Current Value
32Relevant for: validatorsdevelopers
The Big Picture
GRANDPA finality requires communication between all authorities. More authorities means more messages and slower consensus. This constant caps the set size to balance decentralization with performance. Most networks set this to a few hundred.
Why This Matters
If you're running validator infrastructure, this tells you the maximum number of peers your node might communicate with for finality. Higher values require more network bandwidth.
Example
MaxAuthorities is 32. At most 32 validators can participate in GRANDPA finality voting. If more are eligible, the top 32 by stake are selected.
Common Questions
- What happens if there are more validators than MaxAuthorities?
- Only the top validators (by some selection criteria like stake) are included in GRANDPA. Others still produce blocks but don't vote on finality.
From Chain Metadata
Max Authorities in use
Use Cases
- Determine maximum possible authority set size
- Plan validator infrastructure capacity
Code Examples
import { ApiPromise, WsProvider } from "@polkadot/api";
import { stringCamelCase } from "@polkadot/util";
const provider = new WsProvider("wss://entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai:443");
const api = await ApiPromise.create({ provider });
// Query MaxAuthorities constant
const value = api.consts[stringCamelCase("Grandpa")][stringCamelCase("MaxAuthorities")];
console.log("MaxAuthorities:", value.toHuman());Type Information
- Type
- u32
- Byte Size
- 4 bytes
- Encoding
- fixed
- Raw Hex
- 0x20000000
Runtime Info
- Pallet
- Grandpa
- First Version
- v101
- Latest Version
- v101
- Current Runtime
- v393