Prop 3: Increase Max Validators to 70

This proposal marks the completion of 3rd quarter of operations of the mantle-1 mainnet. Since its genesis, the mantle-1 chain has been running stably with no major consensus failures or attacks and has grown to see 96k+ unique wallets and 6.5m+ on-chain transactions. The chain has been clocking in the top 10 chains in cosmos w.r.t weekly active users, IBC transactions and in developer activity. The MantleChain Foundation Delegation Program has evaluated more than 200 applications so far. It has been actively making delegation decisions based purely on the contributions from the validators across technical, community building, and ecosystem expansion fronts. Even so, many great validators are willing to contribute to the project but are unable to participate, being restricted by the 65 max validators count on the chain.

This proposal intends to increase the active validator set of the mantle chain by 5 (MaxValidators=65 to MaxValidators=70).

This proposal is mechanically generated by the AssetMantle team, following the initial chain stabilization plan, for each of the first 5 quarters of chain operation to:

Retire 1 Foundation node

Increase validator set by 5

Re-evaluate foundation delegations for the last quarter and accordingly increase/decrease/remove delegations

Open five new spots in the foundation delegation program

The AssetMantle team's vision for the chain is to become a fully community-governed and truly decentralized chain for the next two years. Adding these new validator spots will help increase active participation from the community and further diversify the validator set to enhance chain security.

To apply for the new spots added to the foundation delegation program - https://info.assetmantle.one/AM-PostGenesis-Validators