Polkadot Active Validator Set to Reduce from 600 to 320

The Polkadot community has proposed to reduce the active validator set from 600 to 500, then to 400, and finally to 320 through three referendums, aiming to complete this by the end of 2026. The first on-chain referendum (Ref 1966) has been submitted. Each step requires approval from the Fellowship whitelist and a vote from token holders. Meanwhile, a proposal for adjusting validator rewards released on the forum suggests that during the reduction period, the budget for each validator will remain unchanged at approximately 57.7 DOT per day, while the share of validator incentives in the allocation pool will decrease from 22.6% to about 12.1%. In the future, validators will transition to Metanodes, taking on block production and RPC services for the Asset Hub and People Chain. The proposal recommends increasing the validator budget after the Metanode goes live, divided into two parts: one to cover operational costs, calculated at $2,000 per node per month; the other as incentives based on the amount of DOT staked by the validators, using 30,000 DOT as a reference for self-staked amount, calculated at an annual interest rate of 30%. This reward scheme is currently still under discussion and needs to be approved through governance voting.

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