The Polkadot team has released a runtime upgrade to lower the amount of DOT tokens needed for nominators to stake to get rewards.
Protocol v0.8.30 was released on April 8, 2021. The low-priority upgrade is meant to reduce the minimum staking requirements from a current 250 DOT to almost zero. With Polkadot exchange hands at around $40, nominators would need to stake over $10,000 to get rewards.
Following the recent v30 upgrade this parameter has been lowered to almost zero. According to the project’s developers, the v30 runtime upgrade should go live within the next two to three weeks after an on-chain governance vote.
In addition to introducing Polkadot runtime 30, v30 also enables Kusama runtime 2030.
For clarity, the primary changes being introduced by the new version include the ability to define NextSessionRotation in im-online instances, faster erasure code, and the addition of events for hrmp pallet. Furthermore, v30 increases payable nominators per validator, features new slots and auction architecture, and adds Parachain onboarding to Rococo.