Introducing the new Desmos Validator Program
By: Riccardo Montagnin
Tags: Rewards, Token, Desmos, Proof Of Stake, Dsm

As you might guess from the title, this blog post will be about the new Desmos validators rewards program. But before exploring the program itself, let’s first take a step back to understand why we’ve decided to change things a little bit.

When we started our first incentive program, Desmos Primer, our aim was to attract both developers and validators. The first could complete the challenges regarding the Desmos commands, to get used to them and to how to create a dApp based on it. The second, on the other hand, could complete the node creation or update challenge.

While this system worked out very well initially, it later become more complex to deal with, especially for validators. Each time an update was performed, they would have to create a GitHub PR to submit their operator address in order to be eligible to get the rewards. In the long time, this discouraged a lot of validators that either forgot to do it or thought it was too complex.

For this reason, in the past months, we thought about how to improve the validator experience overall. After writing down all the options, we came to the conclusion that the best way to do this was to drop the validation-related challenges and create a new monthly-based rewards system.

So here we are, introducing the new Desmos Validators Program 🥳

How to be eligible 📜

Instead of using GitHub PRs, in order to be eligible in our new Validators Program, all you have to do is to run a validator node.

Every month we will get all the validators that had been running a node, compute the rewards they should get, and add such rewards to our scoreboard.

However, running multiple validators is not allowed. At the end of the program, before distributing the tokens, we will run our KYC procedure. This will allow us to discover if anyone tried running multiple validators and, if so, they will be rewarded only as running one single validators. For this reason, we highly discourage you from doing this.

Rewards 💰

During this program, rewards will be awarded on a monthly basis. This means that every month we will get the list of active validators and calculate the rewards they should get based on the activity of the past month.

Rewards will be granted based on the number of blocks that your validator node has pre-commited. Particularly, you will get:

6,000 DSM if you validate more than 80% of the blocks

if you validate of the blocks 5,000 DSM if you validate 70–80% of the blocks

if you validate of the blocks 4,000 DSM if you validate 60–70% of the blocks

if you validate of the blocks 3,000 DSM if you validate 50–60% of the blocks

if you validate of the blocks 2,000 DSM if you validate 40–50% of the blocks

if you validate of the blocks 1,000 DSM if you validate 30–40% of the blocks

Please note that in order to pre-commit blocks, your validator only needs to be online. By definition, each validator pre-commits each block as long as it is active. This means that no special action should be done in order to make sure your validator is doing its job, a part from making sure it’s online.

Running time ⏱️

Since our previous Validating Summer program has expired on September 18, this new program will be retroactive and we set its starting date on September 21.

We plan to keep this monthly reward program running until the Desmos mainnet is launched. Since we plan to do that in Q1 or Q2 of 2021, this means that starting from now all validators have from 3 to 6 months of time to earn some DSM through validation.