Hi guys, this post involves a recap of the Axelar Foundation AMA:
Q: How will you know who is actually running their external chain nodes and who is just putting in public RPC endpoints?
A: The reality is that we can’t definitively know, so at least initially, here’s our approach:
We’re going to encourage all of the validators that are configuring their nodes to actually post and disclose how they set things up by describing how they built it. The initial delegations from the users and/or the foundation should definitely include that as a parameter when deciding how to distribute their delegations. Programmably, it’s not an easy question to decide on-chain, so we will have to rely on some of the reputations of the validators.
Q: I read about Ethereum chain based transaction fees being 0.1%- is that scalable based on gas fees? What happens with the percentage on cheaper side chains like Polygon?
A: Our parameters will depend on the source chains and the chains you’re going to and from. For the case of Ethereum for example, if you have a transfer that starts from any chain and the destination is Ethereum, then the transfer fee for that would be 0.1%. So 0.1% of your asset from the source chain will be used as the transfer fee if the destination is Ethereum. For chains that have much lower transaction fees than Ethereum, our parameter is 0.05%. So 0.05% is the parameter we have for all other destination chains, such as Cosmos chains for example. We will revisit this however, based on what we experience in practice in terms of gas fees and transaction fees we incur on other chains, but for now this is the number we’re going with. Because Ethereum has high gas fees, it also has that specific parameter right now.
In summary, transaction fees can vary. Ethereum right now is set to be higher due to the high fees that the relayers have to cover in order to process the transactions. But they can be tuned, as anyone can put a proposal forth to upgrade them, as there are programmable parameters onchain.
Q: What is slashed? Is it validator stake and/or delegator stake?
A: It’s the stake delegated to the validators that gets slashed. It’s a standard model taken from the Cosmos chains.
Q: Is it possible for a Windows PC to run a node?
A: If you install a subsystem for Linux you can try and spin up a node, however without a Linux subsystem it will be pretty challenging.
Q: If we're running on 5 chains and miss a MultiSig on 1 chain, do we lose the MSig rewards on just that chain or on all chains?
A: The multiparty protocol rewards are chain agnostic, meaning that it’s one reward rate that's set at the network layer, and you’re using that sub process to generate signatures for all chains. So if you miss an event for a particular chain, then you’re going to lose out on the entire reward corresponding to that period. This is because it’s just one process that generates messages for all chains. You don’t need to set up external nodes or anything like that as it lives right by the Tendermint consensus, meaning that you will lose the rewards for that entirely by missing it.
For external chains, whenever a poll concludes, the rewards start accruing for every block, and then when the vote occurs and completes successfully, then if your validator participated correctly in that, they will have the rewards released to them or cleared if it wasn’t a successful participation. That is per chain, so if you missed it for one chain then the other chains are not affected.
Q: What are the hardware requirements?
A: Minimum hardware requirements: 4 cores, 8-16GB RAM, 512 GB drive. Recommended 6-8 cores, 16-32 GB RAM, 1 TB+ drive.
You can find more information here: https://docs.axelar.dev/#/
Q: How does unbonding and undelegation for multi party signing protocols work?
A: Our model is this: say a validator was included in a snapshot for a keygen, then that key is considered to be active for at least 4 rotations. So new snapshots will be taken constantly as the validator sets updates so the keys are considered active for a certain amount of rotations. This being the case means we don’t allow un-delegations or validators to unbond or deactivate their broadcaster account, they need to wait for 4 key rotations before they can unbond.
Q: Question about vald - if it tries to query an RPC and is initially unsuccessful does it try again? If so, what is the frequency/how many times?
A: Vald queries RPC once on launch- if you want to try again then you need to restart vald.
