Rank	Validator	Stake	Share	Cumulative	Comm.
01	Backpack	2.12B MON	13.72%	13.72%	3%
02	CMS Holdings	369.6M MON	2.40%	16.12%	4%
03	Kraken	291.6M MON	1.89%	18.01%	15%
04	LeMonad	250.7M MON	1.63%	19.64%	3%
05	gmonads.com	236.0M MON	1.53%	21.17%	15%
06	P2P.org 💙	230.7M MON	1.50%	22.67%	15%
07	polkachu.com	201.2M MON	1.30%	23.97%	0%
08	Alchemy	160.9M MON	1.04%	25.01%	10%
09	Nansen \| Stake to Stack Points	147.0M MON	0.95%	25.96%	15%
10	ProStaking	135.7M MON	0.88%	26.84%	15%
11	Stardust Staking	128.7M MON	0.83%	27.67%	15%
12	MonadVision	116.6M MON	0.76%	28.43%	15%
13	Bitwise Onchain Solutions	116.6M MON	0.76%	29.19%	15%
14	Everstake	111.0M MON	0.72%	29.91%	15%
15	B-Harvest	110.6M MON	0.72%	30.63%	15%
16	Gemini	106.5M MON	0.69%	31.32%	15%
17	MAVAN	102.6M MON	0.67%	31.99%	10%
18	forthenads	101.2M MON	0.66%	32.65%	15%
19	Staking4All	97.7M MON	0.63%	33.28%	10%
20	Stakin by The Tie← LIVENESS THRESHOLD	97.0M MON	0.63%	33.91%	10%
21	BitCtrl	96.7M MON	0.63%	34.54%	15%
22	01node	96.4M MON	0.63%	35.17%	15%
23	P-OPS Team	91.9M MON	0.60%	35.77%	15%
24	Kairos Research X Firstset	90.9M MON	0.59%	36.36%	15%
25	Kiln1	90.1M MON	0.58%	36.94%	15%
26	Etherfuse	90.1M MON	0.58%	37.52%	15%
27	GalaxyDigital	90.0M MON	0.58%	38.10%	5%
28	Allnodes	88.2M MON	0.57%	38.67%	10%
29	Triton one	85.9M MON	0.56%	39.23%	10%
30	Blockdaemon	84.7M MON	0.55%	39.78%	10%
31	Luganodes	84.4M MON	0.55%	40.33%	15%
32	Validation Cloud	83.3M MON	0.54%	40.87%	15%
33	nadradar	83.0M MON	0.54%	41.41%	15%
34	Figment	82.0M MON	0.53%	41.94%	15%
35	rskl	80.8M MON	0.52%	42.46%	15%
36	L0vd	80.4M MON	0.52%	42.98%	15%
37	auri0x	79.8M MON	0.52%	43.50%	15%
38	Laminated Labs	79.3M MON	0.51%	44.01%	15%
39	Spectrum Staking	78.3M MON	0.51%	44.52%	15%
40	H2O Nodes	78.0M MON	0.51%	45.03%	15%
41	Staking Facilities	78.0M MON	0.51%	45.54%	15%
42	InfStones	77.9M MON	0.51%	46.05%	15%
43	stakefish	77.5M MON	0.50%	46.55%	15%
44	ContributionDAO	77.2M MON	0.50%	47.05%	15%
45	TrustedPoint	76.4M MON	0.50%	47.55%	15%
46	LI.FI	75.7M MON	0.49%	48.04%	15%
47	LootGO	75.6M MON	0.49%	48.53%	15%
48	Cointelegraph Decentralization Guardians	75.3M MON	0.49%	49.02%	15%
49	ASXN	75.2M MON	0.49%	49.51%	15%
50	1XP	75.2M MON	0.49%	50.00%	15%

Third edition - Published 2026-08-16

State of Decentralization - July 2026

This third monthly report from monscope covers the July 2026 validator-set picture. Numbers throughout cite the on-chain staking precompile snapshot captured on 2026-07-26 at epoch 1808, with 198 active validators and 15.19B MON total active stake. Month-over-month comparisons use the June report baseline captured on 2026-06-28.

Headline

July made the validator set narrower, not wider. The active set fell from 200/200 to 198/200, with no eligible validators waiting outside consensus. Validator-level concentration also drifted upward: HHI rose from 207 to 225, stake Gini rose from 0.322 to 0.329, and the top ten validators now control 25.52% of active stake.

The headline measures are still unconcentrated by conventional market structure thresholds, but the month-over-month direction is worse. The BFT Nakamoto coefficients moved from 23 validators to22 for liveness (> 1/3) and from 94 to 93 for safety (> 2/3).

Country Nakamoto = 2. The United States (22.57%) and the Netherlands (18.73%) together hold 41.30% of active stake. The top three countries combine for 56.05%.
Provider Nakamoto = 2. TeraSwitch Networks controls 19.09% of stake, and TeraSwitch plus OVH clear the one-third liveness threshold at 34.73%.
Foundation dependence eased, but remains dominant. The identified Foundation fleet fell from 73.53% to 72.50% of active stake, while 186 validators remain majority-dependent on that fleet.

The important July tension is that MIP-9 expansion is postponed while the current active set is not full. The practical decentralization question is less “when does the cap move to 300?” and more “why are there two empty seats under the current 200-validator ceiling?”

Stake distribution

The active set ended July at 198/200, with no pending entries, no pending exits, and no eligible validators outside consensus. This was not a one-snapshot blip: every July weekly snapshot from 2026-07-05 through 2026-07-26 shows 198 active validators and 0 eligible validators.

Total active stake is 15.19B MON, down 79.5M MON from the June baseline. Because the active validator count also fell, mean active stake rose to 76.7M MON; median stake is almost unchanged at 53.3M MON. The smallest active validator still holds 25.1M MON, comfortably above the 10M MON protocol floor.

The largest validator, Backpack, now holds 2.00B MON, or 13.15% of the active set. That is up from 12.49% in June and is the biggest driver of the HHI move from 207 to 225.

Cumulative top-N stake shares:

Top 1 - 13.15% (Backpack at 2.00B MON)
Top 3 - 17.18%
Top 5 - 20.45%
Top 10 - 25.52%
Top 20 - 32.67%
Top 33 - 40.15%
Top 67 - 57.13%

Commission: cap clustering persists

Commission remained effectively unchanged. 167 of 198 active validators (84.3%) sit exactly at the 15% VDP cap. Five validators run at 0%, unchanged from June; three remain above the cap. Mean commission is 14.40%; median remains 15.00%.

The count at the cap fell from 169 to 167, but that mostly reflects the smaller active set. There is still no clear evidence of a broad commission-price market. The 0% validators remain useful outliers for delegators, not a dominant competitive tier.

Geographic distribution

Validators are still distributed across 29 countries. Country concentration improved slightly from June: country Gini fell from 0.654 to 0.642, and the top three countries fell from 56.75% to 56.05% of active stake. That is still a narrow jurisdictional profile for a network with 29 represented countries.

Top countries by stake-weighted share:

United States - 22.57% across 51 validators
The Netherlands - 18.73% across 13 validators
Germany - 14.75% across 32 validators
Finland - 5.43% across 12 validators
Singapore - 4.80% across 12 validators
Poland - 3.52% across 9 validators

Country Nakamoto remains 2. The U.S. share fell, the Netherlands share rose, and the combined U.S. + Netherlands share is still comfortably above the BFT liveness threshold.

Infrastructure concentration

The 198 active validators span 53 distinct autonomous systems, up from 51 in June. The top provider is still TeraSwitch Networks (AS20326) at 19.09% of active stake. OVH is second at 15.64%, Hetzner third at 10.63%, UAB Cherry Servers fourth at 9.72%, and Latitude.sh fifth at 6.25%.

Provider Nakamoto remains 2, but the top-two margin is thinner than in June: TeraSwitch plus OVH fell from 35.35%to 34.73%. That is an improvement, but still above the one-third threshold. July also introduces a small note in the raw ASN attribution: one active validator resolves to Amazon.com, Inc. (AS16509) at 0.17%of stake. It is not a concentration risk, but it means the clean “no hyperscaler in the active set” statement no longer holds literally.

Protocol and MIP context

July did not resolve the active-set roadmap. MIP-9 remains postponed pending evaluation under Cadence, Category Labs' proposed consensus architecture. That matters more now that the live set is below the current cap: before Monad asks whether 300 validators is safe under a future architecture, the July data asks why the current 200-validator capacity is not being filled.

MIP-12 (Decrease Vote Pace) remains the adjacent live roadmap item on the site. For decentralization analysis, the shared theme is consensus pacing and validator-set design: changes to slot cadence, propagation, and active-set size should be evaluated together rather than as independent parameters.

Measured adoption of already-final protocol changes continued in the background. By the 2026-07-26 MIP-adoption snapshot, monscope had scanned 38,133 contracts for MIP-2 size behavior, with 721 above the 24KB runtime-code threshold. MIP-4 runtime reserve-balance calls, MIP-5 CLZ contracts, and observed MODEXP calls remain at 0 in that snapshot.

What we'll watch in August

Whether the active set returns to 200/200, or whether198 active validators becomes the new steady state under the current cap.
Whether Backpack's share keeps rising. A single validator at 13.15% does not dominate the set, but the top-one trend is the main driver of rising HHI.
Whether Foundation share keeps falling, and whether the decline meaningfully reduces majority-dependent validators rather than only lowering the aggregate percentage.
Whether provider concentration drops below the one-third threshold for the top two providers, and whether the small Amazon ASN appearance is a one-off or the start of broader hosting diversification.
Cadence, MIP-9, and MIP-12 follow-through. Active-set expansion is now an architecture question, not just a parameter vote.

Methodology

Stake, commission, and active-set composition come from the 0x...1000 staking precompile (getConsensusValidatorSet, getValidator) on the public Monad RPC, captured at 2026-07-26. Validator names resolve through monad-developers/validator-info. Geographic and ASN attribution is derived from resolved peer-IP metadata in the decentralization snapshot; monscope's analysis (country/provider Nakamoto, Gini, and the concentration narrative) is its own. Foundation-delegation figures use the identified 20-wallet fleet embedded in the snapshot; the attribution is identified, not an official Monad Foundation address label.