Ways to improve the decentralization of Gnosis Chain

[mkoeppelmann]

@claberus

Turn small passive GNO holders who are active participants in the community or follow our communication channels into validators:
There are around 900 active small users (<200 GNO, out of 1000 users) in our LGNO contract. Does it make sense to bootstrap something like Rocket pool or a fork with these users? This looks like an easy win if we can provide them with a 1 click solution for validating.
https://etherscan.io/token/0x4f8AD938eBA0CD19155a835f617317a6E788c868#balances

Yes, we should certainly provide easy ways for those holders to become validators.
a) Indeed, something like Rocket poot or Diva (a newer liquid staking protocol, also focused on decentralization)
b) making Dappnode even easier. Right now you have to buy physical hardware. A compromise could be a cloud solution that can be set up in minutes. This would be less decentralized than your own physical hardware but still more then using liquid staking

@claberus

Reduce concentration of validators:
2 addresses currently own 50% of validators so maybe we could we do a special program to influence these exceptionally large players into taking some extra steps to improve the network?
Karpatkey currently owns 3% of validators, what’s some good practises we should follow to improve the Nakamoto coefficient in some areas and contribute to the decentralization of the network? Hopefully we could share our lessons learned.

Those 2 addresses are Stakewise and Kleros. I think for those 2 we should not aim to reduce their absolute numbers - but instead increase the total amount staked so that their relative number goes down. E.g. Kleros holds 19.2k GNO out of in total ~3m - that is merely 0.64%.

@claberus

Increase GNO inflation in detriment of large passive whales.
We could propose to increase the GNO staking rewards for validators to make validating more attractive. Even doubling the current rewards should not mean a significant dilution for existing holders. Large megawhales would still be benefited from a healthier network.

The easiest way to do this (without touching the protocol) is to add transaction fees/ MEV (at least after the merge). We could e.g. simply write a contract that can only be called by the “miner” address (the creator of the block). This could even exclude the addresses of the largest known stakers if desired. Such a change would be much easier to do than actually changing rewards on protocol level which would require a hard fork and this always a lot of extra effort for protocol teams.