A few months ago, I made a post about incentivizing public nodes, in which I focus more on third-party funding mechanisms. The solutions could work but they may also not be sustainable.
I didn’t take into account two other revenue streams:
- transaction fees
- protocol emissions
I’m not entirely in favor of introducing fee lanes and whatnot, but we could potentially alter emissions to pay access nodes.
Saito pays its consensus (pillar), routing (sentinel), and access nodes [1, 2].
I’m envisioning a similar solution:
- pillars continue to be rewarded as they are today
- sentinels are paid per pow link
- access nodes are paid for the transactions they forward to sentinels
- sentinels and access nodes are paid from protocol emissions for their participation in confirmed transactions
Alternatively, same model except:
- sentinels are paid per pow link from emissions
- access nodes are paid by users with non-plasma transaction fees
- users can avoid this by running their own infra or connecting to a different node
Anyways, multiple solutions to this problem. Hopefully we solve this one soon.