Commission and Foundation Nodes

Understand the commission and foundation nodes in Aleph Zero's staking process, a secure blockchain with zk-proof technology.

The Aleph Zero Foundation (AZF) used to run 10 nodes to ensure the stability of the network in the early stages of the validation program. However, as per the decentralization roadmap, on December 17th 2024 9 out of 10 AZF nodes were stopped in favor of community nodes.

At the current stage of evolution of the Aleph Zero platform, the Aleph Zero Foundation runs only one validator node: all of the other nodes are run by community validators. The only remaining Foundation validator is called AZF/Turing and its address is 5CcZnvQmvNJviAxpnmZKVM9aYtfoyRsE4YKoTig9jWBTW8zH

In the previous stage of our journey towards decentralization, right after the introduction of staking on Aleph Zero, but before any members of the community were able to join the validator ranks, all the Foundation validators charged 0% commission from nominators.

This changed in early December 2022, when the Aleph Zero Mainnet welcomed community validators. At that time, to avoid so-called "commission wars" among validators, a minimum commission of 2% was introduced for all validators. Hence, the Foundation Validators began to charge a 2% commission.

To improve the decentralization of Aleph Zero by incentivizing nominators to nominate community validators (see https://alephzero.org/blog/mainnet-validator-commission-schedule/ for details), the following schedule of increasing Foundation nodes' commission and the global minimal commission was announced in December 2022:

• Dec 16th, 2022: Foundation nodes — 3.5%,

• Dec 30th, 2022: Foundation nodes — 5%,

• Jan 13th, 2023: Foundation nodes — 6.5%; Minimum for everyone — 3%),

• Jan 27th, 2023: Foundation nodes — 8%; Minimum for everyone — 4%),

• Feb 10th, 2023: Foundation nodes — 9.5%; Minimum for everyone — 5%),

• Feb 24th, 2023: Foundation nodes — 11%,

• Mar 10th, 2023: Foundation nodes — 12.5%,

The goal of the above scheme was to reach the state where at least 50% of all staked AZERO are with community validators. This goal has been reached with the commission of the Foundation nodes set to 12.5%.