This post proposes a cost-neutral framework to onboard other independent community collators into Hydration’s active collator set without increasing the current network's reward expenditure.

By having team-operated collators maintain their vital role as network safety infrastructure while redirecting their block production rewards back to the Collator Rewards Pot (or any other equivalent strategy), Hydration can onboard potentially two (2) new independent community collators at close to ~0% additional cost.

1. Motivation & Problem Statement

Currently, adding new community collators faces an economic constraint: each active collator draws a fixed payout from the network reward pot (~455 HDX per 6h / ~2,730 HDX per day / ~81,000 HDX per month / ~1M HDX per year).

Expanding the active set arbitrarily would increase the budget required.

At the same time, the core IGL team currently maintains two nodes in the active set (MRQ and CL0WLATOR). Team-operated nodes certainly provide critical stability during emergency times and network stress, as well as valuable debugging information for ongoing developments, but they also consume part of this fixed reward budget, even though, by assumption, core development is already supported through other sources of funding.

2. The Proposal:

Retain Team Safety Nodes: The core IGL team keeps their collator nodes running in the active set (MRQ and CL0WLATOR). The objective of making debugging of block production and other node issues faster remains fulfilled.

Redirect Team Rewards: The team-operated nodes redirect their session payouts (~455 HDX / session) back to the Collator Rewards Pot (or an equivalent solution).

Onboard 2 Community Collators: The exact reward capacity freed up by the team nodes is reallocated to onboard potentially two (2) independent community-run collators.

Key Benefits:

• Almost Zero Impact: The protocol spends the same amount of HDX on collator rewards as it does today (additional refs can be considered so that both MRQ and CL0WLATOR receive compensation for the associated hardware/energy costs).
• Preserved Team Oversight: The team maintains its active safety net without operational compromise.
• Ecosystem Alignment: Collator rewards flow to active, long-term community members and independent operators who run dedicated infrastructure for the network.

3. Community Feedback

This is an invitation to the Hydration community, fellow collators, and the core development team to discuss this topic.

4. Disclosure & Declaration of Intent

In the interest of full transparency to the Hydration DAO and community:

• Author’s Intent: I am submitting this post as an active community member with the direct intention of applying for one of the proposed community collator seats (if we reach a consensus).
• Current Operational Status: I already have a fully synced dedicated bare-metal node ready to begin authoring blocks.
• Open Competition: I fully encourage and welcome other independent community members to present their infrastructure for the second proposed seat (or just compete for both) to ensure Hydration gets the most reliable operators possible.

Note: Some might know me by the name of KernelAgent