Not sure how many of you noticed, but I see over 120 new validators added to the network in the last 24 hours (and counting to now 200+). No trades and purchases of PRV tokens though, and no price movement. Is this the core team adding more nodes for supporting additional shared pools or some big whale creating hundreds of new nodes?
Regardless, it looks crazy - like a new validator added every 2-3 minutes! 
Anyone has any intel on what’s going on? 
Good question. Watching for any responses. Large whale would mean large purchases, unless they already held it.
And they are still going…wow…
165 new validators, all in a row…so far…
Yep, I want to clarify what’s going on. Those vNodes which you noticed comes from the PRV collected in the Pool V2.
Earnings from those Nodes goes back to the pool to cover reward %
Got it, thanks Andrey! This does mean that the potential reward for all current node owners or validators just went down by roughly 10% though, right?
Not exactly. The chance to be randomly selected changed, as it will with every node (either physical or virtual) added to the network.
We do need this grow though, to move on to the next step on the roadmap which includes expanding the network. When that happens, chances to be selected will change for the better.
Be prepared to see these waves multiple times, over time.
Hi Jamie, yeah that makes sense. I understand the probability of node selection reduced marginally, and it happens every time the network grows. The total rewards pool stays the same though right, the plan for which is to reduce it by 9-10% each year for the next 3-4 years. Unless the core team changes the denominator for the rewards pool or the proportion of the fixed nodes, a 10% jump in validators overnight does constitute a potential reduction in rewards for the general population especially if this jump was not by someone buying all those PRV tokens. In a scenario when a big whale actually bought say 350,000 PRV tokens to create these 200 nodes, that would drive up the value of the token significantly to balance out the impact on the probability of node selection (or be better off). That didn’t happen here though.
I think it would indeed help everyone in the community (especially all validators) if we had some sort of a heads up or an idea that a pump of nodes is coming up (however many times the team plans to do it in a year) to achieve the outlined milestones. May be either announce this in one of the posts, a blog or make a mention on the monthly PRV holders call?
I understand what you are saying, but disagree 
These PRV amounts were already held by current users, otherwise they could not have been used for the Node Pool.
In my opinion not much changed, because:
If we didn’t have the Nood Pool in place, people may have run a vNode themselves, to earn some extra PRV. (We have seen a drop in Nodes after the Nood Pool got installed). It is merely a change in ownership.
We are not trying to hide anything. A heads up is something to consider next time.
Hi @Jamie
does that mean we are going to see the increase of shard and committees soon?
It would seem the node network has expanded to a pretty stable group, especially with the dev team having a solid 160+ new nodes for rewards that would replace the 176 that were going to be pulled offline.
Thanks for your response. Appreciate your time and expertise on the topic.
Fair enough, I understand that perspective. Still unclear if this really means zero impact to existing node owners or validators though. I didn’t know about the part of the drop in nodes being attributed to the node pool, that is interesting to learn. Thanks for sharing!
But are these validators using the locked slots that incognito already enjoys or the 80 slots that the general population has to fight over for random selection.
Seems that if you are going to flood the pool with nodes you should open up more of the locked slots, instead of taking from what little the community has access to.
Hey @andrey. I thought that’s what the fixed validators were covering? What is the purpose of these new ones? Figured you’d actually need less since the compounding interest is now every hour instead of every second or 15 minutes.
To me this looks like a shady move from the team. No one has been informed nor has there been any discussion on this. Now the core team gains even more control over the network, really bad for decentralisation.
You claim the rewards are used to cover the rewards, but these rewards are lower than what is paid now. So what is happening with the difference, goes it into the pockets of the core team?
As the team is running now so many more nodes might be time to open finally all slots at least now to create a fair and decentralized environment.
I added some more nodes, but instead of an increase of earnings I notice a decrease of earnings in my portfolio until now. If it’s a move from the team adding the nodes and taking the slots from our randomly selected ones I think it should’ve been communicated. I thought the team was pulling offline a bunch of nodes? Well, being less selected leads finally to less rewards for the investors. If the solution is the new slots to be opened, I hope this will happen soon… 
This is alarming to me.
What happens when there are so many nodes that it is more profitable for node operators to shut down their nodes and put all of their PRV into the node pool. Thus saturating the node pool making interest rates drop. Not to mention the inevitable centralization by the core / dev team.
I believe the core team and dev team need to prioritize transparency and open communication. Might want to set something up like the builders rewards where users can vote on other changes.
This 
200 nodes will make a very noticeable difference in the current average node earnings that people have been seeing. It will likely reflect in the average earnings that I post on Node Statistics, over the course of the next couple weeks. In the past, increases in nodes has always been balanced out by an increase in PRV price, as people buy PRV to stake their vNode.
This time, theres no corresponding increase in PRV price to balance out the huge increase in validators.
If this is truly a necessary addition of nodes, I agree with Fitz and think you guys should strongly consider opening up some more validator slots, so as to not “penalize” all of us who have been committed to holding onto our nodes for this long now.
I think the APY is fixed on 37% and that has not changed. Just the refresh of the value is now every hour.
Why wasn’t this talked about or discussed with the community in the last monthly video call?