As part of it’s ongoing efforts to grow the Cosmos ecosystem, the ICF is delegating ATOMs to validators making significant contributions to the larger Cosmos community.
We issued a call for delegation applications from June 7-June 17, 2019, and 46 validators applied.
The main criteria considered is community contributions and ecosystem involvement. We want to support validators that are contributing, giving back to, and engaging in the greater Cosmos community. Such contributions may include: creating a block explorer, active engagement in the governance process, publishing articles and guides, holding meetups and events, contributing open source code, etc. Of particular interest are contributions of open source code and local efforts to build Cosmos communities.
We also took into account commission rates, which should not be unreasonable, and geographic diversity, which greatly facilitates the network’s architectural and political fault tolerance. Applications were reviewed by a team of 6 people and scored out of 16 points.
- Applications which received a score of 13 (inclusive) and above received 300,000 Atoms for delegation.
- Applications which received a score of 8 (inclusive) to 13 received 100,000 Atoms for delegation.
- Applications which received a score below 8 received 33,000 Atoms for delegation.
The ICF encourages a diverse ecosystem; all validators who applied received some delegation. The only exception to the rules above was Sikka. If you’ve been paying attention, you know very well why they were considered an exception. Nonetheless, in their application, they did request some delegation from the ICF as a “token of recognition”. So the ICF delegated an encoded symbolic amount to Sikka. Can you decode it?
While we asked questions on the application about validator security setups, after consideration, we did not use this self-reported information as part of the evaluation process as we cannot verify these claims and want to focus most on community contributions.
That said, the importance of mature security setups cannot be overstated, and we strongly encourage validators to continue to improve their infrastructure and security maturity. In order to further support this, Jessy Irwin, the Head of Security at All in Bits, will be holding a biweekly Cosmos security office hours to introduce a security maturity model that was developed to help validators measure their defenses against different classes of attackers with different capabilities and skill sets.
Please join the office hours, which begin Wednesday August 14 at 8am PST and will happen biweekly, by signing up here.
The ICF is continuing its efforts to support a healthy ecosystem and encourage a balanced and dynamic validator set capable of hosting the next generation of digital infrastructure. We look forward to ongoing and evolving contributions by validators.
The ICF reserves the right to change its delegations at any time. It may withdraw delegations from some or all of the validators it has delegated to and/or redelegate to specific validators at any point in time without any reason. Further, no validator may assert any claims against the ICF to delegate ATOMs to them. The ICF is under no obligation to delegate its ATOMs. Delegation from the ICF does not constitute an endorsement.
This document is for information purposes only with regards to the ICF's intention and is not binding in any way.
Note: A final delegation was made on August 30 to an applicant who submitted an incorrect address in the application form, this was corrected and the delegation was completed.