Hello Lorimer and everyone else,
I’m Maria, Director of Engineering at DFINITY. Since Sven is leaving DFINITY, Alex (@alexu) and I will be taking over his responsibilities. We’ll be working closely with Katie on decentralization and Node Provider (NP) related initiatives. I was deeply involved in launching the ICP network and am excited to return to this topic now that the network has grown so much. Alex joined from the Infrastructure Security team and has worked on these topics from security PoV. So his background is definitely a great fit for this discussion.
Thank you to Lorimer and other community members for thoroughly reviewing proposals and conducting independent research on node decentralization. It really shows how committed you are to ICP’s security and success.
Regarding your questions about specific Node Providers, I think it’s best to let them address those concerns directly here.
As you’ve noted, the issue is broader and the network security should not just rely on any business relationships between NPs and DFINITY.
We appreciate your willingness to collaborate on improving the current approaches to incentivizing, onboarding, and auditing NPs. Balancing incentives, tracking business relationships, and keeping entry barriers manageable is not simple, but there are potential technical solutions. Staking, slashing, and geolocation tracking have been raised in other threads, though we haven’t yet seen any detailed proposals.
I suggest we continue exploring these ideas during the next Node Provider Working Group meeting, which should take place toward the end of February. It will be more productive if we can propose concrete suggestions by then. On our side, we’ll work on some proposals and share updates on the projects started last year. We can also use dedicated threads for follow-up discussions, technical feedback, and progress reports. If you have some suggestions - they are of course very welcome!
Thank you again for your efforts, and we look forward to working together on these important issues.