Mere days after deciding how to deal with a whale in a nominator-friendly manner, I have a new problem.
Figures in first column shows number of nominators for next era, while column two shows total number of nominators:
This screenshot was taken during era 98 and shows how this whale squeezed out other nominators and introduced instability to my nodes.
Few days ago the two nodes had over 20 and 40 validators, respectively.
If nominators were evenly distributed across validators, my nodes’ nominators wouldn’t have left. But because my nodes are “overstaked” and most others are not (the whale currently nominates around 10 validators out of 360), smaller nominators have been leaving.
So the first problem here is I’ve lost more than 50% of nominators in several days.
The second problem is on the smaller node which is newer, there’s now only a handful of nominators and should the whale leave, XXV2 may fail to get elected.
These are real problems and illustrate that kicking or increasing commission to chase the whale away may be better than getting in this situation. I even increased XXV’s commission from 5 to 15 percent, but it didn’t work. (On XXV2 I have fixed commission plan in place so I will keep it within that plan which currently calls for no more than 5%.)
Now I have to think what to do once the whale leaves.
In the worst case I may need to adjust commission rate more often and on short notice, but that’s not going to happen unless you see it on my About page.