Validators Overview
Introduction
The AIOZ Network is based on Tendermint (opens in a new tab). The core behind AIOZ Network operation is the commitment/admission of new blocks into the blockchain by the community of 50 official validators. Only validator candidates who won the most votes (these votes contain cryptographic signatures signed by each validator's private key) in the competition of consensus procedure can become official validators. Specifically, validator candidates can bond their own AIOZ and have AIOZ "delegated", or staked, to them by token holders. The top 50 validator candidates with the highest stakes delegated to them are eventual AIOZ validators.
Validators and their delegators will earn $AIOZ as block provisions and tokens as transaction fees through the execution of the Tendermint consensus protocol. Initially, transaction fees will be paid in AIOZ. It is noted that validators can set a commission rate, as a bonus, on the pay that their delegators receive.
The staked $AIOZ of validators (including $AIOZ of users that delegated to them) can be slashed) in case they double sign, go offline, or escape from governance repeatedly. The punishment level relies on the severity of the violation.
Hardware
No suitable cloud solutions for validator key management are currently available. Because of that, validators are strongly recommended to set up a restricted area with minimal access. Co-locating in secure data centers can be an ideal choice.
Validators had better have their data center location provided with a surplus of power, connectivity and storage backups. It is also advisable to equip the data center(s) with superfluous networking boxes for fiber, firewall, switch, and small servers with spare hard drives and failover.
Initially, requirements for the network will be low because the current testnet only needs a few resources. However, bandwidth, CPU, and memory requirements will rise as the network grows. Thus, large-capacity hard drives are recommended for storing years of blockchain history.