Recently, the Stakesafe team published their validator dashboard which provided some great insights into the way in which stake is concentrated amongst node runners. You can check out their dashboard here: Radix Network Dashboard - Stakesafe
One of the biggest concerns was the concentration of validator nodes hosted at Hetzner Online - accounting for 27.8% of all stake! Radstakes has run our primary validator node on a dedicated server at Hetzner for the last 9 months where the performance has been excellent and the costs reasonable (hence it’s popularity amongst other savvy node runners).
However, this does make us nervous. Whilst our node was hosted in Finland (which is much less popular compared to their Germany data centres) it effectively puts a large amount of network control in the hands of one server provider - not ideal from a decentralisation perspective.
I’m therefore pleased to say that we are currently evaluating a number of alternatives, which will be based either in a completely un-represented data centre, or one in which less than 5% of stake resides. We will also locate this server in a country with less than 5% of the total network stake.
We are committed to the long term success of Radix and hope that these actions might inspire other node-runners to follow suit, in the interest of decentralisation. Whilst it might cost us more, we’re determined to keep our 2% fee in place until at least Babylon so there won’t be any adverse affect on our stakers’ return. Once we’ve made the switch we’ll follow up with a proper announcement, but in the meantime we hope that all stakers will continue to stake responsibly and take these factors into consideration.
Well said Faraz, Hetzner indeed has way too much stake.
I hope this will push other node runners to consider moving away to less used providers as well.
4 of the top 10 validators are running on Hetzner, moving even some of them to other providers will easily change the situation.
Thank you for the insights and detailed explanation. Also thumbs up for the right decision. I think I already stake to 10+ nodes and I’m small fish but prefer decentralization and support that as much as I can.
I imagine they acquire the IP address of the validator nodes from the logs of a fullnode and then just use a GeoIP database for the location and provider.
Thanks for the quick reply Mattia. Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how would you go about finding the logs of a fullnode? Do you need to be a validator to get this?
No, you just have to spin up a Radix node, you don’t have to become a validator or have any stake delegated. See here: Getting Started
Once your node is fully synced, you should be able to match the validator address with its IP from the logs, usually located in /etc/radixdlt/node/logs/radixdlt-core.log (on Linux).
