#Walrus
@Walrus 🦭/acc
This year, the Committee Selection process in the Walrus Protocol serves as the foundational mechanism for maintaining a decentralized and reliable storage layer. This process is governed by a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) model built on the Sui blockchain, which determines which nodes have the right to store data and earn rewards during a specific time window, known as an epoch.
1. Stake-Based Eligibility
The primary factor in committee selection is the total amount of WAL tokens staked to a node. Node operators must hold or be backed by a sufficient stake to be eligible. Any WAL token holder can delegate their tokens to specific node operators, and this delegation directly increases a node's total stake weight. A higher stake weight significantly increases a node's probability of being selected for the active storage committee for the upcoming epoch.
2. Epoch-Based Rotation
The Walrus network operates in fixed time intervals called epochs, typically lasting 14 days. At the transition between epochs, the protocol executes a multi-stage committee reconfiguration protocol.
Triggering the Change: A specific function on the Sui blockchain, initiate_epoch_change, acts as the trigger to refresh the committee members based on current stake distributions.
Handling Churn: This reconfiguration is designed to handle "churn"—the natural process of nodes joining or leaving the network—without interrupting data availability for existing blobs.
3. Incentivized Selection & Market Pricing
Selection is not just about stake; it is also tied to a node's market-driven pricing and reputation.
Price Proposals: At the start of each epoch, every node in the active committee proposes its own price for storage services.
Stake-Weighted Percentile: To prevent price manipulation, the protocol sorts these proposals by stake weight and selects the price at the 66.67th percentile as the network's storage fee for that epoch. This ensures that reputable, highly-staked nodes have the most influence on pricing.
4. Continuous Enforcement and Slashing
Once selected, a node's participation in the committee is contingent on its performance. Nodes must continuously provide Proofs of Availability (PoA) to show they are still holding their assigned data fragments (slivers). By 2026, nodes that fail these checks or go offline for extended periods face slashing penalties, where a portion of their staked WAL is burned, which in turn reduces their future probability of committee selection.