We are happy to announce that the initial selection for Orange Group VIII BetaNet node operators can be found here.
As in all our previous selections, our primary goal is to accept the most complete applications that indicate they could meet the hardware and bandwidth requirements and that provide thoughtful answers to the questions posed.
Other factors that play an important role in the decision are the comments the applicants receive in the BetaNet forum and their willingness to respond to questions or provide additional information.
In this initial selection, we have rejected nodes that have not provided their specs or that have not indicated they can meet the previously announced minimum requirements. Additionally we have reached out to a number of nodes to ask for further clarification and are offering them the opportunity to provide some missing information before we publish the final decision. As always, if no response is received, these nodes will not be added to the list.
We have a few countries that are over represented in the network. As we all know, decentralization of the network is key to all of our success, so we need to manage this. These countries are Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and Canada; with the Russian nodes being the most over represented. While we do not want to exclude eager node operators there were, for example, 102 nodes either in Russia or with operators from Russia in the last pay period. As a result, we will be accepting no new applicants from Russia in this period. This may have to extend to the other three countries in the future (they were home to 44, 43, and 52 nodes respectively).
The Russian nodes for this application period will not be rejected outright, but rather automatically deferred to the next period. With the release of the xxDK, performance on the network has become much more important and we are expecting to work with node operators, specifically those with significantly out of spec upload speed (significantly below 100megabits/s) in order to shore up performance issues. While we hope to retain all nodes, we expect this will cause significant attrition which will open slots for deferred nodes.
For other nodes that were not selected, please keep in mind that this is an initial selection and is subject to change. We strongly encourage participation in the forum and welcome your responses so please let us know why we should reconsider your application!
Thank you,
xx network node team
