Number of Active Participants

1

I am undertaking research on different PoS chains. I understand Algorand allows holders to opt-in to participating in consensus by submitting an online key registration transaction for a valid participation key.

I would like to find out how many active participation keys exist today and, ideally, understand how many keys existed in the past.

How can I go about doing that?

2

A good metric is the number of accounts that voted in the last 7 days.
It was 352 when this post was written.
See https://metrics.algorand.org/, tab decentralization.

You can parse manually the blockchain to figure out how many accounts were online at any given time.
However, it may be a bit of an overestimate, as some users may mark their account online and not participate.
This is considered malicious behavior, but unfortunately that happens.

The number of voters over the last 7 days exclude those non-voting online accounts.

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3

Excellent, thank you. Would you know how to obtain this metric in a more easily parseable form (e.g. as CSV or JSON)?

4

I don’t think it’s available.
Feel free to suggest it on the #dashboard channel on Discord.

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5
  1. There’s no metric for Testnet is it?
  2. Is it true that validating nodes are a subset of participants nodes? meaning a small number of participant nodes is chosen randomly (but the more stakes the node has, the higher chance it is chosen) to do the validating work?
  3. Does number of validating nodes affect how long it takes for the block to be committed (since it has to validated by all validaters)?

Thank you

6

I’ll try to answer the last two questions -

  1. Yes. All validating nodes are participating nodes, hence they are a subset of the participating nodes.
  2. No. The number of validating nodes doesn’t affect the round time. The consensus algorithm works by assigning each vote a weight. The weight is proportional to the stake.
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7

Very helpful. Thank you!