More Great Algo News

Algorand, together with our community, is building a trusted, public and permissionless infrastructure for the borderless economy. In support of further decentralization of the Algorand ecosystem, we are launching a pilot program for running relay nodes on the Algorand network. The purpose of the initiative is twofold: first to enable more parties to take an active role in our community and second, to increase the diversity and number of relay nodes, ensuring the continued health and operation of the network.

The Algorand Foundation therefore invites interested parties to submit proposals for participation in this pilot program. In this initial stage, we are seeking a small number of parties to deploy and run high-quality relay nodes. The scope of this initial program is for six months starting in Q4 2021, but we intend to extend this scope if the pilot is successful.

We will be considering several different aspects of the proposals that we receive, with a minimum acceptable hardware specification including;

8 vCPU 16GB RAM 1TB high performance disk At least 5TB monthly egress traffic allowance Fast connection with low latency, at least 1Gbps both ways The technical specification for the relay nodes to be deployed However, proposers can commit to larger specifications if they believe that this offers an advantage in terms of performance or reliability.

The service-level that the proposers commit to (including time to update whenever there is a new version of the software). The geographical region where these nodes will be deployed. The type of deployment (commercial clouds vs. in-house, etc.). The compensation that the proposers will be seeking from the Algorand Foundation. We will consider all the above criteria when evaluating proposals, aiming to award a diverse set of relays. We expect to enroll between five and ten parties in this program, depending on the quality of the proposals that we receive.

One goal of this pilot program is to develop monitoring tools for relay nodes. Thus, in addition to running the nodes, participants will be required to monitor their own performance (and potentially that of other relays). In particular, they will be required to enable the telemetry feature on the Algorand software or any other monitoring feature that may be added in the future.

The Algorand Foundation will also monitor the relays’ performance, and will rate them each month as “outstanding”, “adequate”, or “poor”. Compensation for the relay-node runners will be tied to performance: we anticipate that “outstanding” relays will receive the full monthly compensation amount that was agreed upon, “adequate” will get 75% of it, and “poor” will only receive 25% of the monthly compensation.

The node runners will be required to have their relay continuously up to date with the latest stable version of the Algorand software. For information on program criteria, important dates and how to apply go to our program submissions portal.