Validator Introduction - Alchemist Stake

Validators
1

Entity Information and location:

Alchemist Stake, Romania

Infrastructure location:

Tier 3 Datacenter (usually M247) Located in Romania, Austria, Germany, France and Netherlands (mainly Europe)

Hardware:

Baremetal servers in Romania, Austria, Germany, France and Netherlands (mainly Europe)

Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.):

4 engineers (that worked as pentesters and incident responders)

Years of experience:

3 years (since 2020)

What other networks are you running validators for?

Agoric, Humans.ai, Bware Labs and MultiversX

Based on your participation in any previous testnets, mainnets, are there any best practices to be aware of? What are some things that made previous testnets, mainnet launches successful and/or things to avoid that have gone poorly?

Communication:

  • Dedicated Telegram groups with validator teams in order to assure responsiveness;
  • Dedicated Discord channels for the testnet chat only;
  • Clear timeline for each phase of the incentivized testnet and always allow
  • Using a task submission portal which is easy to evaluate tasks in (like Knack);
  • Dedicated Telegram/Discord channel to announce testnet/mainnet upgrades;

Testnet validator best practices:

  • Making sure validators don’t have auto-compound enabled in a testnet environment / not enabling inflation unless it is for specific tests only during testnets;
  • Making sure validators use correct genesis file for each testnet phase (e.g. check SHA256 hash for that specific file)
  • Use UTC instead of GMT (as it can cause confusion if you are dealing with validator from all around the globe)
  • A good timeframe for upgrades, genesis events and all other events that need all participants attention would be 17:00 UTC

Do you have a validator voting framework and process?

  • We participate in discussions on Commonwealth and we post a review on Keplr validator dashboard for the community to see what influenced our decision. In case there is a more sensitive governance proposal, we discuss on our Telegram group with the community before.

Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?

We plan to run IBC-relayers, RPC nodes and indexers as needed.

Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?

Social Trading as an interesting feature we’d like to see on dYdX.

Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?

We have coordinated the Humans.ai Friction Incentivized testnet:

Over 50 validator teams over 3 Phases before the mainnet launch;
Configured Knack submission portal for validators;
Maintaince Discord/Telegram communication with validators to assure a smooth cooperation;
Designed testnet tasks along with Humans.ai team;
Prepare mainnet genesis
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