4.2 Validator Committee

Similar to the standard DPOS protocol, any node can qualify as a validator by staking a specified amount of tokens to the system contract. Users can also delegate their tokens to trusted validators, thereby becoming delegators. Each validator’s stake comprises its own holdings as well as tokens delegated by other users. The system ranks the top N validators (e.g., 100) based on their stake amounts and selects them as candidate validators. The top 15 validators directly become active validators. From the remaining 85 validators, the system randomly chooses 6 to join the active validators, forming a set of 21 active validators. The newly selected active validators will come into effect in the next epoch. Moreover, the number of candidate validators can increase as the network expands in the future in order to enhance the decentralization.