It’s great to see that the @dYdXFoundation is taking a proactive approach to promote responsible participation and decision-making within their network!
The F5 Nodes team would be happy to add our best practices to this list, which we use to successfully and efficiently support our validators across 30+ networks, with a strong emphasis on the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem.
Let’s get into it:
Perfomance
– Isolate your validator’s resources, such as CPU cores / memory, to prevent interference from other processes running on the same machine;
– Pruning older or unnecessary data to manage data storage efficiently;
– Prioritizing validator traffic over non-critical traffic within your network infrastructure. This way, your validator will not be negatively affected by other network activities.
– Validator’s commission:
- Tiered commission rates based on the amount of delegation. Larger delegations = lower commission. This can attract larger stakers and incentivize them to delegate more tokens to your validator. Win-win strategy which our team practices.
- Engagement with the delegator community to gather feedback on commission rates and changes. Besides that, offer educational resources that help delegators understand the significance of commission rates and their impact on the network’s overall health. This could be a blog on the validator’s website or organisation of AMA sessions / Twitter spaces, etc.
- Additional rewards for delegators who commit to longer delegation periods.
And the most important part of validator performance is collaborating with other validators to share performance tuning strategies, discuss bugs/fixes, and work together to optimise the performance of the entire network.
Operations and Security
– Strong encryption for sensitive data at rest and in transit. Our team uses AES or Triple DES algorithms to protect our data confidentiality;
– Using MFA to access critical systems/data/accounts/backups;
– Using a combination of cold and hot keys for added security;
– A clear and actionable emergency response plan that outlines steps to take in case of critical failures, security breaches, or network attacks. For example, data centre faults;
– DDoS Protection. On the Cosmos Hub, a validator node can be attacked using the DDoS method. We use sentry nodes to prevent this. Read this post on Cosmos Hub Forum.
Governance Participation
– Validators should participate in governance discussions on the dYdX forums and contribute to the decision-making process. As well as take an active part in the life of the network and communicate with the dYdX team and delegators in making governance decisions.
Ecosystem Considerations
– Providing regular updates by validators with ongoing contributions, such as tooling enhancements, educational content or any other useful resources/tools. That will keep delegators and the community informed about your progress;
– Stakeholder Engagement, such as dedicated channels to provide feedback and suggestions (monthly/quarterly collection of information through a google form, for example), AMAs / Twitter spaces, etc.
We hope that our practices will serve as a valuable resource for validators, stakers and the entire dYdX community! #KeepBuilding
Best Regards,
RedWest
F5 Nodes