Select what genuinely interests you. Your picks feed directly into our editorial planning. Polkadot is shrinking its circle of active validators. Referendum 1966 has been running since Tuesday and aims to cut the number of validators that produce blocks and earn rewards from 600 to 500. If approved, the change mathematically takes effect from Tuesday, November 10, at around 11 a.m. Central European Time. It is the first of three steps: by the end of November only 320 validators are to remain active. Anyone nominating DOT themselves may then be left without rewards if none of their chosen validators survives the cut. What is documented: content, timing and voting status come from the referendum itself, the roadmap from the proposal in the Polkadot forum of October 16, and the tax rules from the German Income Tax Act. Our assessment follows further down in a separate, clearly marked section.