Polkadot’s Update to 160 DOTs as minimum nomination limit: The Reason

This is a short term upgrade proposed to increase the limit of DOTs for nomination from 120 DOTs to 160, maintaining the increase of 40 DOTs that the network has had throughout this period of updating the nominator limit through governance. The reason for this is the combination of the following:

• Polkadot’s 0.9.16 upgrade was scheduled to contain a fix that would completely remove the 120 DOTs limit. This explained thoroughly in the monthly staking report of January 2022. After the 0.9.16 update, the nomination limit would move to a dynamic system based on demand, rather than a fixed entry barrier.
• Due to some unforeseen issues arisen after the deployment of 0.9.16 in Kusama, 0/9.16 has not yet been proposed to Polkadot.
• In the meantime, the number of nominators in Polkadot has been increased to reach the 22500 limit.

As a consequence, we propose to temporarily increase the nomination limit to 160 DOTs. This allows for the permissionless chill_other transaction to be used and prune the number of nominators, in order to keep the nomination ecosystem of Polkadot active, whilst we wait for the enactment of runtime 0.9.16 on Polkadot.

Proposal details: All values are unchanged except for minNominatorBond.

• Call hash: 0xb2286cbfdd18c265572d3305754b0dbe8ba1fd8da40ef48ff0d5ef40912f2291

• Call data: 0x0717a00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001e457000001b0040000015a

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