In Brief:
A referendum sitting at gov.enjin.cloud asks ENJ holders to grow the Relaychain’s active validator set from 25 to 35 across the coming year.
Rather than one jump, the expansion arrives in four stages — all cleared by a single vote, pre-scheduled on-chain roughly 90 days apart, with step one due in August 2026.
Once 35 is reached, a reviewed continuation to 50 validators is on the table. Enjin’s most recent post put the remaining voting window at 24 hours. Enjin says the window to vote on its validator expansion referendum shuts inside a day, directing token holders to proposal 10 on the project’s governance portal.
What’s on the table is a move from 25 to 35 active validators on the Relaychain across the next 12 months — but not in a single leap. The vote authorizes four separate increments, each written to the chain ahead of time and spaced about 90 days from the last. August 2026 brings the first of them. 24 hours left to vote The validator expansion referendum closes tomorrow. If you hold ENJ, weigh in:https://gov.enjin.cloud/proposals/10@EnjinView on X ↗ Beyond the 35 mark, the text of the proposal points toward a reviewed continuation up 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.”
The team boiled its reasoning down to three phrases: “More operators. More diversity. A network that’s harder to disrupt.”
How the vote works
Ballots are cast with sENJ — the liquid token that stands for a stake held in an Enjin nomination pool. Conviction is part of the equation, meaning anyone prepared to lock their tokens for longer sees their vote count for more.
All of that machinery only arrived this year. Under the Kallang upgrade, sENJ governance voting was lifted out of the staking pallet and rehoused in a purpose-built MultiToken Conviction Voting pallet, reaching Canary on April 15, 2026 and Mainnet on May 18. The same release retired the legacy sudo pallet, introduced an emergency origin for fast-tracking urgent on-chain measures — patching a vulnerability or halting a compromised pallet, for instance — and refreshed the Polkadot SDK.
What a slot costs
Putting your name forward as a Relaychain validator candidate requires 15,000 ENJ. Actually landing in the active set demands far more than that, since elections are decided on total stake — the operator’s own bond combined with whatever nomination pools throw behind it.
Nominations can reach validators only through those pools; holders cannot back an operator directly. And the pools themselves can only be created by owners of the Degen NFT collection. Before a pool is allowed to nominate, it needs at least 2,500 ENJ staked. Its ceiling is dictated by the Degen NFT behind it, and each pool runs for a fixed term of anywhere from 30 to 1,000 eras, with the longer commitments paying out more.
More slots also drag down the stake requirement at the bottom end of the set. Anyone currently sitting just below the cutoff line would qualify without adding a single ENJ.
Validator elections happen at the beginning of an era’s final epoch — the sixth epoch of that era. The chosen operators then begin work in the next era, roughly four hours afterward.
The reward math
Token inflation on Enjin Blockchain sits at 4.8927482% annually. Fresh tokens are issued every era and split evenly across the active validators. Each operator takes a commission of its own choosing, anywhere from 0.1% to 5.0%, and forwards the remainder to the nomination pools supporting it.
Add ten validators, and the same per-era issuance gets carved into 35 pieces rather than 25.
The last expansion
Enjin has been here before. The active cap went from 15 to 25 on April 28, 2025, and 25 validators have been elected every era since to produce blocks and participate in governance.
Block 9,962,945 marked the point that change went live. At the time, Enjin paired it with a stated goal of 50 active validators per era by the close of 2025.
