Edward Kim Speaks Out on Terra Classic’s Allnodes Validator Concern

Allnodes will raise its commission in the coming months.

Terra Classic core developer Edward Kim lent his voice to the discussion about Allnodes’ operations as a validator on the blockchain in a Twitter thread yesterday.

I prefer to speak over video chat as I believe a lot can be lost in translation over async chat and other mediums, and have been doing so for the past several days. First, I believe that @gadikian passionately brought forth an issue in the ecosystem …

— Edward Kim (@edk208) January 25, 2023

The developer noted that Notional Labs developer Jacob Gadikian was right to express concern over the operations of the validator. According to Kim, all community members should operate their validator nodes in the ideal situation. The core developer, who doubles as the director of the Terra Grants Foundation, said this while sharing materials that could help users start running a node.

In addition, Kim points out that Allnodes will increase its commission next week to incentivize users to stake elsewhere and reduce its alarming 40% voting power. According to the TGF director, the validator will increase it by 1% daily till the commission gets to 10%, asserting that he has proposed further increases if the voting power does not significantly decrease.

It is worth noting that Allnodes already announced this plan at the end of last year.

Being the top validator is a great responsibility. We are aware of the concerns regarding our voting power. Based on this, we are letting our @terrac_money community know that for decentralization purposes our commission for staking $LUNC will increase to 10% after Feb 1, 2023. pic.twitter.com/l52XNDk8NG

— Allnodes (@Allnodes) December 31, 2022

While the core developer’s statements appear to have appeased the majority of the Terra Classic community, Gadikian points out that Kim fails to address the issue of Allnodes holding the private keys of validators using its service. 

Notably, Tobias Andersen, AKA Zaradar, another Terra Classic core developer, has argued that this is not a problem as there is no economic incentive for the validator to use the keys in its custody. According to Zaradar, if Allnodes acted maliciously, it would tarnish its image and open itself up to lawsuits, which could ruin the business.

However, others like PFC Validator point out that it still poses a security risk. The validator argues that an exploit or government directive can shut down the chain due to the centralization of power and data.

According to PFC Validator, the only solution for these validators is to set up new nodes, as the seed phrases can not be changed even if they stop using Allnodes’ service.

Meanwhile, Zaradar has cautioned that forcing non-technical members of the community to run a node would be worse for security.

The debates on Allnodes operations yesterday culminated in Jacob Gadikian deciding to step down from the Joint Layer 1 Taskforce. As reported yesterday, it poses a potential setback to the team where he worked as one of two full-time developers.