Enjin validator expansion referendum heads into final day of voting

In Brief:

• Enjin has a referendum live at gov.enjin.cloud to expand the Relaychain’s active validator set from 25 to 35 over the next year.
• The increase runs in four stages, authorized by a single vote and pre-scheduled on-chain 90 days apart, with the first step landing in August 2026.
• A reviewed continuation to 50 validators follows the move to 35. ENJ holders had 24 hours left to vote as of Enjin’s latest post.

Voting on Enjin’s validator expansion referendum closes within a day, the company said in a post pointing holders to proposal 10 on its governance portal.

The measure lifts the Relaychain’s active validator set from 25 to 35 over the next 12 months. It doesn’t happen at once. The increase is split into four stages, all authorized by the single vote and scheduled on-chain in advance, spaced roughly 90 days apart. The first increment takes effect in August 2026.

Past 35, the proposal calls for a reviewed continuation to 50.

“The @enjin Relaychain is growing,” Enjin said in announcing the referendum. “A referendum is live to expand the active validator set from 25 → 35 over the next year. 35 now, a reviewed continuation to 50 after. Beyond that, the network decides.”

Enjin framed the rationale in three phrases: “More operators. More diversity. A network that’s harder to disrupt.”

How the vote works

Voting runs on sENJ, the liquid token representing a stake in an Enjin nomination pool. Conviction applies, so holders willing to lock tokens longer carry more weight.

That plumbing is new this year. The Kallang upgrade moved sENJ governance voting off the staking pallet and onto a dedicated MultiToken Conviction Voting pallet, hitting Canary on April 15, 2026 and Mainnet on May 18. The same upgrade removed the legacy sudo pallet, added an emergency origin for fast-tracking critical on-chain action such as patching a vulnerability or pausing a compromised pallet, and updated the Polkadot SDK.

What a slot costs

Registering as a validator candidate on the Relaychain takes 15,000 ENJ. Getting into the active set takes considerably more, because election is by total stake: a validator’s own bond plus whatever nomination pools back it.

Validators may only be nominated through those pools, not directly by holders, and pools may only be formed by holders of the Degen NFT collection. A pool needs a minimum of 2,500 ENJ staked before it can nominate. Each pool carries a maximum size determined by its Degen NFT and a set duration of 30 to 1,000 eras, with longer durations earning more.

Adding slots lowers the stake threshold at the bottom of the set. Whoever sits just outside the cut today gets in without raising another ENJ.

The Relaychain elects its validators at the start of an era’s final epoch, on the sixth epoch of the era. Selected operators go active in the following era, about four hours later.

The reward math

Enjin Blockchain runs token inflation of 4.8927482% a year, with new tokens released each era and distributed in equal shares among active validators. Each validator keeps a commission it sets between 0.1% and 5.0%, then passes the rest to the nomination pools backing it.

Ten more validators means the same per-era issuance divided 35 ways instead of 25.

The last expansion

This isn’t Enjin’s first move on the validator cap. On April 28, 2025, the network raised the active limit from 15 to 25, and from then on 25 validators have been elected each era to produce blocks and take part in governance.

That change took effect at block 9,962,945. The target Enjin attached to it at the time was 50 active validators per era by the end of 2025.