Node Operator Incentivisation

During the offsite at Paris, 2023 - We discussed the possibility of having an incentivisation program for node operators re: sharding.

Problem

With sharding enabled, this may cause issues in meshing of peers and overall message delivery reliability.

Cause

Meshing of peers will be done only between those who operate on the same shard, since shard ids are encoded in the enr of peers. This will cause the network to split from using just one pubsub topic, to many more - leading to smaller subnets forming, with smaller meshes. Message delivery reliability is directly affected by the capability of a node joining the appropriate mesh, which is wholly dependant on discovery.

Effect

Messages are dropped, k-anonymity may not be preserved, attacking a specific shard becomes easier (eclipse).

Solution (potential)

We establish a marketplace for applications to incentivise node operators to be bootstrap peers for given shards. The application would like to have most reliability, and hence it is in their best interest to have as many nodes as possible to help end-users bootstrap to a given shard.

Following is the solution proposed - bootstrap-enr-incentivization

waku-org / bootstrap-enr-incentivization