DOT Validator Alliance was originally started as a group of various Polkadot communities (founding members were Polkadotters, Stakenode and PromoTeam) that believe in the importance of independent and community-oriented validators for the sake of decentralization of the whole Polkadot ecosystem. This narrative is still what we are thriving for but unfortunately, the situation is different now — and we realized that we can’t be the only ones fighting the battle for a better, decentralized future.

We have already seen a change of tide on Kusama and Polkadot — major staking companies are taking a bigger slice of the staking pie every day and small validators struggle to get into the active set even more. Parachain collator slots used to be dedicated to reputable community members who really care about the success of the project — now we experience staking businesses to spin up more and more collators, especially on Proof of Stake parachains like Moonbeam to just strive for profit.

This is not how Satoshi Nakamoto imagined a trustless society, full of independent individuals and communities that not only run the network itself but also support its users.

Although we united in order to tackle these problems, we feel that our role in the ecosystem is still rather minor and we can’t really influence where things are going. Also, in the meanwhile, some other initiatives rising up from the Dotsama community have appeared — for instance, Chaos DAO whose members care deeply about the ecosystem, started to spin up their own collators to support projects and fund their community activities at the same time.

In the light of these events, we have decided to open our doors and give birth to DOT Validator Alliance DAO — a place where all independent, community-oriented validators gather, support each other and share their valuable knowledge to strengthen the entire ecosystem and provide the best possible service for various blockchains, be it parachains or the relay chain itself.

The bootstrap

This newly formed organization will be composed of the original members who will transparently vote on accepting new DAOists and take decisions related to the Alliance and its own treasury. Potential new members are welcome to introduce themselves in a #alliance-candidates channel on our Discord server.

We will select one candidate every few weeks in order to bolster the strength of the alliance and to create a body that will promote the spirit of decentralization within the Polkadot ecosystem and its parachains.

Each of these new “DAOists” will immediately receive equal voting rights and become a full member if approved. Anyone with prior validating experience can apply within our Discord and we will give everyone the same treatment and fair feedback.

The future

Once there are new members who will bring some fresh air into our DAO, we will start defining our goals and future initiatives. The founding principles remain the same (as reflected in our manifesto) — seek decentralization, provide support to parachain teams and have top-notch technical knowledge regarding running the DotSama infrastructure. The goals are clear but the means of achieving them are yet to be seen — if we are to succeed in our mission, we need to gather as many DAOists as we can to make sure we are on the right path and ensure we will become a strong voice in our beloved ecosystem.

End game

We believe that DVA DAO can become one of the key players in the ecosystem in regard to the operation of various pieces of infrastructure. We are already quite a skillful organization and most of the members are already an important part of the ecosystem

• Most of us are already part of 1KV program
• We run collators on almost all parachains
• We already lead different initiatives, such as the decentralization of common-good parachain collators
• All of us already have their own server infrastructure
• We are well-versed in best practices like monitoring, alerting, etc
• We are involved in and work with different parachain projects, thus gathering a lot of various knowledge from all the sources

So, opening the gates to new, passionate node operators will only benefit the entire ecosystem thanks to our experience and shared knowledge. There are already successful entities fighting for a more decentralized future — be it ChaosDAO, IBP (Dotters) and others that are already enriching the ecosystem with their hard work. Our only hope is that DVA becoming a DAO is a step in the right direction and we will join these already existing initiatives in a fight for a better future of the best ecosystem that is out there, DotSama!