# Onboarding & Selection Process

At a fundamental level, Validator Operators (VO) must first ensure that they:

1. Are already accepted and participating as a validator on the SUI network for at least 2 months
2. Have high uptime relative to validator set, >99.9% uptime
3. Have a proven track record of running validators 
4. Have implemented the best practices around the security of infra, keys management, failover processes, risk management, and business continuity planning.

Smoove will start with a permissioned validator set by conducting periodic screening and onboarding of new validators. The frequency of adding new validators will depend on the amount of SUI staked and the growth of the validator set. 

**Process to participate once mainnet goes live:**

The process of joining are as follows:

1. The Validator Operator (VO) reach out to the Smoove team via official Discord to express their interest by sharing a short introduction. 
2. The Smoove team will share a form to be filled out by the applicant. 
3. Once submitted, the Smoove team will review the application internally. 
4. Smoove team will notify the whitelisted VOs within 7 days via Discord for further integration instructions. 
5. Once the integration is done, the whitelisted validators will participate in Smoove's active validator set by the next epoch. 

**In the future**

Upon the mainnet's release, Smoove will actively track and monitor validators, assessing their

a. staking limits based on amount of Validator's stake vs Delegators' stake\
b. competitiveness in terms of Reference Gas Price vs gas survey bid\
c. reliability in achieving Checkpoints\
d. performance in terms of number of Gas Units processed

using on-chain metrics provided by the protocol. Ultimately, Smoove aims to evolve into a permission-less set of validators with a proven track record of profitability and efficiency in validating transactions.

However, the protocol's design may lead to the consolidation of stake on the top few validators, posing a potential issue. In such cases, Smoove's selection matrix will expand to rebalance the stake among other performant validators who may have not accumulated enough stake but deserve a chance to participate.


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