Context & Background
First off, I want to say that I have massive respect for the Archway core team. I’ve been here since the early days, won hackathons, and deeply believe in the original vision: a truly developer-first L1. The team has been incredibly supportive of my projects, and the potential we saw at Genesis was immense.
However, the reality of the market and the current state of our network require a harsh but necessary conversation about the math of our incentives.
The Core Problem: The 50/50 Illusion
Archway attempted to strike a “fair” balance with a 50/50 reward split between developers and validators. Unfortunately, in practice, this has created a fatal economic flaw.
I recently published a detailed post-mortem on this dynamic here: https://x.com/wotorimovako/status/2047576348160409620
To summarize the issue:
- Income Asymmetry: Validators earn from the entire mass of network activity and inflation, often receiving staking grants without complex operational risks. Developers only earn from their specific dApp.
- The Liquidity Black Hole: Developers spend months building, marketing, and bringing real value/users to the chain. Validators, needing to cover fiat server costs, systematically sell their rewards. This means the liquidity created by builders is constantly drained by infrastructure providers.
- Result: A static 50/50 split kills builder motivation. We are losing the exact people who are supposed to drive the network’s value.
The Proposal
To revitalize Archway and actually fulfill the “developer-first” promise, I propose we radically restructure the Reward Split parameters.
- Immediate Transition (Years 1-3): Change the reward split to 90% for Developers and 10% for Validators (or even 95/5). We need to aggressively stimulate the builder ecosystem to bring life back to the chain.
- Long-Term Cap: Establish a hard rule that validator rewards from the protocol split should never exceed 10% in the future.
Why Validators Should Support This
I know validators reading this might instinctively vote “NO” on taking a pay cut. But look at the token price and network activity.
10% of a thriving, billion-dollar ecosystem with hundreds of active dApps is worth exponentially more than 50% of a stagnant chain. If we don’t aggressively incentivize developers to return and build here, the absolute value of validator rewards will continue to approach zero anyway. Security is vital, but security for an empty network is pointless. We need to protect the value creators from the constant sell pressure of server maintainers.
I am opening this up for discussion. Let’s fix the math before it’s too late.
What are your thoughts, both builders and validators?