I am going to link this comment here as well.
I disagree with the categorization, at least in terms of our experience/expections coming in as a gensis operator. We were told to take gnosis first before ETH, and were judged on that performance to be granted ETH (along with our testnet activity which was extended as well).
Given the above it means that GNO is a true bonus/not required, and given its econimic realities, I find myself wonderng, as an operator, if I want this “bonus”.
Secondly, I am going to call out a few other numbers to consider here.
Right now stakewise has 41,741 GNO staked in the pool. Not all of that GNO is actively staked on validators that number is 34950 actively staked (From app webpage).
There are 106503 active validators on GNOSIS meaning right now stakewise represents:
Active Validators:
34950 / 106503 ~ 33% of the staked GNO
Total Validators (if all the GNO was actively working)
41741 / 106503 = 39% of staked GNO
Each of the node operators with 9K+ validators (stakewise, cryptomanufaktur, and VeriHash) represent 8 -9 % of the total staked GNO. Finoa at present 4 - 5%. If T-systems eventually gets added we will likely hit the 39% of the staked GNO total.
My question is does the pledge we made about not growing beyond a certain percentage of staked ETH apply to chains like Gnosis? If so, we need to need figure that out as we are over that now.
Secondly, we should re-engage the the GNO team and see if there is some support we can get from them. I know the stakewise team reached out to to them about grants for supporting commercial operators. With over 30% of the GNO network capacity in total with 33% active, even just one operator ceasing to operations will have an impact especailly if its one the of 8 - 9% ones.
Regardless, if GNO was truly bonus at the start I am not sure we can treat it as bonus now when there is over 30% of the network capacity sitting in our pool some of it still in-active.
And looking at these charts, one can see a clear trend. – Charts - Open Source Gnosis (GNO) Mainnet Explorer - beaconcha.in - 2024
As the network and validators have increased network performance is slipping significantly with effectiveness becoming really bad. This likely also explains why on average the GNO network itself looses about 1 GNO per hour across all the validators in terms of penalties.
This also explains why extracting closer to that 14% APR vs the 10.45% we are at now is going to be boarderline impossible if network metrics contrinue in this direction.
Missed blocks is now over 20% which in turn impacts other validators on the network. Granted some of this is likely due the fact that it is not profitable to run GNO at scale so I am sure some have just turned their validators off and given the price of GNO this is a low risk/low loss move. But there is another story here as well.
There are real software limitations that GNO is starting to run into now. With half the slot time of ETH it is going to hit a wall when the validtor population gets high enough.
This is already the case with sync committees and the reason why it is so hard to be consistently good with them. 5 seconds isn’t enough time for most validators to get the work done and the message to the BN in time before a slot is missed; because most clients are not designed for a 5 second slot time to start with and we are seeing the effects of that on the network now.
Also block production is impacted with 20% of the blocks on GNO arriving late and thus a miss. Again, you can’t just “turn up the boost” and expect your stock honda civic engine to hold together; this isn’t Fast and Furious. But that is sort of what is happening here, we are taking a client, halving the slot time and hoping the designs and architectures of those clients and the network (along with its assumptions around propogation time and other stuff) hold true.
At the start of GNO it looks like it was holding but as validator population increased that extra “boost” is starting to show its impacts.
All this does not bode well for the GNO network IMHO. It is a sign of a network buckling under pressure and getting worse.