It is time to talk a bit more about one of the singularities of Ark. The delegate system had time to develop during roughly a year now and made big steps during this time. There has been a lot of activity and the history of the first year would sure be an interesting topic for an article on it’s own. I am far more interested in looking forward so lets have a look at the current state of delegate politics after clarifying the basics.

How does the Ark governance work?

The Ark network itself is operated by the servers of 51 elected delegates and additional volunteer servers. One server of the Ark network is usually called a node. There are two different types of nodes in the network. Delegate nodes form the backbone which is extended by relay nodes. Consensus behaves very similar to other cryptocurrency networks. Every node of the network talks with other nodes in the network exchanging information about blocks which contain the transactions allowing the network to decide which transactions are valid. Delegate nodes behave pretty much the same like relay nodes but they are allowed to create new blocks which is called forging.

The delegates are the main responsible to operate, secure and decide on changes to the network. They kind of form the executive government of the Ark network. They are voted into their forging positions by the holders of Ark. Each Ark coin counts as one vote for one delegate. As soon as an Ark holder registers his vote for a certain delegate all his coins count as votes for this delegate. Thus all ark holders together are kind of the legislative government which elects delegates into the executive government positions. This means that in the Ark democracy the most powerful entity is the coin holders and voters and they can influence the network according to their total balance of Ark coins. On top of that most delegates share most of the block rewards with their voters offering a passive income option for Ark holders.

Bearing that in mind it becomes obvious that is really important for the Ark blockchain to have active voters which elect good representatives acting in their interest. So lets have a look at the different delegates.

Delegate Categories

In order to get an overview about the current delegate politics I will put delegates into different categories. One delegate can be in multiple categories and these categories are my own interpretation and subject to errors and changes. I think they give a good overview of the delegates non the less. Feel free to add comments if you don’t agree with some of my category assignments.

Private Delegates (15)

There are quite some delegates which are supported by a few big voters which have private agreements with their delegate. There is usually not much information about these delegates and you have to contact them personally for more information. There are currently 15 delegates with privately agreed profit sharing:

ares, arkane, arknet, bbclubark, doc, emotive_ark, forginator, hippopotamus, kolap, pitbull, rasputin, samuray, superstar, therock, tibonos

Special Requirement Delegates (3)

Some delegates impose special requirements on voters to be eligible for profit sharing. I listed them in an own category as they do not fit well into the private nor public delegate category.

arkx will only accept voters up to 1.6MM

biz_private will only accept voters with more than 20k

yin does only accept new voters at certain times

Team Delegates (5)

The official Ark team states that they want to hand over the network to the community over time. But they also recruit new team members out of the community. This leads to kind of a shifting tide between more or less delegates which are member of the official team. Currently these 5 delegates are most likely tightly related to the official team:

arknet, chris, dr10, quarkpool, tibonos

Public Delegates (33)

There are currently 33 delegates sharing their rewards with voters without having to negotiate a special deals nor special requirements. If you fulfill their conditions you will automatically get a share from them. Even though they accept most votes please check floors and caps and other conditions of these delegates before voting. These delegates are:

anamix, arkgallery, arkland, arkmoon, arkpool, arkship, arkworld, arky, axi, bioly, biz_classic, calidelegate, chris, criptodogg, dafty, del, doom, dr10, dutchdelegate, ghostfaceuk, goose, jamiec79, jarunik, ozpooldelegate, pieface, quarkpool, ravelou, ryano, sharkark, sharkpool, thefoundry, toad, wes

Pure Public Pools (21)

There is a number of delegates which focus on running the delegate and offering profit sharing as a pool without additional contributions. There are currently 21 of these pool only delegates:

anamix, arkgallery, arkmoon, arkpool, arkship, axi, bioly, calidelegate, criptodogg, del, doom, dr10, ghostfaceuk, goose, jamied79, ozpooldelegate, quarkpool, ravelou, sharkpool, toad, wes

Contributing Delegates (15)

Besides the pure pools there are public and some (2) private delegates with significant contributions to the Ark network and community. They work for Ark as community members of offer additional services and bring Ark forward. There are currently 15 actively contributing delegates:

arkland, arkmoon, arkworld, arkx, arky, biz_classic, biz_private, chris, dafty, ductchdelegate, jarunik, pieface, ryano, sharkark, thefoundry

Most of these delegates are active in the Ark development community and you can check their contribution on their github profiles. I did not include the official team members delegates here.

Related Delegates

In order to avoid concentration of power and to keep the delegate system decentralized the general opinion is that one individual person (or entity) should not be in charge of multiple delegates. Currently there don’t seem to be any known double delegates but some delegates are closely related with each other.

The closely related delegates are:

biz_classic and biz_private are run jointly by goldenpepe and moonman

bbclubark and emotive_ark seem to be related

arkpool and quarkpool seem to be friends

doc, forginator and therock seem to be operated by the same investor group

Current Delegate Competition

The current top 51 seems to have stabilized somewhat for now. There has been quite some action in the lower slots of the rankings in the last weeks. But now it looks like digitron is on rank 52 for quite some time without being able to get into the top 51 again.

Either digitron starts an offensive to get in again or we need a new active and promising delegate proposal in order to stir up the top 51. As we have seen in the past it is also likely that some forging delegates lose support and drop out which would also reshuffle the ranking and trigger another competition for the slots.

There is still huge competition despite the current stability and several delegates increased their sharing ration in the last month.

More Information

There are several resources allowing each voter to form his own opinion about the different delegates and their proposals. I highly encourage everyone to look into several delegates before voting and supporting a delegate to represent your stake in Ark.

Please be aware that my report might be biased as I am a delegate myself. It only states my opinion and is based on my own research.

Jarunik