Show more validator information

UI/UX Suggestions
1

Anchor gets most of its revenue from collateral staking rewards, which come from locked-in bAssets. Likewise, users who bond their assets are also able to claim rewards for holding bAssets. Therefore, Anchor and bAsset hodlers should want to maximize the return from their bAssets, which are tokenized representations of bonded/staked assets.

There are many benefits to Anchor’s bAssets; they shared slashing risk, they offer immediate liquidity rather than having to wait the 21-day undelegation period, and holders can be confident in them because all the validators have been whitelisted. Yet, there are still some drawbacks to holding bAssets as opposed to regular staking that Anchor could help address. Thus , I ask:

Please consider improving the Bond > Mint > Validator selection, by showing more data.

The list shows only the names of validators–and to many, these names are arbitrary. I would guess that many would simply choose a validator randomly (as I did). Having such little amount of information makes it difficult for users to make an informed decision on where to delegate their assets. Users would need to refer to the docs, investigate each validator on a block explorer, and then compare using information from several different places.

In contrast, the Terra Station > Staking screen shows much more information about the validator all in one place:
-Voting power could perhaps indicate to a user that the validator may be widely trusted, or they decide to delegate elsewhere to try to limit the voting majority of any one entity.
-Self-delegation can show how much the validator has riding on their work, thereby increasing trust.
-Validator commission simply shows how much of a cut the validator takes from the block rewards. (Terra Station offers many well-performing validators with 0% commission, while all of Anchor’s whitelisted validators take some commission–some as high as 20%!)
-Uptime clearly indicates reliability and also translates to higher rewards to the delegator.

Displaying this information to users allows them to make better decisions on how much reliability, return (from block rewards), and promotion of decentralization they want. bAsset minters will speak with their delegation which qualities they prefer, and over time we should have a better distribution of delegation, and therefore more block rewards, from this. I see no reason why Anchor can’t display this information, nor why it wouldn’t want to, as it would clearly benefit the protocol, its lenders, its borrowers, and bAsset holders.

Thank you for your consideration.

P.S.
As a bonus, perhaps consider whitelisting some lower commission validators (0% would be great) and maybe some kind of rule where increasing commission automatically de-whitelists the validator.

2

Wouldn’t equally distributing delegations to all validators make the process more simpler & efficient?

3

I agree that distributing delegations equally would be simpler, as it’s easy to understand and compute. But, I don’t think it would be best necessarily; doing so would forego many of the benefits I brought up earlier.

Return on block rewards could be increased by preferentially delegating more to validators with low commission, and fewer to validators with high commission, so I don’t think equal is best for economic efficiency. I personally think 20% commission is just too high.

However, removing the validator selection could also be good because the simplicity of the interface is also important. Plus, a noobie choosing a random validator without any other information seems needless. It would also save work on designing new UI.

With that, some concerns arise with the idea of it being automated. Automatically distributing to all validators could open exploits if not crafted carefully. What’s to stop a validator from increasing their commission? and to what limit? A validator charging 100% would obviously be very problematic for Anchor. Other concerns arise in regard to other validator data, for example, if a validator were to suddenly have low uptime, or too much voting power. Abuse may be possible.

Some other options that go with removing Validator selection from the Mint screen:

  1. Balancer Smart Contract:
    Instead of manual selection, there could be a smart contract that finds a way to distribute the delegation of assets based on many validator data points (e.g., delegate more to validators with low commission, high uptime, etc.), but I imagine that optimizing all the technical implementation details for such a plan could be quite challenging.

  2. Equal distribution, but with stricter Whitelist qualification rules:
    Anchor could also consider stricter rules about qualifying for and maintaining a position on Anchor’s Whitelist. It may not be ideal, but it’s simpler, it cleans up the UI, and it could at least prevent disastrous problems that could be caused by validators (e.g., increasing commission too high).