Hey there! I’m Nikita, lead DevOps engineer at Citadel.one, and here is a little brief about us.
Entity name and location
Citadel.one LTD
P.O. Box 4342, Road Town, Tortola
British Virgin Islands
International team based in different countries including: Argentina, France, Georgia, UAE.
Infrastructure location
Our bare-metal infrastructure is located in Europe: France, Germany, Poland, Finland.
What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
For our validator infrastructure we run bare-metal servers, located in Europe, of various providers mostly preferring OVHCloud.
Technical make-up of team
Highly skilled DevOps and backend dev team with each member having 5+ years of experience in the crypto field.
Years of experience
Running validators in PoS ecosystems since 2018, starting with Tezos network.
Had some experience with mining in PoW back in 2013
What other networks are you running validators for?
Currently running validators in mainnets of 40+ cosmos ecosystem networks.
On top of that we have validators in the following non-cosmos networks: Sui, The Graph, Tezos, IOST, ICON, Wanchain, MAP Protocol
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?
- For the launch of any new testnet/mainnet that involves a gentx collection there should be a github workflow set up that checks validity of gentxs in PRs.
- For mainnet launch there should be at least a 24h window before final genesis release and genesis time so validators can prepare their infra and proof read the genesis. Dev team should read genesis file really carefully multiple times before releasing a final version, there were multiple occasions in past when genesis had to be edited after release because of wrong vesting dates, module parameters (some modules, like slashing, have non-optimal default parameters), etc.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We have a lined out Validator Constitution (Citadel.one Validator Constitution - Google Drive) & internal tooling that helps to keep track of all of the governance proposals.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem?
Planning on integrating dYdX chain into Citadel.one platform (app.citadel.one)
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
Apart from our platform, we have a Telegram bot that tracks governance proposals in cosmos ecosystem networks and notifies users about new proposals and their final result - Telegram: Contact @citadelvotebot
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
With our product at app.citadel.one, we’ve been contributing to Cosmos ecosystem and beyond starting 2020. Now we have more than 60 chains integrated and use-cases featured in our App Store
On top of this we are consistently helping validators/dev teams of cosmos networks with their technical issues: troubleshooting chain halts/organizing restarts, reporting (rarely fixing some easier ones) bugs, troubleshooting other validators issues.