As mentioned by the Staking team on this message, Polkadot currently has 22500 nominators and the configuration of the staking system prevents further nominators to join.

The team suggests to update the staking parameters as soon as the next runtime upgrade happens today. The proposal has the goal to increase the minimum bond to allow new nominators above the threshold to participate in the network’s security mechanism, and for less staked nominators to be chilled. Note that after 9080, the existing nominators can always update their preference at all conditions.

The proposal the team suggested will change the staking parameters to allow more nominators with higher backing stake be able to join the staking system. The existing parameters as as follows:

• minimum validator bond: None
• maximum validator count: 1200
• minimum nominator bond: 40 DOTs
• maximum nominator count: 22500

The new proposed parameters will update one value:

• new minimum nominator bond: 80 DOTs


and set a new parameter that did not existed before:

• chill-threshold: 90%

The reasoning behind the new minimum nominator bond: Polkadot onboards ~150 nominators per day. That means if the network has 4500 empty slots, they will be filled in 30 days. The team aims to increase the limit enough so that we won't need to do another tweak for at least a month. Changing this parameter to 80 will almost expose 4500 nominators.

The new chill-threshold will ensure that the permissionless chill_other can only be used when more than 90% of "maximum nominator count" is used.
note that to ensure polkadot's stability until the parachains launch, this motion does not yet include an increase in the total count of nominators. Multiple tracks of optimization are ongoing by the development team, and you can read more about them in this issue.

Please note that doubling the value of the parameter to 80 DOTs will hopefully give the team more time until the new threshold is reached and we have made progress on a more permanent solution. Please leave your comments and feedback on the proposal. Keep in mind these measures are temporary, and the overall goal is the stability and security of the overall network.