The final selection of the Orange Group VIII BetaNet node operators can be found here.
You can read more details about how the initial decision was made here which carries over to the final decision.
The final Orange Group VIII selection consists of 44 nodes in 17 countries around the world, distributed in 6 geographic bins: Americas, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
Applications remained open for a second period of public comment. We reached out to a number of applicants to ask for further clarification. We also encouraged nodes to continue to actively participate in the forum and answer any questions posed by the node community.
Taking into consideration the further detail they provided we made the decision to add 2 more nodes to the list, bringing the final number up from 42 to 44 nodes. We have not included nodes that we did not receive a response from in the final decision.
As we mentioned in the initial selection, we have a few countries that are over represented in the network. As decentralization of the network is key to all of our success, we made the decision to not accept new applicants from Russia as part of Orange VIII. We have also extended this to nodes from the Ukraine and have not been able to include a select number of nodes that have reached out to us in the final selection.
The Russian and Ukranian nodes that met the requirements for this application period are not rejected outright, but will be automatically deferred to the next application period (April).
We want to thank everyone who commented and helped us with this process!
Thank you,
xx network node team
