Validator Pageant

Question 164: Select one validator outside the top 10 and make a case for why newcomers to Terra should delegate to that validator. Define any metric of your choosing that marks a good validator (airdrops, voting, community benefits, uptime); assess the average for the full set of ~130 validators (i.e. if you pick airdrops, assess how many of them offer an airdrop); and assess how your chosen validator performs based on that metric.

Introduction

Terra's validators run full nodes, participate in consensus by broadcasting votes, commit new blocks to the blockchain, and participate in governance of the blockchain. Validators are able to cast votes on behalf of their delegators. A validator’s voting power is weighted according to their total stake.

Only the top 130 validators are considered active or bonded validators. If a validator’s total stake dips below the top 130, the validator loses its validator privileges and no longer serves as part of the active set, entering into unbonding mode and eventually becoming unbonded, or inactive.

Delegators are Luna holders who want to receive staking rewards without the responsibility of running a validator. Through Terra Station, a user can delegate Luna to a validator and in exchange receive a part of a validator’s revenue.

So what makes a good validator worth delegating to? There are a couple of metrics I would define:

Uptime - should be as close as 100% as possible to show the commitment of the validator to maintain a good infrastructure
Self-delegation - the validator should have LUNA staked to show commitment
Participation - Validator should participate in governance and represent its delegators in the decision making. Decisions should have as goal the long term health of the ecosystem.
Voting power - if the network is to remain decentralised, delegators should actively check the voting power of the delegators to avoid that some of them amass a high voting power.
Comission rate - typically, validators have between 5% and 10% comission from staking rewards. In some cases, delegators have 100% comission. How can this be? It is a very nice way to support projects by "donating" the staking rewards to the delegators.

On Terra Station, Validators can be ranked by Uptime, Voting Power and Commision.

I will choose a Validator according to:

Participation criteria: should at least vote in 50% of the proposals.
Self-delegation: the more staked LUNA the validator owns, the more commitment it shows.

Methodology

I will join terra.gov_vote table with the information of the votes emitted by address and the terra.validator_labels table with the name of the validator and count the distinct proposal_id that each validator votes and then calculate this as a percentage of the total proposals which are loaded on the Velocity database.

Results

Graph below shows the Validators ordered by participation percentage. Note that only 33 Validators are showing on this table from a total of over 200 that appear on Terra Station, with only 130 being active.

Top 3 Validators are:

0base.vc #53 - Commission 10%, Uptime 100%, Voting power 0.37%, Self-delegation 0.38% (4465 LUNA)
Mission Control #73 - Commission 5%, Uptime 100%, Voting power 0.37%, Self-delegation 0% (45 LUNA)
setten.io #44 - Commission 3%, Uptime 100%, Voting power 0.5%, Self-delegation 0% (1 LUNA)

Conclusion

All in all, I would recommend to stake in 0base.vc since it is a very active validator and has a good self-delegation.

The following list shows the Top 18 Validators by Self-delegation. Hashed with over 90% of their stake self delegated is leading by a landslide. DokiaCapital (#4) follows with 3.33%, and Mantra DAO is third.