83
There has been a lot of talk recently that Polygon is "centralized" and that the Polygon Foundation has too much control over the network. This comes on the heels of a member of the Polygon core team posting guidance to the validators to increase the minimum gas price to 30gwei. While I do think an increased gas fee will make it more expensive for scammers and spammers to operate on Polygon, and even at 30gwei Polygon is still one of the cheapest blockchains with a robust mainnet, I disagree with how they went about deciding this move and their announcement. My guess is they were trying to keep it low-key and not make much of a deal out of it. Well, it seems like that backfired. People have expressed their frustration Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, making this far more exposed than (in my opinion) the team expected.
My request to Polygon for decisions in the future: better communication. 30gwei isn't the end of the world, and the team doesn't necessarily need anyone's permission to put out this guidance, but communication or marketing to announce this change and the date in the future when it will happen will go a long way. For a more decentralized perspective, the team can put out a quick poll to the validators to see how this will be perceived, who's onboard, and recommendations for communication. This wouldn't take more than a few extra days, but would go a long way to show they are working with the community.
Since there was little request for input before the guidance, and minimal communication after, Vault Staking has not updated to require a 30gwei minimum for transactions. That means when our validator is the active block producer, transactions as low at 1gwei will still be able to be mined.
Vault Staking needs your help. Vault Staking is currently the 34th largest validator on Polygon with 0.24% voting power. That means, on average, we will produce 24 out of ever 10,000 blocks. We can only rank higher with more delegation, so my request to you and all Matic holders, please delegate to lower-powered validators. Too much power in a select few validators allows too much control to a small number of people. Find a validator you trust, or one that is accessible, or one that aligns with your expectations of a validator. Hopefully that is Vault Staking for you, as I try to be accessible on Discord, provide communication here on PUBLISH0X for major developments, and (such as in this instance) am willing to do right by my delegators and not update to the 30gwei guidance.
If you would like to delegate to Vault Staking, first you will need Matic in your personal Ethereum wallet (Metamask or Ledger+Metamask is easiest, but any WalletConnect wallet should work). Then, head over to the Vault Staking staking page, click Become a Delegator, and follow the prompts.
As always, thank you for your continued support. I truly appreciate every reader, tipper, delegator, and those who reach out. Let me know if you have any questions; you can always reach out in the comments, find me active in the Polygon server, or reach on DM (AlgoRhythm#2931).
Thanks for reading!
