Proposal: Decentralized sharing of validator health metrics

Hi @ihsotas! Please find answers to your questions below:

Are we also thinking to build something like trust score for these validators?

I think the data from the Metrics nodes would be a good additional input to a trust score, however the most important metric is probably the validators’ reliability in signing checkpoints, which is already being measured and shown on Polygon’s staking site.

I think the main difference between the existing checkpoint stats and the system I propose is this, in a nutshell:

The checkpoint stats will show that a validator has problems after the problems occur and start harming the blockchain operation, but with the metrics sharing proposed here, some of those issues could perhaps be noticed and prevented in advance.

What are the plans to onboard more validators & make the network decentralized?

The proposed system is ready to onboard and it’s already decentralized. However no one can force the validators to use it. More validators will probably onboard over time, especially after some tooling gets built and starts adding value, for example a simple alert system.

The only remaining centralized part in the system is the gatekeeping: Currently I have to manually allowlist new Metrics nodes so that they can validly start publishing data. This happens via a smart contract, so it could easily be controlled by a multisig owned by the existing Metrics nodes. So that existing nodes can allow new ones in. I’m thinking of setting that up in June.

In reference to this post , Is there any dashboard to track the geography of polygon node validators on the map?

Personally I’m not aware of any easy way. The locations of nodes could in theory be looked up based on their IP address, but the IP address is not included in the data being shared (which might be a good thing for security).

I hope that helps! Cheers