This proposal is explained as suggested by Kian from the Staking team.

NOTE: this proposal is using the new terminology introduced in the February newsletters, please refer to that for a recap.

This proposal aims to alter the limits on the nomination intention for Polkadot, namely lowering them since they are not strictly needed anymore.

As of release of runtime 9170, pallet-bags-list has been fully enabled in Polkadot, and setting the intention to nominate should now be made possible for a larger audience. In essence, the number of intentions need no longer be bounded by 22,500. The bags-list will take care of picking up the top 22,500 nominations (those who become “electing”). Thus, we propose the following:

1. Increase the number of possible intentions to 50,000.

NOTE: that this number could be lifted altogether, but we suggest keeping an upper bound that’s dynamically controlled by the governance as an extra safety measure, at least for the time being.

2. Decrease the amount of stake needed to submit a nomination intention to 10 DOT.

NOTE: Similarly, this number could also be lowered back to 1 DOTs, which is the existential deposit, but we suggest doing that as a next step within the next few months, and for now keep this small limit to prevent a massive sudden influx of intentions.

Call design:

Encoded call data: 0x071700e87648170000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000150c3000001b0040000015a00000000

Urgency: Ideally, this proposal should be enacted before the number of total nominators in Polkadot reaches 22,500 (the value for which at the time of this writing is 21,214). If it does, the ‘nominate’ transaction will become unavailable to all stakers. This proposal should have no negative effect on any stakers, as it will only relax the limits to submit for nomination intentions.