Validator Pageant

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

Validators play a fundamental role in the operations of any blockchain and are a central component. A "Validator" in a Blockchain is like a banker who verifies each incoming transaction. A transaction will only be completed on the blockchain when it has been verified by the validator. Validators are assigned the duty of verifying transactions for legality and accuracy.

Each POS blockchain network consists of more than a single validator depending on the requirements of the system. Each time transactions are issued, all or some of the validators in the network validate the transactions to be legitimate and then the validated transactions are placed on the blockchain.

Validators in interoperable networks, as in any other blockchain network, are responsible for maintaining the efficiency of the system, participating in voting and forming new blocks on the blockchain. Blocks are selected by validators to be added to the chain through a multi-stage voting process.

The validator's role in the network is to run a complete node and participate in the network consensus by casting votes. Validators earn revenue for committing new blocks.

Running a validator is a big responsibility, so only the top 130 in Luna bonded participation are chosen to sign blocks. As such, security and responsiveness guarantees must be met, at the risk of the validator's participation being reduced (penalised), which damages both the validator's (and his delegate's) funds and reputation.

The main conditions for curtailment are

Double signature: a validator signed two different blocks with the same chain ID at the same height
Downtime: a validator does not respond / cannot be contacted for a certain amount of time
Missing votes in the oracle: a validator did not report a minimum amount of votes that were within the weighted median in the exchange rate oracle

In this dashboard, we will analyse the validator Pantera Capital, the first U.S. institutional asset manager focused exclusively on blockchain.

Methodology

To be able to extract information about validators, I have used different Terra tables from Flispide Crypto database. Firstly; I used Terra.transactions to see the missed blocks of each validator. Then, I used both, validator_voting_power and validator_labels to check which address correspond to each validator. Then, I have extracted the downtime and percentage of completed blocks by the formula provided in Terra docs.

Results

The first dashboard shows the maximum blocks missed by each validator as well as the pcg of blocks validated by each of them. As we can see, Pantera Capital, depsite being in the middle of the list, it is due to the huge number of blocks it is validating. The important feature here is the percentage of blocks validated which is determined by the color of the dots. Here, we can see how the Pantera Capital is one of teh most important Validators in this aspect because of have the most enhance red color, having more than 95% of the blocks in validation.

ANother important metric is about the downtime minutes per block, in this case, Pantera is in the middle again , but it is due to the time Pantera are doing its work. Maybe, some improvement could be done to stay at the top but the number are good enough to trust on it.

Finally, we need to observe the missed oracle votes to see if teh validators are active and pay atttention to it. In Pantera case, only missed 2 Oracle votes.

Conclusion