Calamari’s Community Collator Program Moves Forward with the Community’s Support

The main purpose of a Manta collator program is to secure the network and contribute to the fortification and decentralization of our network. The Dotsama ecosystem has attracted excellent entrepreneurs to the program who have proven to be committed to technical and ethical excellence. By opening our collator registry, we started to decentralize our block generation process. This is a really important step for the network and broader privacy community because, with a good number of quality collators, the Calamari Network will become more stable and robust.

Why Join?

​​This is an opportunity to become a part of Manta’s project and gain specialized knowledge while also earning real network rewards. We are currently looking for and onboarding collators, so if you’re interested in enhancing privacy, learning and getting valuable experience as a collator and earning incentives, this article will provide details on the application and the onboarding process to start as a collaborator earning $KMA rewards.

Enhance Privacy in Web 3

Contribute to the network and the greater privacy community

As the blockchain ecosystems grow along with the DeFi applications that sit on them, there has never been a more important time to emphasize on-chain privacy. Privacy Finance (PriFi) is an emerging aspect of decentralized finance that has come to the forefront as the need for Web3 privacy grows. The volume of transactions on our network is exponentially increasing the right to privacy and we are working to be optimal and ready to scale with the help of our collators.

We have made significant progress in cross-chain messaging connections with multiple top ecosystem projects. This messaging format becomes key to the growth of privacy as a service (PraaS). In order to create plug-and-play privacy on other high-volume chains, it is necessary to enable the Cross-Chain Consensus Message Passing (XCMP) format, so different parachains can exchange messages between them. In this way, we enable privacy for other parachains and their respective tokens. Collators are essential to this process since they are the ones who exchange these messages between the parachains. As a collator, you will compile the transactions within our network as well as the transactions coming from all these chains connected with our plug-and-play zero-knowledge proof solution.

Contribute to the network and earn incentives

As a collator, you can start earning $KMA rewards. We will also be launching a native staking program in the future. Staking will remove a considerable amount of $KMA from circulation. We will launch our native staking program once we migrate from PoA (Proof of Authority) to PoS (Proof of Stake). In addition, we are also enabling other forms of staking on other parachains through XCM.

Contribute to the network to learn and gain valuable experience

The Polkadot ecosystem is expanding with many great projects growing. You can learn how to perform the role of a collator within Polkadot and work across different Polkadot projects in an open and decentralized collator set.

Benefits of Joining Now

Placement in the collator pool is competitive, with more suitable applicants than collator slots available. As the core team enables the network’s utility features, we anticipate a heavy increase in transaction volume for more collator rewards.

How Can I Become a Collator?

We are very pleased to have recently promoted another 6 community collators to active collators this month. This brings the number of Calamari community collators to 10 and strengthens the decentralized credentials of the network. Our goal is to reach 20 Collators by the end of Q2 2022. Under this estimate, we set the initial running collator bonding requirement to 400,000 $KMA.

Support

From the beginning, we have been actively supporting each of our collators, and all pending candidates, by providing a technical assessment for the safest collator configuration. We are making the collator selection process more transparent, automatic and merit-based.

Being a collator is an independent job that comes with great responsibility. Collators are the key to the decentralization of the network and we appreciate that you have maintained best practices and provided all the essential elements that the network needs.

Performance Metrics

The initial collator incentives design was approved by the community with Runtime 3.1.2 and was structured according to the current transaction volume, based on the collection of transaction data in the calamari.subscan.io chain for that time. In this first design, Collator runners receive 60% of the transaction fees and 100% of the tips. The remaining 40% of the transaction fees go back to the treasury. Thus, the collator runner, even with the current transaction volume, will have >= 10% APY initially and at least 5% APY when Calamari Network expands to 20 collators. With this upgrade, we managed to improve runtime efficiency as we enabled LTO for binary compilation. This should mean, for end-users, faster and smaller binaries thanks to additional optimizations made at link time. As a result, we have greatly improved Calamari’s performance. Now, all weights are much lower than before, which means that the gas tariff will be 20% to 40% cheaper.

Application Process and Next Steps

We are making community upgrades to our collator onboarding, enabling new slots each week. This way we will be able to reach the initial 20 collators we require in a faster way. We anticipate a new community collator every 2 or 3 days for the rest of Q2.

We invite all blockchain node maintainers to join the Community collators program. We are currently accepting applications from node maintainers who wish to run a Calamari collator node. Detailed steps can be found here: https://docs.manta.network/docs/collator/SetupAndRun

Who Can Join?

In order to participate in the program, please ensure you meet the following criteria:

https://sparta.calamari.systems/

Collators are a key part of making this mission stable and robust. By opening Calamari Network’s collator registry, we are decentralizing our block collecting process. This is an important step for the community because with a good number of quality collators, Calamari Network will be more stable and robust.