After reaching the 900 validators milestone on Kusama, we are reviewing network metrics to decide on further steps.
The full report can be found HERE.
Recommended steps:
The general recommendation of the team is to pause any increase of validators from now on in preparation for parachain deployment: BABE and GRANDPA are running smoothly, but the parachains consensus logic is far heavier and more complex and will need optimization to reach that point. As such, the parachains team is planning to only use some limited subset of the validators initially (perhaps 50, 100, or 200) randomly selected each session for parachain consensus. Those selected validators to do parachain consensus will receive the bulk of the rewards for each session. Over time, the amount of rewards each validator receives will be roughly equal, but increasing the validator count relative to the amount of validators participating in parachains will lead to increased variance of rewards. For this reason, the parachains team recommends keeping the amount of validators low to achieve an outcome of low reward variance, an earlier launch of parachains and consensus stability.
Closely monitor the MinStake/AvgStaked ratio for network security reasons.