hi Vasanti, Thanks for making the post about the expansion.
While Smart Stake is all for an increased validator set in general, the motivations of the proposal on stake centralization and nakamoto coefficient aspects aren’t really going to be improved by simply increasing the validator set.
If you refer to Stake Heat Map or Validator Stake Distribution at https://analytics.smartstake.io/polygon/stats/vp , you will see that the bottom 70 validators control less than 10% stake collectively. The bottom 40 control only 1% voting power.
If you compare the VP Curve Changes in the last 18 months, there is hardly any stake redistribution.
While Stake Centralization and Nakamoto Coefficient both indicate that significant improvements are needed, I am not sure expanding the validator set is the way to achieve it. Even the additional geographical distribution is not going to provide significant benefits given how low the VP of newly added validators is going to be.
The only exception to the above is any VC or exchanges that you want to onboard via this increase. For regular validators, it is an uphill battle in Polygon to acquire Voting Power.
Many of the validators have been around since 2020/early 2021 and their VP is still very low. I think the network will be well served with other initiatives that encourage community/VCs/Project team to distribute their stake better than how it has been for many years now.