There’s a Council proposal to increase the number of validator slots to 375 which will likely come into effect in September.
Currently there’s 370 active validator slots and depending on how the coin is doing, there’s usually 10-20 validators in waiting.
Adding five slots is reasonable but unnecessary. It will help a bit with network resilience and make it easier to get elected.
After the recent TM policy changes which made Team Multipler more evenly distributed among TM-backed nodes and rewarded for its stake, some poorly performing nodes can no longer get elected.
It’s not perfect because while those nodes may be performing poorly, not all have a high failure rate. At the same time some folks with plenty of coins and nodes that both perform poorly and have high precomp failure rates still get elected. But it is what it is.
In this situation it’s not hard to get elected with a decent-performing node that doesn’t have unplanned downtime.
My PRIDE node gets elected without TM (I have 1 xx TM on it) and without me staking it. My other two nodes, ENVY and SLOTH, perform better than PRIDE and I nominate them with over 400K xx, so they don’t need a lot in 3rd party nominations to get elected.
Adding an extra node would make it three non-TM nodes for me, and with 400K xx they’d be around 30% funded, so I think I could get this done.
But the price of xx coin is currently low, so increasing the number of nodes from three to four doesn’t seem so attractive - more work and time for a small extra gain.
For now I’ll pass this opportunity and revisit if the price of the coin goes up.