NEO Global Development (NGD) has released a new update to the neo.org consensus node page. The change was made to increase transparency by keeping the NEO community updated about the status of existing consensus nodes and number of candidates.

Alongside the announcement, NGD has also released guideline documents on becoming a consensus node. The guidelines outline the two approaches that potential candidates can use to become NEO consensus nodes:

  • On-chain governance – Election through the votes of NEO holders
  • Off-chain governance – Election through a strategic partnership with NEO Foundation

In order to fully decentralize, the aim is for on-chain governance to be the main source of consensus node governance in the future. This will be achieved by NEO Foundation’s continued investment of tokens into the long-term development, operation, maintenance and ecosystem of NEO. NEO token holders can vote according to the number of tokens they hold and are “the network owners and managers, managing the network through voting”. Therefore, as the NEO Foundation distributes tokens through ecosystem funding, they diminish the amount of influence they have on the voting process.

Consensus nodes are the validators of the NEO network, and are elected by vote. A consensus node is nominated as speaker and proposes a block of network transactions. Other consensus nodes (delegates) will validate the block by checking for invalid transactions, and sign agreement. If 2/3 of nodes sign agreement, a block is deemed valid and all transactions contained within are committed to the blockchain as final.

Requirements for both on-chain governance and off-chain governance candidates include general public information, NEO community contribution/participation, plans for hardware scaling/upgrades and solutions for:

  • Safety & security of the node
  • Maintenance
  • Long term stability
  • Failure tolerance/recovery backup
  • Maintenance personnel
  • Budget

The update announcement concluded with details regarding the current consensus nodes operating on the NEO MainNet and TestNet. Both networks are currently operating with 7 consensus nodes each, with the following hosts:

  • MainNet – 6 NF nodes, 1 City of Zion (CoZ) node
  • TestNet – 2 NF nodes, 1 NGD node, 2 CoZ nodes, 1 KPN node, 1 Swisscom Blockchain node

Voting for the KPN node to join the MainNet is expected to start within the near future.

The full update can be found at the link below:
https://medium.com/neo-smart-economy/neo-consensus-node-page-updated-to-speed-up-decentralization-progress-556db7f76de8

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