The third Trustlines validator auction ended successfully, and the third validator period has begun.
There are still validators who obtained a validator slot by bidding in the auction who have not come online with their validator node.
We want to remind all those who are not yet online to check out the All You Need to Know as a Validator After the Third Auction blog post. Once you start your node, you need to import the private key to your node and use the address that you used in the auction. Only that address is whitelisted to be a validator and can produce blocks.
You must bring your node online soon. If there are fewer validators than the number who obtained a slot, it hurts the Trustlines Blockchain. The block times increase, and it can cause an issue in gaining finality.
Thus, in the near future, the Trustlines Foundation will propose another fork to remove the inactive validators from the validator set.
Those who will get removed from the validator set will still have their stake locked until the end of the validator period. The same locking period exists for the active validators as well. Still, they will earn block rewards and transaction fees from the blocks they produce by having a node online.