Anyone may operate a Radix Node and register it as a validator on the Radix Public Network. Radix is permissionless, after all.
Radix’s consensus protocol selects only the top 100 validators by delegated stake to participate in consensus and receive network emission rewards. These 100 validator nodes are known as the validator set. The consensus protocol picks the validator set at the beginning of every epoch.
This makes validator node-running quite competitive, and we expect the standards of operation will be very high. Most successful validator nodes will be run on high-availability cloud infrastructure by experienced systems administrators. For those who fit this profile, there are economic incentives available.
For those curious about the changes to validator management between the previous Olympia Mainnet and the current Babylon Mainnet, validator management has moved up the stack to the application level, with a clean separation between how the validator is configured (with regard to name, fees, etc.) and the actual running node. This has some important benefits, most notably:
- Validator nodes no longer need a built-in wallet function with their own XRD balance and a special-purpose interface to interact with the ledger
- Signing keys can be rotated at will, and are no longer restricted to a single key for life
- Node-runners can take advantage of the full metadata system to provide additional information about their node
- It’s significantly easier to have multiple people able to safely administer the validator settings, without needing access to the associated node
- Scrypto components can easily perform validator-related actions such as staking and unstaking.
If you’re looking to run a validator, see the Radix Tech Docs for more details.
Further reading:
- Radix Tech Docs
- How does staking work on Radix?
- Start Here! Radix Staking Introduction
- How are validators selected?
- What's the difference between a full node and validator node?
- What is the XRD subsidy incentive for validators?
