It is always easy to be a smartBCH validator. We kept the requirements low to invite more people to run smartBCH validators. For PoW votes, you only need to mine one BCH block during an epoch of 2016 blocks. For PoS votes, you only need to accumulate 500 Coindays on the smartBCH sidechain.
During the last bull market we had 35 validators and now we still have 28 validators. Although this is good for decentralization, it has also caused problems. Some validators are not running on stable machines with good internet connection. Maybe this is because the reward of validators is limited and they can not afford a good cloud infrastructure. Either way, the unstable validators make the smartBCH unstable.
Today, smartBCH halts because of some offline validators. And we can not reach enough validators and work with them to restart smartBCH.
In the short term, we will restart smartBCH with an emergency patch that uses a single validator to generate new blocks.
To stabilize the sidechain in the long term, we will soon perform a hard fork upgrade to increase the requirements to be elected as a validator. With higher requirements, there will likely be fewer validators, but this is helpful to ensure that validators are run by serious parties who really care about the sidechain.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the current low-requirement voting sche me We will write an article soon to explain the new voting scheme.
