How are validators on Radix selected? | The Radix Knowledge Base

Validators are nodes that vote in “consensus”: approving and maintaining a record of transactions.

A node must first register with the network to become a validator. This allows token holders to stake (“delegate”) tokens to it and lets the network know that the node wishes to be considered for inclusion in the validator set. Registered nodes will be visible on both the Radix Dashboard dApp website.

Token holders can make their own choice about which validator they wish to delegate staked tokens to, allowing the XRD token holding community to effectively vote on the best validators (and receive incentive rewards when those validators do the right thing). Delegating stake is an important aspect of network security, and you should choose which validators to stake to wisely, and the value of your Liquid Stake Units may go down if the validator you stake to is not performant and / or reliable

At the beginning of each epoch, the Radix Protocol will automatically select the 100 validator nodes with the most delegated stake to become the validator set. This stake is the sum of both self-stake and delegated stake. The validator set then participates in consensus until the end of that epoch, and the cycle repeats.

Radix is therefore fully decentralized and permissionless.

For the fully sharded Radix Xi’an mainnet version, there will be no limit to how many validators can participate.

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