NetOps WG · Recruit & support community validators

Community members note the active validator set has fallen below ~100 and ask whether Radix needs more validators. Decentralization and liveness benefit from a larger, healthier set – but new operators hit friction (e.g. corrupt ledger snapshots, long sync-from-scratch times).

Where it stands (August 2026)

Read whole from the mainnet Gateway on 16 August 2026 at epoch 335598, the validator set does not support the premise that it has fallen below 100. There are 287 validator components on the ledger, 188 of them registered, and 179 of those carry stake – comfortably more than the 100 slots the protocol fills each epoch by stake. The set is full.

The thinness is further down. Of 4,773,496,229 XRD staked, ranks 101 to 179 hold 148,854 XRD between them – three thousandths of one percent – and the bottom of the active set is barely above that: rank 99 is a node whose own on-ledger name reads co:integrate Node Closing Jan 2025 – Please Unstake, with 56,171 XRD, and rank 100, betahk.io, holds 45,500. Only 89 validators hold a million XRD or more. So a slot is available to a new operator on almost no stake, and worth almost nothing when they get it. That reframes what recruitment has to deliver. Registered nodes are already in surplus; what a new operator lacks is enough delegated stake behind the slot to pay for the hardware. It also ties this card tightly to the subsidy decision, since the subsidy is what currently makes a small slot viable at all.

After the restart (September 2026)

Mainnet restarted on 11 September 2026 after a ten-day halt. Read again on 16 September at epoch 341,235, the set is still full and still thin at the bottom. 186 validators are registered, two fewer than in August, and 177 of them carry stake. The 100th by stake, Malu, holds 26,680 $XRD, well under half what the 100th held in August, and the 86 registered validators below it hold 80,520 $XRD between them. 87 hold a million $XRD or more, against 89 in August. Of the three validators holding over 10 million each that unregistered in the first two days after the restart, one has come back: Vunterslaush Staking re-registered with 10.3 million $XRD behind it and has made 669 proposals and missed 9. Blockshard and Fundamento Cripto are still out.

A registered slot is also not a running node, and that count is coming down. At epoch 340,611 on 13 September, 19 of the 100 validators in the active set had made no proposals since noon UTC on 11 September, holding 265.6 million $XRD, 5.8% of registered stake. Three have since brought their nodes back, each to a clean record from the moment it returned: Radix Charts V2 at about 10:00 UTC on 14 September, DoItForDan about an hour later, and Allnodes at about 11:30 UTC on 15 September. A fourth, XRDStake.com, dropped to 101st by stake without ever having entered the active set. Fifteen are still on zero, holding 219.7 million $XRD, 4.8% of registered stake, and 186.3 million of that sits on one validator, the Weft Finance node, sixth by stake, which has now missed 19,659 proposals in a row. Fourteen of the fifteen have sat in the active set for all 1,332 epochs since the restart and missed every proposal they were due; the fifteenth, betahk.io, is inside the top hundred by stake but the Gateway records it as never entering the active set at all. The consensus manager pays emissions only for successful proposals, so these earn nothing and neither does the stake behind them – and that stake is leaving: 562,527 $XRD has been unstaked from the Weft node since 13 September. Recruitment has two gaps to fill after the restart: stake behind the smallest slots, and operators who bring their nodes back.

Operators raising fees (late September 2026)

Read on 28 September at epoch 344,883, the set has held its post-restart shape: 186 validators registered, 177 with stake and 87 with a million $XRD or more. The 100th by stake holds 41,656 $XRD and the 86 below it hold 107,193 between them. Over the seven days to 28 September, 14 validators in the top hundred made no proposals, holding 218m $XRD, 4.7% of registered stake, and 185m of that is still on the Weft Finance node, which missed all 38,997 proposals it was due that week.

The operators who are running are raising their fees. Seven validators holding 490m $XRD between them have queued a higher fee on-ledger, which the protocol applies at a fixed future epoch so delegators can move first. Once all seven apply, the stake-weighted fee across the set rises from 22.6% to 25.0% at today's stake; it was 20.6% on 7 August. On 28 September Tadkis announced the shutdown of the Community Council Node, which charges a 100% fee to fund the Community Council's marketing, business development and events: at the current price its income no longer covers the Council's work or the node's own infrastructure. It was still registered at epoch 344,883 with 22m $XRD behind it. The end of the Foundation's validator subsidy left fee income as an operator's only revenue, so recruitment now also has to keep the operators already in the set.

Figures read from the Radix Gateway's validator list and uptime statistics at epoch 344,883. The subsidy card covers whether the DAO should pay operators directly.

Deliverables

• Assess target validator-set size and geographic distribution.
• Fix onboarding friction: reliable ledger snapshots and clear sync guidance.
• Stand up / point to a node-runner support channel.
• Consider incentives for new independent operators (tie-in to subsidy design).

Dependencies & cross-references

• Governed by Daffy's Radix DAO framework (repo Shadaffy/radix-dao); see the Governance Framework Reference Repo and Charter (Round 1).
• Interacts with subsidy design.

Sources

• Radix DLT Official – validator-count discussion