decreased from 90% in Cohort 1 to 64% in Cohort 2! On Kusama the results were less astonishing, with a small decrease from 76% to 70%.
The second cohort also marked a significant milestone, a true first for Polkadot. The program now nominates the first alternative, production-ready host implementation! That is Kagome, the C++ implementation developed by Quadrivium and funded for the last 2 years by the Polkadot treasury. This marks a new, important era where the Parity host is not the only one validators can run. The node is run by the Quadrivium team, but in the next cohorts we aim to push this further and have even more operators running Kagome on their nodes.
Finally, one other difference from Cohort 1 is that the program no longer aims to make nodes independent of its nominations. This was a noble goal, but in practice we saw that independence wasn’t that easy to determine or apply and it caused stress to participants that feared losing the DN nomination could mean dropping out of the active set.
So, instead, the selected nodes will be nominated continuously for four months regardless of their community nominations, and can potentially be part of subsequent cohorts, if they perform well.
The complete list of selected validators is available on the Decentralized Nodes website.
