We’re happy to announce the launch of the second cohort of the Decentralized Nodes Program!
The response from each inside and past the Polkadot group has once more been excellent. We acquired a formidable complete of 188 purposes, for 256 Polkadot nodes and 530 Kusama nodes (a 6% and 17% improve respectively in comparison with Cohort 1). After an intensive choice course of, we chosen 104 Polkadot nodes from 63 operators and 210 Kusama nodes from 69 operators. These nominations turned efficient on March 17, 2025, and the time period for this second cohort will run till July 17, 2025.
The principle aim of this cohort was to extend the diversification of the taking part nodes and, by extension, the lively units. Many blockchain networks endure from having validators working in the identical areas and on the identical internet hosting suppliers. This creates single factors of failure and reduces their resiliency. Polkadot and Kusama aren’t any exception, however with this new course of the Decentralized Nodes program we purpose to enhance that state of affairs.
Because of this we gave desire to operators who have been prepared to host their nodes in much less widespread places and fewer saturated operators, and moreover, to those that wished to self host their nodes. Moreover, we sought to lower the dominance of AMD CPUs used for nodes by incentivising using Intel processors.
In addition to these, we targeted on related issues as within the first cohort: the nodes’ specs and efficiency, the technical experience of the operators, and their ecosystem affinity, and we supplied candidates with detailed choice standards. We additionally evaluated the efficiency of nodes and operators that participated in Cohort 1, whereas giving newcomers a bonus to incentivise new folks to hitch this system. Lastly, we additionally launched a change in comparison with Cohort 1: operators may apply with as much as 2 Polkadot nodes and 5 Kusama nodes and they might be evaluated as a bunch for every community.
Many of the purposes have been of the very best high quality, which made the analysis course of very troublesome, however allowed us to have a number of wonderful nodes and operators. And the aim of diversification was achieved to an important diploma. The next graphs converse for themselves.
Polkadot Cohort 1 distribution
Polkadot Cohort 2 distribution
Kusama Cohort 1 distribution
Kusama Cohort 2 distribution
Europe and North America dominated throughout the first cohort, however within the second we noticed a rise in nodes being hosted in APAC, which turned the dominant area in Polkadot, LATAM, and Africa. We additionally noticed a rise in supplier diversification, regardless that the desire to some suppliers (totally different from Cohort 1) couldn’t be prevented. As for CPU diversification, on Polkadot AMD’s dominance decreased from 90% in Cohort 1 to 64% in Cohort 2! On Kusama the outcomes have been much less astonishing, with a small lower from 76% to 70%.
The second cohort additionally marked a major milestone, a real first for Polkadot. This system now nominates the primary various, production-ready host implementation! That’s Kagome, the C++ implementation developed by Quadrivium and funded for the final 2 years by the Polkadot treasury. This marks a brand new, necessary period the place the Parity host is just not the one one validators can run. The node is run by the Quadrivium crew, however within the subsequent cohorts we purpose to push this additional and have much more operators working Kagome on their nodes.
Lastly, one different distinction from Cohort 1 is that this system not goals to make nodes unbiased of its nominations. This was a noble aim, however in observe we noticed that independence wasn’t that straightforward to find out or apply and it prompted stress to individuals that feared dropping the DN nomination may imply dropping out of the lively set.
So, as a substitute, the chosen nodes shall be nominated constantly for 4 months no matter their group nominations, and might doubtlessly be a part of subsequent cohorts, in the event that they carry out nicely.
The whole checklist of chosen validators is accessible on the Decentralized Nodes web site.
