Gm Tari holders 
With Ootle now only ~2 months away, I think the community deserves clear answers on a few important questions before launch.
1. Validator hardware requirements
What are the actual minimum/recommended hardware requirements for running an Ootle validator?
Specifically:
• CPU / RAM
• Disk space required at launch
• Expected annual storage growth
• Network bandwidth requirements
These numbers are important for understanding how accessible validator participation will actually be.
2. Validator decentralisation
The initial plan is for the Council to run validators. What is the concrete timeline for opening validator participation to the wider community?
We need a clear roadmap from Council-operated validators → permissionless/community validators.
We don’t want decentralisation to be another “Soon™” item. 
3. Validator deposit / stake
When does the validator deposit actually become active?
The current consensus code has the minimum validator registration deposit at 0 XTM on both mainnet and Esmeralda, while the RFC-0313 stake mechanism exists but is currently switched off.
If the eventual plan is permissionless validator registration with a real deposit, what is the timeline for moving from 0 XTM to an actual required stake, and what determines that amount?
4. Committee size vs Council control
If a shard committee consists of 40 validators:
• How many committees will exist at launch?
• How many validators will the Council operate?
• How many will be operated by genuinely independent entities?
• Will multiple Council validators be able to end up in the same committee?
“The Council runs validators” doesn’t tell us much about the actual level of decentralisation. The number of independent operators matters.
5. Ootle performance and chain comparisons
Can we get concrete performance numbers and comparisons with other chains?
It would be useful to see:
• TPS / sustained throughput
• Block time
• Finality
• Transaction latency
• Number of validators supported
• Hardware requirements
• Cost of running a validator
Rather than broad claims about scalability, having comparable numbers would let the community objectively understand where Ootle stands against other networks.
These aren’t unreasonable asks with launch approaching. The more transparent the numbers and roadmap are now, the better the community can understand what Ootle will actually look like at launch.