Hi Tegan.
I’ve literally just emailed Centrifuge about this and the possibility of creating a pool for ‘smaller’ users that want to validate as a group.
Here is the original announcement which talks about it: Validator Program Announcement
Validators stake 10,000-60,000 rad from what I understand (I’m not sure how that works pre-token-launch). I assume to be selected you need to be very serious and knowledgeable about what you are doing though!
I believe they are selecting 18 validators based on this vote (Vote Passed: Extending the Validator Set from 15 to 18 although in the original announcement they talk about 10 in the first round, then 10 more in May, then 10 after launch) and most of these seem to be very established and experienced:
Validator Program Announcement - #2 by cassidy
I didn’t put anything about this in my original post as I’m still trying to get my head around the validator requirements myself - if anyone can enlighten us I’d be grateful.