Dear community, this is Sven Fischer from DFINITY, part of the Release Management team.
As we are moving into the fourth quarter we would like to give an update on the status of the Node Decentralization activities. To recap, the onboarding of new Node Providers (NPs) was halted due to reprioritization of other activities, amongst others, the Bitcoin Integration. However, other node decentralization activities, like upgrading of existing nodes, and testing of new hardware specifications, have progressed in the meantime.
As of the start of Q4, the status of our decentralization efforts is as follows:
- The upgrading of existing nodes to is in progress and continues until the end of 2022. Storage upgrade will be included in this to accommodate potential growth in storage requirements of the IC network.
- In Q4, we will start onboarding the first new Node Providers. Focus will be on adding nodes of new NPs to the NNS subnet in order to extend our degree of decentralization of the NNS. Furthermore, part of the new nodes will be used to increase the security of the ECDSA subnet used for Bitcoin integration.
- The new NPs will be onboarded using the new hardware specification (Gen2 replica node hardware specification), while we are completing the final tests of the hardware in parallel, specifically on the support of SEV-SNP
- We will start in Q4 with onboarding of 6 new NPs.
- A subset of these new NPs will be asked to onboard independently based on the currently available NP onboarding runbooks (Node Provider Onboarding), in order to show the community that NPs can onboard without intervention or support from the foundation. Technically it is already possible for a NP to onboard, but there are technical practicalities as stated in the above thread that inhibit this, and we want to make the onboarding process a smooth and efficient process.
- Self-declaration: While the new onboarding process provides more independence to NPs, it brings the question how the community can judge which NP proposals to adopt and which ones to reject. The team is preparing a self-declaration template. Through an upcoming NNS motion proposal, we propose to establish this self-declaration as a means for NPs to provide more information to the NNS community, enabling an informed vote on whether to adopt a new NP.
- For the new NPs being onboarded we will follow the existing remuneration schema. That is, rewards are determined exclusively by the “rewardable nodes” setting in the IC’s registry. This might change in the future as the team is looking into taking into account more precise metrics such as node uptime and downtime (see also the previous thread response on Remuneration).
The DFINITY Foundation is currently working together with the community and existing NPs for the above activities. There is a large backlog of NP requests so we expect the decentralization to accelerate over the first two quarters of the next year, with the introduction of runbooks for independent onboarding by new NPs.
Q4 2022
- (A) Continued work on upgrading existing nodes.
- (B) Onboarding of 6 new NPs, with a subset following runbooks for autonomous node deployment. Deployment will be based on the next generation HW configuration that is currently in test.
- (C) Testing of next generation HW for different HW vendors.
Q1 2023
- (C) Testing of next generation HW for different HW vendors.
- (D) Start of autonomous node deployment for new NPs.
Q2/Q3 2023
- (E) NNS-driven DC allocation: The NNS-controlled DC allocation mechanism will be introduced and control all future node additions. With this step and a new node hardware an accelerated network growth is unleashed.
- (F) NP onboarding using NNS Front-end dapp instead of CLI tooling.
Of course, based on community feedback or technical obstacles that we might encounter, the plan might be adjusted. We will continue to update you through the forum on the status of these activities.
